Medellín Museum of Modern Art: ‘We are an expression of the transformation that the whole city has undergone’

When the Medellín Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1978, it had no physical home. Nor any collection to speak of. However, its founders — a group of young local artists, predominantly — thought that Medellín needed a ‘forum’ (their word) in which the city’s burgeoning contemporary art scene could thrive.

They felt excluded by Medellín’s main cultural institution, the century-old Museum of Antioquia, which dedicated itself to fine arts and eschewed anything that might be deemed in the slightest bit avant-garde.

‘We’ve come a long way since then,’ says María Mercedes González. She has been director of the Medellín Museum of Modern Art (widely known as ‘el MAMM’) for 12 years. I’m speaking to her in her office, high up in the five-storey building that the museum today calls home.

In 2023, it welcomed 163,000 visitors — more than any other year in its history. ‘Everyone here now owes our predecessors a debt,’ says González. ‘Not just the founders, but the figures [in charge] after them, who showed great will to keep the museum going through difficult times.’

In 1980, el MAMM moved into modest premises in a neighbourhood called Carlos E. Restrepo. Later that decade, Medellín — Colombia’s second largest city — grew infamous as the capital of the country’s drugs trade and was plunged into years of cartel violence. ‘People just didn’t go out then,’ González says. ‘Normal life took place in homes. This is a resilient city, though, and el MAMM — like many other institutions — stayed open, creating a barrier of resistance [against the socio-political reality].’

That resistance was tested to the maximum in 1989, when a bomb went off in the museum. Thankfully, nobody was hurt, nor any artworks damaged, but various windows needed to be replaced.

Today el MAMM boasts an impressive collection of 2,400 works, the majority made by Colombian artists since 1950: the likes of Pop-associated artist Beatriz González; the conceptualist Bernardo Salcedo; the still-life artist Santiago Cárdenas; and the video installationist Clemencia Echeverri.

The most-represented figure in the collection is Medellín’s own Débora Arango, who shocked Colombia’s socially conservative population of the mid-20th century with her expressionistic paintings on themes such as women’s rights, political corruption and the seeming hypocrisies of the Catholic church. The art establishment ostracised her for decades, until curator Alberto Sierra offered her a retrospective at el MAMM in 1984. By way of gratitude, Arango donated 233 works to the museum a few years later.

Thanks to acquisitions, bequests and donations, el MAMM’s collection ended up outgrowing the space available to store it in Carlos E. Restrepo. The museum duly quit its headquarters in 2009 to occupy a bigger building: an erstwhile steel foundry in Ciudad del Río, the one-time industrial zone of Medellín.

Today, the fourth floor at Ciudad del Río is devoted to the permanent collection, with a group of Arango’s works among the main attractions. ‘El MAMM now is an expression of the transformation that the whole city has undergone,’ González says. ‘We’re all proud of that.’

After the dark days of the 1980s and 1990s, Medellín has witnessed a civic rebirth in the 21st century — one that has become known among urban planners worldwide as the ‘Medellín miracle’. Spearheaded by the city’s mayor, Sergio Fajardo, during his term of office between 2003 and 2007, and continued by his successors, the rebirth has involved infrastructure projects bringing libraries, schools and parks to poor neighbourhoods. A cable-car system now also connects the city centre with barrios on the steep hills that surround it.

The museum’s move from Carlos E. Restrepo fitted into Fajardo’s plan to regenerate Ciudad del Rio — an area that had become increasingly abandoned (and which nowadays is strikingly gentrified and residential).

The move went so well that in 2015, el MAMM opened a new wing, which more than doubled its size to 10,000 square metres. ‘We’re a museum which maintains an international outlook,’ says González. ‘However, there’s no denying we’re rooted in this city. We’re very much connected to our surroundings and our communities. Medellín has always been a part of el MAMM’s DNA.’

One need only look at the schedule of temporary exhibitions to see this. Yes, the museum dedicates shows to big international names — Dan Flavin, William Kentridge and Sophie Calle being recent examples. However, it is renowned, above all, for its exhibitions with a local, national or continental (Latin American) flavour.

In 2022, it hosted a show called Tiempo para escucharnos, in which a number of Colombia’s 100-plus indigenous communities were invited to show their art. ‘In many cases, these people had never visited a museum before,’ González says. ‘The curation was very collaborative, involving lots of conversations [between us and the indigenous groups], and the end result featured not just traditional art objects — such as paintings and sculptures — but also cultural rituals.’ The latter included incantations, the eating of coca leaves, and the burning of fires.

‘It was a fantastic experience’, says González, who is at pains to add that health-and-safety rules were observed at all times. ‘The fire ceremonies took place outdoors rather than inside the museum!’

At the time of writing, el MAMM has just opened a show dedicated to Afro-Colombian culture called Desafiar: Atravesar el sol desde un gran Pacífico — a nod to the estimated 10 per cent of Colombia’s population who are of sub-Saharan African descent. In 2023, it hosted Medellín: Pulso de la ciudad, an exhibition that looked at cultural practices thriving locally today, such as graffiti and hip hop.

‘We’ve started to have what you might call existential thoughts about who we are as a museum and who we serve,’ González says. ‘Partly, this was a result of the period of reflection that the Covid 19 pandemic gave us [el MAMM was closed for seven months in 2020]. But this was also the direction we were moving in anyway… trying to bring relevant societal issues to the public agenda, examining more closely the identity of the city and country we’re part of.’

In other words, el MAMM has become more than just an art museum? ‘Art is still the central thing we do,’ says González. ‘But we also think of ourselves as a kind of town square.’

The museum today consists, essentially, of the single-storey old foundry space, where major temporary exhibitions are held, and the multi-floor extension that was added in 2015. Conceived by local architects Ctrl G and their Peruvian counterparts 51-1, the extension features a series of concrete ‘boxes’ piled on top of each other, in a manner that’s deliberately askew. The idea was to pay homage to the barrio houses that were built haphazardly up Medellín’s hillsides.

The museum complex includes a cinema, a top-floor event space, and a plaza where concerts are sometimes held. These all help with a revenue stream which González says occupies her mind ‘on a near-constant basis’. (El MAMM is a private, non-profit institution, with a board of directors to whom she reports.)

The mayor’s office contributed roughly half the funding for 2015’s expansion, and much of González’s early time at the museum was spent raising the other half. These days the museum is all but left to fend for itself financially — meaning, especially after the losses accrued during Covid, that González continues to liaise a lot with local corporations and foundations. (Presumably she relies on skills developed in her career before joining the museum, as a diplomat.)

El MAMM’s highs, over the years, have included hosting the First Latin American Colloquium of Non-Object Art and Urban Art, a landmark gathering in 1981 which examined a continent-wide trend for dematerialisation in art. Another high was its longstanding (though now defunct) Arturo y Rebeca Rabinovich art salon, an annual exhibition and competition that promoted young Colombian talent.

One of the lows came around the turn of the millennium, when Colombia’s most famous artist, Medellín-born Fernando Botero, chose to donate the better part of 200 works to the Museum of Antioquia rather than el MAMM. (There are no works by Botero in the collection.) It’s worth adding that Medellín itself has now largely come out the other side of its ‘miracle’ — and is faced with a host of new challenges, from air pollution to inequality.

Where does González see the museum’s future? ‘I think it’ll continue to grow as a space with a civic vocation,’ she says. ‘Around 70 per cent of el MAMM’s audience comes from local communities. So there’s a real understanding of our responsibility to them, in terms of what we offer on an artistic and educational level.’

Few, if any, museums are as intrinsically connected to the city they occupy as el MAMM is.

For further details on the Medellín Museum of Modern Art, visit elmamm.org

Desafiar: Atravesar el sol desde un gran Pacífico runs until 1 September 2024, alongside separate exhibitions devoted to the Mexican artist Tania Candiani and the Colombian artist Hernando Tejada