In 1955 the Patronato de las Artes began the permanent collection of the Lima Art Museum with the acquisition in Paris of the most complete set of works by the Peruvian painter Carlos Baca-Flor. When the permanent rooms were inaugurated –on March 10, 1961–, President Manuel Prado, on behalf of the Prado and Peña Prado families, delivered to the Board of Trustees the valuable collection formed at the beginning of the century by the outstanding intellectual Javier Prado Ugarteche. This legacy, known as the Prado Memory, allowed the patronage to imagine the possibility of forming a great panorama of art in Peru through the centuries and continues to form the heart of the museum's collections to this day. From then on, through an active policy of acquisitions and donations, 

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the museum's foundation, in January 2014 we launched our virtual collection , to expand access to the valuable collections housed in MALI.

In September 2015, after an intense remodeling process of the second floor of the Exhibition Palace thanks to financing from the COPESCO National Plan of the Mincetur, we reopened our permanent exhibition halls, presenting more than 1,200 pieces (from pre-Columbian times to the middle of the century XX) of a collection made up of more than 18 thousand works that narrate 3 thousand years of history of Peruvian art. National and foreign visitors can tour the renovated rooms that cover an area of ​​4,500 m2.