Valparaiso, Chile: Art under the open sky

Action
Like good travelers, we’ve visited quite a few museums in the past several months. Besides the children’s museums in Rosario, one of our favorites was the Museo al Cielo Abierto (Open Air Museum) in Valparaiso. The museum’s premise is simple: display art outside in the city, under the open sky.

We “entered” the museum by walking up an alley onto Bellavista Hill. At the top of the hill, scattered along a few streets and passageways, are the museum’s exhibits – large murals by some of the most famous contemporary artists in Chile, painted on the sides of buildings.


Reflection
The Museo al Cielo Abierto was probably the most low-budget museum we’ve visited. It wasn’t enclosed in any building, there was no gift shop, no one was working there, and there was no ticket window at the entrance (since there weren’t actually any tickets or official entrances). In other words, the museum did very little to separate itself from the surrounding neighborhood. The murals were so well integrated into the streetscape that it was often hard to tell where the works of art began and ended.

Which I assume is one of the points of the museum – to challenge the division between art (generally confined to museums) and our everyday surroundings (generally not considered artistic spaces). It’s probably not just a coincidence then that many of the buildings near and around the museum had been painted with an array of vibrant colors. These buildings were just ordinary homes outside of the museum, but does that mean that they’re not art?


Question
What are your favorite museums, and why? What are other examples of museums integrating with the surrounding community? When have you seen art outside of museums?