The museum's roots reach back to 1881, when physician Manuel Uribe Angel and a group of civic leaders founded the Zea Museum, named for the independence-era statesman Francisco Antonio Zea, at the Library of the Sovereign State of Antioquia. Its first collection was modest: books, pre-Columbian artifacts, rocks, minerals, coins, and documents spanning the era from Colombian independence through the Thousand Days' War. But political turbulence intervened. When a constitutional reform in 1886 downgraded Antioquia from a sovereign state to a department, the museum lost its autonomy. It eventually closed entirely, its building converted into a governor's palace, its collection scattered between the University of Antioquia and the Historical Academy.

The museum might have disappeared permanently if not for Teresa Santamaria de Gonzalez and Joaquin Jaramillo Sierra. In 1946, alarmed that Medellin lacked a proper museum, they organized its resurrection as a private nonprofit -- a structure deliberately designed to shield the institution from the political whims that had killed it before. Legal status came in 1953, and the museum finally reopened in 1955 inside the Casa de la Moneda, a former aguardiente factory next to the Church of the Veracruz. The space was humble, but the museum was alive again. In 1977 it changed its name to the Francisco Antonio Zea Museum of Art, a title that confused tourists and locals alike -- visitors expected a wax museum ("cera" sounding like "Zea" in Spanish).

In 1978, Fernando Botero made his first donation of works to the museum, and with that gesture the institution's trajectory shifted permanently. Botero, who had grown up poor in Medellin before becoming one of the world's most recognizable living artists, offered a deal: he would give a sculpture room, a painting room, and a drawing room if the museum relocated to a worthy space. The city obliged. The museum moved to its current home on what became Botero Plaza, and in 2000 Botero delivered on a staggering scale -- 23 monumental bronze sculptures for the plaza and 188 works for the galleries inside, making the Museum of Antioquia the largest collection of his art anywhere in the world. The outdoor sculptures became an instant public gathering place, alive with street vendors, families, and tourists rubbing the bronze belly of the famous fat bird for luck.

Since 2016, the Museum of Antioquia has pushed beyond its physical boundaries through the Museo 360 initiative, which seeks to make the museum a space for encounters and reflections that, in the institution's own words, recognize the reality of the city instead of hiding it. Collaborative projects with groups like Las Guerreras del Centro -- a collective of sex workers from Medellin's downtown -- have produced exhibitions that challenge stigma and center voices typically excluded from gallery walls. The museum now draws over a thousand visitors daily. What began in 1881 as a doctor's collection of rocks and coins has become something more ambitious: a living institution that insists art belongs not in storage or behind velvet ropes, but in the open air, at street level, where anyone walking past can touch it.