Colombia Opens Largest Exhibition Ever Dedicated to Gabriel Garcia Marquez


ByCaroll Viana

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garcia marquez
The National Library of Colombia has inaugurated the largest exhibition on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, featuring more than 450 manuscripts. Credit: Guadalajara Film Festival / CC BY 2.0

The National Library of Colombia has inaugurated “Everything Is Known: The Story of Gabo’s Creation”, the most extensive and revealing exhibition ever dedicated to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, master of magical realism and recipient of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. For the first time in his home country, an exhibition has been mounted that brings together free to the public more than 450 items, including manuscripts, personal belongings, and documents. These materials were recovered from Garcia Marquez’s archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, as well as from national and international collections.

‘Everything Is Known: The Story of Gabo’s Creation’, the largest exhibition on Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The exhibit opened its doors to welcome both national and international visitors to explore seven thematic rooms that trace the key creative and life stages of Garcia Marquez from his childhood in Aracataca to his rise as a global literary figure. The exhibition will remain open until August 2, 2025.

The National Library of Colombia worked in collaboration with the Ministry of Cultures, the Gabo Foundation, CAF, and the Harry Ransom Center for more than two years to bring this ambitious project to life.

Among the highlights on display are hand-corrected drafts of the iconic One Hundred Years of Solitude, a first edition of the novel, an annotated copy of The Metamorphosis, and a 1928 map from the United Fruit Company referencing “Macondo Farm.” The exhibit also includes deeply personal items: Garcia Marquez’s typewriter, passports, early newspaper columns, family photographs, clothing, videos, and even adolescent sketches from 1941 that reveal lesser-known artistic interests.

Private letters take a prominent role in the exhibition. In them, Gabo shares his doubts and dreams, mentions a rejection from The New Yorker, and corresponds with figures such as Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. The exhibit also showcases his work in journalism, with columns, audiovisual materials, and issues of Comprimido, a tiny newspaper he founded in Cartagena that has been dubbed “the smallest newspaper in the world.”

Beyond the personal, the exhibition also pays tribute to Garcia Marquez’s literary influences, featuring documents related to authors like William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Luis Borges, who helped shape Gabo’s writing style. His role as a peace activist is also highlighted, with reports, letters, and photographs from various demonstrations showing his political commitment throughout different phases of Colombia’s armed conflict.

Lead curator Alvaro Santana Acuña, a sociologist and historian from the Ransom Center, described the process by saying: “Each chapter was designed to surprise and reveal new layers of Garcia Marquez’s creative process.”

“Everything Is Known” goes beyond a simple tribute—it invites the public to understand how a Caribbean-born writer from Colombia transformed his inner world into a universal literary language. This immersive and thoughtful journey allows us not only to appreciate the voice behind magical realism, but also to discover the courageous journalist, the committed thinker, the father, and the traveler whose work continues to build bridges between the local and the global.

https://colombiaone.com/

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