Eighty students from across Costa Rica participated in a photo course designed to explore the theme of poverty in everyday life. The photographs will be on display at the National Museum this weekend until Sunday, Sept. 27.
Portraitist Lucas Iturriza has spent the past half-decade capturing faces on film and talking with his subjects about their lives. The purpose of the project has been to celebrate the diversity of Costa Rica – not just as faces and skin colors, but as backgrounds and lifestyles.
Standing before the marigold crenelated National Museum — once the Bellavista Fortress that served as a barracks for Costa Rican troops — President Luis Guillermo Solís celebrated the 66th anniversary of the abolition of the army alongside veterans of the Civil War and National Army and students on Monday.
To browse this temporary exhibit at the National Museum is to journey through decades. Agencia EFE is a Spanish media company and the fourth-largest wire service in the world. The YouTube generation can’t usurp the power of still pictures, because a good photograph hits you like a hammer.
Laidy Bonilla, an archeologist with the National Museum’s Department of Cultural Heritage Protection and who was involved in the raid, told The Tico Times the collection is very large, making up more than half of the 148 artifacts seized so far in 2014. The collection included ceremonial and domestic items such as ceramic vases, pendants, metates — mealing stones used to grind corn and seeds — mortars, and grinding stones from Costa Rica’s Pacific northwest dated between 300 AD and 700 AD.
The National Museum recently opened a curious new exhibition, “Conquistas Sociales en Costa Rica.” While “conquista” in this context can be translated most accurately as “achievement,” visitors will appreciate the victorious tone the exhibit gives to Costa Rica’s conquests of injustice and inequality.
Biologists estimate that at least four percent of the world's plant and animal species live in Costa Rica. Now, information on all of those species is available to anyone at the Costa Rica National Museum's online national biodiversity portal, Ecobiosis.