The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá (MAC), a UNIMINUTO cultural entity, was born in 1966 under the premise of Father Rafael García-Herreros: the conviction that art, like wealth, has a social function to fulfill.
“Beauty, like wealth, has an obligatory social function”Padre Rafael García-Herreros
The idea was born from a visit García-Herreros made to the home of a woman who kept paintings, ceramics, and other cultural treasures limited to her own view. From this came his desire to create a museum with works donated by artists willing to give culture a social meaning, a dream he shared with Germán Ferrer Barrera, cultural manager and the museum's first director.
On August 15, 1966, the founding of the MAC was formalized. Ferrer Barrera arranged the donation of works with leading artists of the time, and on November 25 of that year the museum opened to the public in a modest room at Colegio Minuto de Dios, with an inaugural exhibition of 55 works that founded its collection.
The growth of its activities and new donations prompted the construction of a building conceived exclusively to be an art museum —something without precedent in Colombia, not only for its avant-garde design but for its location in a working-class neighborhood, the Barrio Minuto de Dios—. On November 21, 1970, then-president Misael Pastrana Borrero inaugurated the new building, designed by architects Eduardo del Valle and Jairo López: a spiral that unfolds over a large central void acting as a skylight, with a helical circulation staircase running through its three floors, forming a single volume together with the theater. The building won the National Architecture Award.
Since its opening, the MAC has become a meeting point for contemporary expressions in the visual, sound, performing, electronic, and literary arts, at the local, district, national, and international levels, through spaces such as the Salón de Agosto, the Salón del Fuego, the Salón de Nuevas Expresiones, the Festival de las Artes Contemporáneas Electrónicas, and the Proyecto Tesis, among other thematic exhibitions.
In 2009 the MAC created, in the Plaza de Banderas of the Barrio Minuto de Dios, a sculptural space with a permanent exhibition of works by renowned artists —among them Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, Luis Eduardo Urueta, Justo Arosemena, Jim Amaral, John Castles, César Padilla, Hugo Zapata, and Nadín Ospina—, in addition to the murals “Signo Encuentro” by Manuel Hernández and “Sin Título” by María Teresa Pardo, which have remained on the MAC's exterior walls since 1986. In total, 24 sculptures and 2 murals welcome hundreds of passersby every day.
Today the MAC holds nearly 1,600 works by leading figures of art in Colombia and the world, offering a journey through the most representative contemporary art from the second half of the 20th century to the present. It also has a permanent reference documentation center, with more than 1,100 specialized art titles.
As the only contemporary art museum in the locality of Engativá, the MAC is a cultural landmark that, thanks to the support of UNIMINUTO and its institutional agreements and alliances, holds numerous exhibitions, concerts, panel discussions, workshops, and performance pieces each year —an active venue for the exhibition, dissemination, and communication of contemporary artistic and cultural practices, with priority given to the participation and inclusion of diverse audiences—.
This ongoing work with the community —with neighborhood residents, students, artists, and visitors— has made it possible for the MAC, over more than 55 years, to receive international recognitions such as the International Accreditation of High Quality from the American Alliance of Museums, for its excellence and good museum practices, and fourth place among the best museums in Ibero-America for its digital content.