Archive for the ‘Colombian Arts’ Category

Art

Close to one million people in Colombia earn a living directly or indirectly from the country’s vibrant arts and crafts sector. Colombians have been producing art for thousands of years. Ornate golden figures and jewelry from millennia ago have been discovered by both ruthless conquistadors and careful archaeological digs.

Some Colombian artists, such as Fernando Botero, Enrique Grau, David Manzur, Luis Caballero, Santiago Martinez Delgado, Ignacio Gomez Jaramillo, Débora Arango, and have received international fame, awards and wide public acclaim.

Colombian art has 3,500 years of history and covers a wide range of media and styles ranging from Spanish Baroque devotional painting to Quimbaya gold craftwork to the “lyrical americanism” of painter Alejandro Obregón (1920-1992). Perhaps the most internationally acclaimed Colombian artist is painter and sculptor Fernando Botero (1932).

Pre-Columbian sculpture

Pottery

There is archaeological evidence of ceramic production and sedentary groups living on Colombia’s Caribbean coast (near the towns of San Jacinto, Monsú, Puerto Chacho, and Puerto Hormiga) beginning around the year 5940 BCE around the town of San Jacinto. This would place these pottery shards among the oldest ever recovered anywhere. Little is known of these very early Colombians other than that they were hunter-gatherers who adorned their pottery with human, animal, and geometric designs.

Goldwork

The earliest examples of gold craftsmanship have been attributed to the Tumaco people of the Pacific coast and date to around 325 BCE. Gold would play a pivotal role in luring the Spanish to the area now called Colombia during the 16th century (See: El Dorado).

One of the most valued artifacts of Pre-Columbian goldwork is the so-called Poporo Quimbaya, a small (23.5 x 11.4 cm), hollow, devotional object (used to mambeo or coca leaf chewing ritual) made of gold whose aesthetic harmony, simple elegance, and mathematical symmetry are striking and almost modern.

The Museo del Oro in Bogotá displays the most important collection of pre-Columbian gold handicraft in the Americas.

[Stone]

Roughly between 200 BCE and 800 CE, the San Agustín culture, masters of stonecutting, entered its “classical period.” They erected raised ceremonial centres, sarcophagi, and large stone monoliths depicting anthropomorphic and zoomorphhic forms out of stone. Some of these have been up to five meters high.

Related to the San Agustín culture were the inhabitants of Tierradentro (“inner land,” so called because of its inaccessibility) who created over one hundred and fifty underground tombs, or hypogea; their walls and ceilings were richly decorated with geometric forms recalling the interior of palm huts. Also in the tombs were found funeral urns, bowls, and pitchers.