Hundreds Rally at Bogotá Museum After Works Are Pulled

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the Museo Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá this past weekend, days after the country’s new far-right government ordered about 30 artworks removed from view, according to a report by Hyperallergic. Images from inside the museum, the outlet reported, showed bare gallery walls marked by the outlines of dismantled pamphlets and photographs. At the entrance, riot police stood ready with water cannons and stun grenades.

The works, which referenced LGBTQ+ and feminist movements, victims of state violence and the 2016 peace agreement between the government and the FARC guerrillas, came down at the direction of President Abelardo De La Espriella, Hyperallergic reported. The president said he had instructed Culture Minister Paola Holguín to ensure that “all those odes to terrorism featuring Pizarro and the other terrorists are removed from public places,” a reference to Carlos Pizarro Leongómez, a former guerrilla commander and one of three presidential candidates assassinated in 1990.

Among the withdrawn items were a Humberto Rincón Perfetti photograph from an LGBTQ+ rights march, a Pride flag that belonged to activist Elizabeth Castillo and a pamphlet on women’s reproductive rights. Also removed was ephemera tied to the killings of Pizarro and Patriotic Union leader Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa, along with a pen made from a bullet that was used to sign the 2016 accord. Made by the Ministry of Education under then-President Juan Manuel Santos, it bore the inscription, “Bullets wrote our past, education will write our future.”

The reaction from Colombia’s arts community was swift. Directors of six modern art museums, in Medellín, Bogotá, Cartagena, Barranquilla and El Tolima, plus the Museo El Rayo, issued a joint declaration voicing “deep concern” and urging the culture minister to reverse course. “Museums have the responsibility of allowing us to know the complexity of our history, including that which makes us uncomfortable, confronts us, or is difficult for us to acknowledge,” the statement read.

Beatriz López, co-founder and artistic director of Instituto de Visión, which has spaces in Bogotá and New York, told Hyperallergic the removals silence voices that “long occupied the margins of the official narrative.” Holguín, in posts on X cited by the outlet, argued that the museum may not serve as “an instrument of political indoctrination” or “a hub for spreading biased versions of our history.”

Hyperallergic noted parallels with the Trump administration’s pressure on the Smithsonian over exhibits dealing with slavery, civil rights and diversity. Most of the targeted objects hung in the museum’s “Making Society” gallery, inaugurated in 2019, which examines “processes of coexistence, resistance, and revindication.” Others came from a section on socially engaged printmaking and photography of the 1950s and ’60s, including works by the late artists Antonio Caro and Luis Caballero.

De La Espriella, a former criminal defense lawyer, was sworn in in August after narrowly defeating leftist senator Iván Cepeda, running on an “antiwoke” platform. In September, Hyperallergic reported, the Culture Ministry suspended a long-running federal stimulus program for artists and creative workers.

Bogotá curator Jaime Cerón, who led the city’s 2025 biennial, called the changes “a setback for the cultural rights of communities” long rendered invisible or censored, but predicted the move would backfire. He pointed to a Medellín mural honoring mothers searching for disappeared children; after the mayor had it whitewashed, artists repainted it and its phrase spread across the country. “Acts of censorship have become the most effective way to make what one wants to erase omnipresent and ultra-visible,” Cerón said. Artist Pablo A. Medina echoed that view: “What you try to erase only becomes stronger.”