BOGOTA.- Even some of his closest colleagues told Eugenio Viola that he was making a mistake when he took the job as chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art Bogotá in 2019. His career was soaring at the time, with a resume that included organizing exhibitions at major European venues, including the Venice Biennale. That same year, the Rome-based magazine Artribune named him, for a second time, as Italy’s best curator.

And Bogotá, despite a tradition of fine art and craft making going back thousands of years, has never emerged as a major center of international art. The city, with a population nearing 8 million, has just a handful of museums, and the modern art museum, known as MAMBO, was long on history but short on global clout.

Locals thought of it as an elite and clubby den, “a place where ambassadors and embassy wives” hung out, as Colombian artist Luz Lizarazo put it. “None of the artists here were going there,” she said.

Viola was sharply aware of the limitations of taking over a museum he knew was lacking in both popularity and financial support. “It was completely mad because I was leaving the first world in order to move here,” he said during an interview in the museum’s cafeteria. Viola was wearing black from head to toe, as he always does in public, except for the purple shoelaces on his leather boots.

But a unique possibility existed in Bogotá. Like many curators, he talked a lot over the years about using museums as a mechanism for making communities better and this, he remembered thinking, might be a chance to actually do that. Colombia was just two years into a peace process intended to end about 50 years of civil war, and its political and cultural institutions were reimagining what they could be without the shadow of violence and instability hovering over the country.

“Here, I could be part of a process of social and civic reconstruction,” he said.

Five years later, that goal has proved elusive. National politics have shifted, financial resources have been hard to come by and Colombia’s renaissance has stumbled. But the chief curator has transformed the museum in ways that matter: Its exhibitions are more inclusive and consequential, and its doors have opened to new visitors.

He made the move to South America and devised an exhibition program with two aims: to create shows around living Colombian artists the museum previously had failed to foster, and to bring high-level international artists to Colombia so that visitors could see more of what was happening in the rest of the contemporary art field. On both tracks, he would focus on material that addressed current events.

His first show, just a few months into his tenure, got right to the point. It was an exhibition of photos and videos that Teresa Margolles, a Mexican artist, compiled at the Simón Bolívar Bridge between Colombia and Venezuela. Migrants were pouring over the border there in large numbers. The show was an artful invitation for museum visitors to engage with one of the country’s most pressing problems.

MAMBO went on to produce other provocative shows on topics that Viola said had been off limits at the museum and, to some degree, in public conversation in Colombia. “We have to fill a lot of gaps here,” was how Viola explained it.

There was the group show “Virosis. Art and HIV in Colombia,” and a solo exhibition titled “It Hasn’t Ceased Yet,” by Colombian artist Fernando Arias, whose work directly addresses gender, social injustices and violence. The exhibition “Stigmata,” by Carlos Motta, connected the dots between colonialism and 21st-century social problems.

MAMBO began presenting more work by women, too, such as Alba Triana, a Colombian artist who lives in Miami, and Lizarazo, whose 2021 solo exhibition, addressing gender limitations, included an installation made entirely of sheer stockings that were cut, stretched and hung so they resembled patterned wallpaper. While that show was up, MAMBO helped to establish an annual Julius Baer Award for Latin American Female Artists and gave the first one to Voluspa Jarpa, a Chilean artist.

At the same time, Viola looked beyond the country’s borders to create events intended to increase visitor numbers, presenting the first exhibitions in Colombia by Israeli artist Dor Guez; Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, a Guatemalan; and Alexandre Dang, who is French and lives in Belgium.

Through Monday, MAMBO is showing a mix of talents with concurrent retrospectives of Nijole Sivickas and Ana Mercedes Hoyos, both Colombians, and Silvia Rivas of Argentina.

MAMBO tries to present nine exhibits a year, though Viola has to find the funding for each one. The museum gets by on private donations and subsidies from both the municipal and national governments, though Viola said public money was a fraction of what museums received in Europe and the United States.

“Colombia is not a poor country,” he said, but its priorities are not on art. For example, he said, it does not join other South American nations such as Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina in supporting pavilions at the Venice Biennale. He is working to change that, but the lack of money is a constant distraction for the museum, which has 45 employees and a building that requires frequent repairs.

MAMBO is housed in an architectural landmark designed in 1979 by Rogelio Salmona, one of Colombia’s most famous architects, who was known for his modernist brick structures. It is often mentioned as one of the city’s best buildings. Set on a hill along Carrera 7, Bogotá’s main commercial thoroughfare, it is highly visible and easily accessible.

But it is also a difficult space to navigate, with oddly shaped galleries and awkward ceiling heights that make reprogramming a challenge.

“Salmona built it as a monument to himself,” Viola said. “And it is 5,000 square meters of pure dysfunctionality.” The current exhibits, for example, were scheduled to run through Oct. 6 but are ending early because of building issues.

As a curator, he makes the most of it. “I’m lucky because I’m Italian, so I’m not used to the temptations of the white cube,” he said. “I’ve done exhibitions in churches, train stations, at the Venice Biennale.” Once that you understand that you can’t compete with the space, he said, it becomes interesting to deal with.

Finding a way around obstacles has defined Viola’s time in Bogotá, starting from when he arrived. He was the first foreigner to lead the museum, and the press and public, and even the arts community, did not hide their suspicion when he got there, he said.

“It was very strange for us,” Lizarazo said. “Like, who is this new MAMBO curator who is Italian and doesn’t speak Spanish.”

Viola quickly changed the opinions of many. As soon as he arrived, he began visiting artist studios, talking to everyone, learning Spanish, she said. “He did what he had to do.”

Catalina Casas, who owns Casas Riegner, among the city’s most prominent galleries and one of the few to show at international art fairs, credits Viola with “reactivating a museum that had lost its relevance.”

“Nowadays it’s important to visit their exhibitions,” she said.

Viola’s personal reputation in Latin America has grown along with his museum’s. One example: In July, he was named curator of the 2025 edition of Guatemala’s Paiz Art Biennial, which is often referred to as Central America’s largest art event.

As far as being part of a civic reconstruction, Viola said that the museum had had successes and disappointments, and that it still had a long way to go. Part of the reason is external. The widely hailed peace process in Colombia failed to achieve its goals. The government continues to struggle with armed criminal organizations and the situation remains dire in many of Colombia’s rural regions. One armed group, which calls itself the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces, is reported to operate openly in up to 30% of the country.

For many Colombians, the violence and displacement that were supposed to cease still prevail, and the museum finds itself serving a public that remains in the midst of trauma, rather than celebrating its end. That has altered the mission Viola originally envisioned for his tenure.

He still wants the museum to help people heal, but he understands that it also needs to help them cope. Art is one way to do that.

“What is the antidote against all of this violence, if not culture?” Viola said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.