Bogotá, From Modern Art Museum to the National Museum

The museums are the collective memory of a country/nation, the collective memory of Colombia is exhibited in Bogota’s National Museum. If you have fully visited the most important museum in town, the Gold Museum, the corridors of the National Museum are waiting for you. This time we start our walk at the Modern Art Museum. 

The entrance of the museum and the little square in front of it is followed by stairs coloured by an art work. French artist Daniel Buren’s work ‘From half circles to full circles: a coloured journey, work in situ’ is made by colourful arches over the stairs that make a passage from the museum to the Independence Square and park. 

As we pass the park and take the main avenue to the right we are on the Carrera 7, one of the main avenues of the city, and a couple of meters ahead on the right hand side is the National Museum. The Museum is a brown-brick simple building from the outside, and has tens of halls on three floors inside. From archeological pieces to portraits painted in Western style, from historical documents to modern art pieces it has a wide collection of almost every cultural element of Colombia. A temporary exhibition on the indigenous cultures of Colombia is ‘to sweeten the word’ is about the memory of indigenous cultures.