Inbal awards Armando Colina, cultural worker and co-founder of Arvil

Culture worker and romantic patriot Armando Colina, co-founder of the Arvil gallery, which is celebrating its 55th anniversary, received recognition from the National Institute of Arts and Literature (Inbal) for his outstanding career and contribution to the arts in Mexico.

The ceremony took place at the National Museum of Art (Munal), to which Colina donated in 2023 the documentary archive of Carlos Mérida (1893-1984), a Guatemalan artist living in Mexico, of whom he was a personal friend and with whom he maintained a close collaboration. professional. The original Mérida collection was divided into three segments: one donated to the Carlos Mérida Museum of Modern Art of Guatemala; the second, to Inbal, in 2000, by Ana Mérida, the artist’s daughter, and Colina contributed the third, which contributes to a more comprehensive image of the artist.

Also celebrated was the donation a couple of months ago of a set of eight black and white metal plates from the 18th and 19th centuries, of Tlaxcalan and Puebla origin, intervened by the artist Francisco Toledo in 1981, with the purpose of making new prints , based on which the essayist Carlos Monsiváis (1938-2010) wrote the work of fiction New catechism for reluctant Indians.

Today, Toledo’s plates and prints are exhibited at the San Agustín Etla Arts Center in Oaxaca. The donation was made to the Institute of Graphic Arts of Oaxaca, an institution created by Toledo, which is part of the Inbal Museum Network.

At the delivery ceremony, Lucina Jiménez, head of Inbal, pointed out that not only is the generosity de Colina, because “that is not all the contribution that our dear worker friend, builder of culture and servant of the arts, has actually made, but rather he has been a voluntary transformer of the ways of relating to art.

That is vital, because if we had to make a history of the arts in Mexico from their management, Armando Colina’s career would have to be the first to be studied, since he has been a figure capable of contributing his resources, his dreams, their illusions, to move in that virtuous link that exists between books, art and museums. The relationship he built with Víctor Acuña, co-founder of Arvil, later became the development of emblematic projects of which this country is proud; He is an example of life, but also of intelligence.

Their work, crucial in the projection of Mexico

For Jiménez, Without the work of Armando Colina, Mexico would not have had the international significance that it had in its defining moments. To a large extent we owe it to him that emblematic figures of modern Mexican art of the 20th century have had the weight they have in the world. That must be said, because he even risked his ties at one point with the institutions themselves to do what he believed had to be done..

The honoree responded: It fills me with joy to receive this recognition of my long vocation as a promoter of culture in Mexico and abroad, an activity that has been very fun, because it has made me creative throughout my life and, above all, in the past 55 years. years, which are already many.