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The Medellin Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1978 by a group of artists, architects, business managers and entrepreneurs who saw the need to create an institution to channel the public interest for contemporary art, after the biennales that took place in Medellin between 1968 and 1972. The Museum started in 1980 as a non-profit private organization in a building in Carlos E. Restrepo, a traditional neighborhood of Medellin. Already in 1985, the institution and the building were declared cultural heritage of the city.
In 2006, in recognition of over two decades of administration at national and international level, the City Council of Medellin endowed the museum with a new building, the Talleres Robledo, an old steel mill from 1938 located in Ciudad del Río, one of the most iconic industrial areas of Medellin, in the south of town. The recovery of the building was done under rigorous technical and museographic specifications, and one of the main objectives was to preserve the memory and the industrial character of the building and its surroundings, symbol of the modernization process of the city. In November, 2009, MAMM starts a new chapter in its history with their arrival to Ciudad del Río, which was the right thing to do not only for the development of the area but also because the Museum gained a whole new public.
Collection and exhibitions:
MAMM has gathered one of the most significant artistic and cultural patrimonies in the country and the region, including representative works of Colombian modern and contemporary art, with special emphasis on the second half of the 20th century. The MAMM collection comprises more than 250 works of national and international artists such as Manuel Hernández, Beatriz González, Olga de Amaral, Ana Mendieta, Carlos Cruz Diez, Álvaro Barrios, Enrique Grau, Carlos Rojas and Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, among others. It also houses the most important collection of the Antioquean artist Débora Arango, comprised by 233 works donated by the artist herself in 1987, and over 3,000 pieces by Hernando Tejada, donated in 2006.
Monographic exhibitions of recent years include the ones devoted to the work of Luis Camnitzer, a key figure of conceptual art, and the renowned French artists Sophie Calle. The annual programming also includes tribute exhibitions to Colombian artists of great prestige, such as Débora Arango, Beatriz González, and Luis Caballero.
Educational and cultural calendar
The educational and cultural extension program is structured around two lines of work "MAMM, your home" and "MAMM in your territory." The first one comprises all those activities that take place in the Museum (Workshop-Visits, School of Mediators, Passport to Art, The Extended Night, Creatives MAMM, Ciudad del Río Cinema, The Port) directed to people of different backgrounds concerning the exhibitions and other areas such as cinema, design, architecture, music and new technologies. The second seeks to spread the educational and cultural proposal to different parts of the city and the region through programs such as The City and the Children, The Travelling Suitcase, and The Mobile Museum, which have as common denominator the artistic, cultural and urban training that complements formal education.
Building extension
At the east side of the Talleres Robledo building (the current parking lot of the Museum) a new building based on the project of the architecture firms 51+1 (Peru) and Ctrl-G (Colombia) will be constructed. With a floor area of 45,000 sq ft (4,200 m2), the new building will house two permanent exhibition halls, multiple halls, an auditorium for 250 people, plus areas devoted to services, archive and documentation, and education programs.
See also the interview with:
María Mercedes González
Director of the Medellin Museum of Modern Art. Interview by Gerhard Haupt & Pat Binder about the collection, the challenges, and expansion plans of MAMM.
(Translation from Spanish: Marina Torres)
