Museum of Art of the National University of Colombia

The Art Museum of the National University of Colombia is a university museum dedicated to contemporary art. Its showrooms are located in the university city in Bogotá, Colombia. It makes integrated productions from video art, performance, performing arts, contemporary music, sound sculptures and electroacoustics, using its settings interchangeably: the León de Greiff Auditorium and the Art Museum.

History

In 1965, the rector of the National University of Colombia, José Félix Patiño, agreed with Marta Traba, director of the then newly created Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá, to give up a space within the university city to develop their activities. She was assigned a building near El Dorado Avenue that was intended for residences for professors and is currently the headquarters of the Department of Philosophy. In 1969, Traba resigned as director of the Museum and Gloria Zea was appointed as the new director, who removed the Museum from the University premises with the aim of building a new headquarters in the center of Bogotá, after a conflict between the directors of the Museum and the directors of the School of Fine Arts and the National University who insisted that the Museum had lost all ties with the School of Fine Arts.

In the seventies the Art Museum was refounded within the University, where it is currently located. It differs from the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá directed since then by Gloria Zea, through agreement number 68 of August 26, 1970 that specifies its mission: “to sponsor, promote and disseminate the visual arts.”

Work began in February 1971 in the building designed by architects Ignacio Gómez and Gonzalo Vidal where the Department of Philosophy operates today. Starting in 1973, the Museum was assigned for the purposes of its administration and direction of programming and cultural policy to the National Directorate of Cultural Dissemination and moved to its current headquarters (near the entrance to Carrera 30 and Calle 45)., designed by the architects Alberto Estrada and Elsa Mahecha, where it is part of the university cultural complex, in accordance with the urban plan of the university campus designed by the architect Leopoldo Rother in 1937, which is made up of the León de Greiff Auditorium, the Conservatory of Music, and the Faculty of Arts of the National University of Colombia. Its first director was the professor and historian Germán Rubiano and since then it has been directed, among others, by the teacher Carlos Granada, the teacher María Elvira Iriarte, the historian Marta Fajardo de Rueda, the teacher María Elena Bernal, the teacher María Victoria de Robayo, the historian and art critic José Hernán Aguilar, the historian María del Pilar López, the teacher Mariana Varela, the teacher Marta Combariza, the historian William López, the historian and curator Santiago Rueda Fajardo and the theorist and art critic Ricardo Arcos-Palma. Subsequently, the coordination of the Museum was in charge of the Advisor Louise Poncet and currently, this function is carried out by the restorer Olga Inés Foronda Ferrada with the purpose of working on the conservation of the Museum's collections among other aspects that project it towards the future. future under the direction of María Belén Sáez de Ibarra, National Director of Cultural Dissemination of the National University of Colombia since 2007.

Museum articulation

Develops a broad academic and pedagogical program in alliance with the faculties of the National University of Colombia and with the academic community in Colombia and abroad, as well as with other entities in the cultural sector, both public and private, through the Program of Cultural Criticism of the DNDC and from the School of Guides together with the Cano Laboratory and the Interdisciplinary Master's Degree in Theater and Living Arts, pedagogical projects that, combined with the purpose of the Art Museum, generate a space to reflect on the work of art in contemporary times in participation with students assigned to the School of Plastic and Visual Arts of the National University of Colombia.

Programming

The curatorial processes of contemporary art are approached from an analysis of academic discussions that underlie the transformations of art in its current theoretical contexts, especially those that come from cultural studies, cultural criticism and visual studies; all fields of study in emergence and that are closely related to notions that suppress the limits of a disciplinary conception of art and are inserted together with the human and social sciences and the same once differentiated disciplines within art in what is constituted as culture. -world. This process is articulated with the DNDC Programs, in particular, the Cultural Criticism Program in which different conferences on globalization and contemporary art are held, as well as Visual Studies meetings where some of the central problems that this curatorship addresses are addressed. addresses, such as the notion of interculturality, glocality, contemporary subjectivities, history, ethnography, contemporary time, and the study of the image, including the electronic image.

Guide school

The School of Guides is strongly promoted during the administration of the teacher María Helena Bernal (q.e.d) where the pedagogical part is the scent of that School. During this period, workshops are held to the community at large. The school of guides is abolished and retaken from 2008 to present. The school of guides is composed of students of different careers belonging to different universities in Bogotá, who are interested in receiving a training on the role of the guide in a museum of contemporary art. The School responds to the need to strengthen interdisciplinary academic ties and its main mission is the formation of public.

collections

XX CENTURY ART COLLECTION

It constitutes thanks to donations of artists. It consists of more than 380 Colombian and Latin American works of the twentieth century among which are counted by painting and mixed techniques by the artists Carlos Rojas, Feliza Bursztyn, Bernardo Salcedo, Fanny Sanín, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Luis Caballero, Santiago Cárdenas, Oscar Muñoz, Beatriz González, Manuel Hernández, Workshop 4 Red.

A fort of the collection are the engravings and paper works of the seventies and eighties such as those of Umberto Giangrandi, Workshop 4 Red, Nirma Zárate, Antonio Caro, Mariana Varela, Luis Paz. These works were very representative of a period of the recent history of Colombian art with a strong political content.

Among the latest pieces that have entered the collection are the photographs of Hannah Collins.

This collection is found in the reserves of the Museum of Art and in the Central Library and responds to loan applications by external entities and can be consulted for pedagogical investigations and purposes. It has nothing of Greek art

Pizano Collection

Declared well of cultural interest in 2002, thanks to the management of Professor María del Pilar López, it is composed of engravings and plasters brought from Europe in the late 1920s, under the initiative of the artist Roberto Pizano, rector of the National School of Fine Arts in Bogotá, in a pedagogical objective, so that students who could not travel to know the great masterpieces, could exercise their eye, draw and mold.

Much of the graphic pieces come from the Louvre, the British Museum and the Printing House of the former German Reich (Reichsdruckerei). Among the 1600 engravings we find works of Rembrandt, Durer, Piranesi, Rigaud and reproductions of Delacroix paintings, Da Vinci. In 2011, the engravings of the Pizano collection and 250 graphic works of the XX Century Art collection have been transferred to the engravings area of the Central Library of the National University, especially designed to host them in fourteen plans during the administration of Vice -Rector Fernando Fernando Montenegro who undertook the restoration of the Central Library.

The sculptures of the Pizano Collection are plaster reproductions of 239 pieces of art from Ancient Egypt to the 20th century, including Greek, Roman, Gothic, Renaissance art, etc. A selection of sculptures is exhibited on several floors of the Central Library, under the curatorship of Professors Christian Padilla and Ricardo Arcos-Palma, authors of the book: The Legacy of Pizano: Testimonies of a Wandering Collection: http://www.docentes.unal.edu.co/rjarcosp/docs/LIBROPIZANOFINAL.pdf (broken link available on Internet Archive; see history, first version and latest). and the documentary: The Pizano Collection: The pilgrimage of the witnesses of plaster: http://www.prismatv.unal.edu.co/nc/detalle-serie/detalle-programa/article/la-coleccion-pizano-la- pilgrimage-of-the-witnesses-of-yeso.html (broken link available on Internet Archive; see the history, the first version and the latest)., produced by UNIMEDIOS directed by Professor Carlos Patiño; The other pieces were moved in 2010 to the basement of the Central Library, where a space was designed with all the technical conditions for their conservation and with ease of access, for the study and use of the pieces for educational purposes. This project was carried out under the administration of the Museum Director Ricardo Arcos-Palma (2008-2010) with the support of the Vice-Rector of Headquarters.

In this way, the pedagogical objective of the Pizano collection is recovered, which after so many years without users and public access, is once again a fundamental element of consultation for students and professors of the Faculty of Arts of the University National, from other universities in the country and from the general public of all origins of the world.

Exhibitions

Some of the exhibitions recently presented by the Museum are Dystopía from 2008, with Miguel Ángel Ríos, Carlos Amorales and Harold Vásquez; Speech Acts from 2009, by Clemencia Echeverri; The Memory of the Other from 2009, with Úrsula Biemann, Rogelio López Cuenca, Hannah Collins, Francesco Jodice, Antoni Muntadas and Krzysztof Wodiczko; The Revelation of Time. Films and Photographs2010 by Hannah Collins; Variations on Purgatory from 2011, by José Alejandro Restrepo; Ryoji Ikeda's 2011 Datamatics; a solo exhibition by artist Luis Camnitzer in 2012; The short path of 2012, by Miguel Ángel Rojas; Likewise, within the exhibition activity, projects articulated with the academy are developed, such as the Cano Laboratory and the samples of degree work from the Interdisciplinary Master's Degree in Theater and Living Arts.

In order to provide access to a broader audience and develop their objective of public education, they offer the service of free guided tours during exhibition season.