Exploring Bogota's Art Scene / Explorer la scène artistique de Bogota
Bogota has a very interesting and diverse artistic scene. From numerous independent museums, the Bogota museum, the gold museum and to add on all of this the city is filled with beautiful street art. It's situated at 2600m high and has a huge mountain on the edge of the city where you can appreciate the breathtaking sunsets over the dense metropole of 8 million habitants. Bogota was definitely our favorite city of Colombia for it's diversity of food, art scene, people and general vibe in the city.
GRAFITTI SCENE
Being a Montrealer who lives in a pretty active graffiti scene I was surprisingly happy to arrive in Bogota and see the city filled with beautiful street art. In all of the neighberhoods and in every direction you look you find some kind of street art.
We spent a complete day with a graffiti guide to learn more about the local graffiti scene and we discovered some great local graffiti artist’s with a wide range of styles.
Graffiti has recently become legal in Bogota, if you have the authorization of the city or the authorization of the owner of the wall you can paint ont it. This is most likely why we find so much street art everywhere in the city.
If you are in Bogota check out this Graffiti tour it's worth it ;
LOCAL ARTIST : NICOLAS WILLS
We also met a great local artist who creates nice and weird characters in ceramic. His workshop is in his house and he's super involved in the artistic community of Bogota. He’s a great guy and he really helped us by showing us around the city. He essentially showed us the good and affordable restaurants, some nice pubs and we even went out with him one night with some of his friends.
MUSEUMS
Art Collection of the Bank of the Republic :
Botero is one of the most famous artists from Colombia and he gave a huge part of his collection to this Museum. It also has a beautiful section with contemporary art. The most interesting thing about this museum is that it’s free for everybody.
Independent Museums :
We also visited a wide range of small independent museums that were also free. Here is a small list of some of those museums ;
- Espacio El Dorado
- NC-arte
- Valenzuela Klenner Gallery
If you have the chance to visit Bogota and if you want to appreciate it properly I feel that you need about 2 weeks to really discover what the city has to offer. If we ever go back to Colombia we will definitely come back to visit Bogota.
If you have interesting cities and/or destinations worth visiting in Colombia to share with us please do. We are always interested in hearing about other travel stories and discoveries.