Find us in the Minuto de Dios neighborhood, Engativá locality, in western Bogotá.
Carrera 74A # 82A-81
Engativá, Minuto de Dios · Bogotá
291 6520 ext. 6160
The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá is a UNIMINUTO cultural entity, open to the public, that researches, preserves, disseminates, and educates about the artistic and cultural processes generated in contemporary times through spaces of reflection, dialogue, and tolerance. It is an active laboratory that fosters audience participation and inclusion to generate thought and social meaning, rooted in culture, that radiates to and transforms the academic, neighborhood, local, national, and international communities.
By 2025 the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá will be recognized nationally and internationally as a venue for discussion, reflection, inclusion, equity, and tolerance through the construction, appropriation, and distribution of the social meaning of contemporary culture, and as a laboratory of research, experimentation, and management that contributes with quality to the development of its communities and of an equitable society.
The museum is characterized by being a sustainable institution, supported by a high-quality culture, with a broad and relevant cultural offering, easy access, wide coverage, use of technology, innovation, and social initiatives rooted in art.
To integrate the artistic, neighborhood, student, and academic community through cultural, research, and heritage projects.
To promote efforts that favor diversity, identity, inclusion, and community artistic practices.
An explicit commitment to audiences, artists, and their works when they become part of the collection.
Relationships of trust and transparency, internally and externally, as part of our ethical commitment.
To watch over the full development of the human person and of communities, toward dignified and equitable living conditions.
Use of technology and pedagogy to generate new meanings and experiences, with free access to contemporary knowledge.
Art as an element that helps create effects that serve as a model and stimulus for structural changes in society.
The right of all people to culture and cultural goods, with preferential consideration for those who lack access to it.
A project that is sustainable socially, culturally, financially, politically, and environmentally.
Culture helps build a solid, tolerant, and open community that interacts with other communities.
We build cultural identity, respecting identity values in their diversity and favoring their integration.
Aware of the legacy we hold as heritage for current and future generations.
We are inclusive and equitable, with actions that allow all kinds of people to access cultural goods and services.
Vision
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.