First Annual Exhibition of Colombian Artists: Art for the People, Art with the People or Art about the People?

Abstract

This article seeks to make some questions on the role of the people in the first institutionalized edition of the Annual Exhibition of Colombian Artists in 1940. It proposes an exploration of the tension between the public exposure and the real participation of the people under the interference of the cultural policy back then and the observa- tion of the different spheres that made up the exhibition. These include the spaces, artists, accepted works, opinions in the press, and the public attendance. The inten- tion herein is to observe this phenomenon from the critical museology approach as a theoretical and reflective exercise that allows questioning how such exhibition event was carried out in relation to its context, (initial) mission and the public(s) and then contribute with a new perspective in order to better understand this event that has been broadly studied by the history of art in Colombia. The main interest is to verify whether the mission sought by Jorge Eliécer Gaitán as the National Ministry of Education (where the people would act not only as the receiving public but also as the “jury”), was achieved. Or, whether the incidence of this artistic event only reached the rhetoric space of a cultural democratization policy that was apparently an avant-garde movement in that time.