ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the genesis of the museums of modern art in Cartagena (1959) and Barranquilla (1960) through a social-historical lens. These museums emerged as the two Colombian port cities were undergoing processes of modernization, and the confluence of diverse economic, political, and cultural projects of regional, national, and inter-American character shaped their formation. A group of local avant-garde artists were looking to create spaces for the legitimization and internationalization of modern art. With this goal in mind, they sought to connect with a circuit promoted by the Visual Arts Section of the Office of American States and its director José Gómez Sicre, with the support of Marta Traba, its main ally in Colombia. During the Cold War, this circuit aimed to create a unified front in defense of a specific formalist and apolitical type of modern art, seeking to curb the influence of socialist realism that tended to be associated with leftist thinking. Colombian Caribbean artists’ relationship with this inter-American network was very effective and allowed for the creation of museums and the positioning of the regional vanguard as a protagonist in Colombia’s developing modern art scene, as well as the establishment of Alejandro Obregón, Enrique Grau, and Cecilia Porras as its main representatives. In institutional terms, however, precariousness prevailed at the local level. Thus, the emergence of museums can be understood as a decisive moment in the genesis of the field of art in these cities, but this process did not reach its definitive conclusion with their establishment.