Delving into the archives of old newspapers from any Latin American or Caribbean country, one encounters countless accounts, drawings, and photo-engravings of posthumous tributes paid to great men of letters and the arts in order to exalt their work. Our streets, filled with commemorative plaques and busts, stand as heartfelt public elegies in the face of the irrepressible departure of those men who came to occupy a privileged place in the early construction of each nation’s identity.

Today, in the most nineteenth-century sense possible, we wish to honour the memory of a remarkable woman who leaves an invaluable legacy for all of Latin America and the Caribbean. Beatriz González (1932–2026), Colombian and a native of Bucaramanga, has departed leaving behind a vast body of visual creation, extensive research, and museological thought that profoundly shaped Colombian memory institutions in the late twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first.

“Artists exist so that memory is not thrown away.” This aphorism encapsulates a creative legacy built primarily from images reproduced millions of times in newspapers and broadsheets that portrayed Colombian reality. González used these images to construct a new national portrait and, perhaps, a sharp critique of the status quo.

She also lived with passion for working with museums. She walked their galleries and corridors, probing the most complex interstices of art and history in order to narrate differently and to bring other forms of the museum into being. It is difficult to forget someone who, for decades, insisted on pressing a finger into the wound of difficult histories so that they might speak from the walls. We will endeavour to honour that legacy. We will not forget her.

Photograph: “Visitors at the exhibition Bruma by Beatriz González.” Fragmentos – space for art and memory, Bogotá, Colombia, September 2022. (Julián Roa Triana)