Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Contemporary art museum in Montevideo, Uruguay.

The Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo is a contemporary art museum in Montevideo housed within sections of a former prison building, displaying rotating exhibitions from artists around the world. The galleries present works across multiple forms of media, with new shows regularly replacing previous ones.

The building was designed in the late 19th century by architect Juan Alberto Capurro on Jeremy Bentham's panopticon model, with a central watchtower and four three-storey radial wings of up to 30 cells each. It served as a prison for over a century, closing definitively in the 1990s. Between 1998 and 2011 the central body housed the University School of Design. The Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo opened there in July 2010, a project dating from 2008 and backed by Uruguay's National Directorate of Culture and Spain's AECID.

The EAC runs its exhibitions through open calls for individual, collective and curatorial projects, plus themed proposals for Sala M and residency, training and research programmes. Its Programa Públicos addresses the works through mediation, talks, workshops and guided visits, and the LAB EAC is a laboratory of contemporary practices led by different artists. Since 2018 it hosts the National Visual Arts Prize exhibition, edition No. 58, the Linda Kohen prize, co-produced with the Instituto Nacional de Artes Visuales.

The Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo occupies the wing facing Arenal Grande, while the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural is entered from Miguelete street; the Sala M has its own entrance at Miguelete 1825. The former panoptic prison has a central watchtower and four three-storey radial wings, so allow time to move between them. The Sala Seis, opened in 2018, offers 160 m² with ceilings over 4 metres.

The building regularly receives specially commissioned artworks designed specifically for the former prison spaces, creating dialogue between the art and the site's troubled past. These installations take advantage of the unusual architecture and history to generate unexpected conversations about justice and memory.