The Museo Nacional de Colombia is preparing the renovation of its exhibition galleries to celebrate its 190th anniversary.
The initiative contemplates the formulation of a new curatorial proposal for the permanent exhibition galleries, their design and display, and the creation of new educational spaces. As part of this project, the museum will carry forward works of conservation, cataloguing, and restoration of its collections, improve the building's environmental conditions, update its technology, and raise the funds needed to complete the proposal in full.
The main goal of the renovation is to update the way in which the museum communicates with the public, show the country's natural and cultural diversity, present a variety of visions, and promote a dialog between its art, history, archeology, and ethnography collections.
The new narrative proposal will enable visitors to see the permanent collections as a diverse yet clearly articulated whole that will feature a variety of visions of Colombian history and culture.
The thematic script will be organized as follows:
First Floor: Territory
The main goal is to put on display representations of territory that incorporate physical features of the space with socio-cultural expressions generated in it as the result of adaptation processes. The territory will be approached from three standpoints: thinking and knowing the territory; inhabiting the territory; moving in the territory.
Second Floor: Natural Resources. Social and political processes of the nation. This group of galleries will seek to present communities in a historical setting, as well as their modes of social, political, and cultural organization, which are what give the nation its meaning. The appropriation of territory will be interrogated, along with individual's society's political being, and the tensions and conflicts of the nation's history.
Third Floor: Spirituality and Religiosities. Languages of creation.
This floor will represent an activity that is inherent to human beings. Producing images offers the possibility of transcending and enduring, beyond religious, political, or purely aesthetic motivations. Different practices, crafts, and techniques have evolved over time to produce such representations.
The Museo Nacional de Colombia was established in 1823 and is the country's oldest such institutions, as well as one of the first in the Americas. In the early Twentieth Century, donations and legacies enabled the museum to consolidate its painting collection, and the growing interest in strengthening this area via acquisitions reinforced the art collection in general.