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MORETHANAMOMENT

W

Mexico continues to

bask in the spotlight

as one of the richest

cultural creators of

our time. Michael

Slenske meets the

artists, makers and

machers defining the

country’s creative

renaissance at home

and abroad.

e always try to grow organically withthe local public,” says Zélika García over mid-afternoon splits of champagne while walking thebooths of her budding Zona MACO Foto and ZonaMACO Salón del Anticuario fairs during MexicoCity’s rain-soaked Gallery Weekend in September.Over the past 12 years, that local-organic modelhas helped turn García’s fairs—and the cityitself—into a must-visit hub on the internationalcreative calendar. At the Foto and Salón delAnticuario fairs, she adds, “We have 45 galleries,and even though we’ve only been open two days,we’ve already had 5,000 visitors. Last year in totalwe had just 7,000 visitors.”

Her best friend, Moisés Micha, co-founder ofGrupo Habita, which operates a dozen hotels acrossMexico—including hotspot Condesa DF, where theGallery Weekend luncheon hosted internationalmuseum directors and curators from the NewMuseum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami,

the Hammer Museum and the Los AngelesNomadic Division—couldn’t agree more.

“Right after Maco and Gallery Weekend wehave Design Week and then the Grand Prix,” saysMicha, noting Guadalajara’s pre-MACO weekend.“So the calendar is getting very busy.”

When García launched her first fair, Muestra,in Monterrey in 2002, it drew just 20 galleries and3,000 visitors. “I was begging galleries to come,”she says. But last February, the original Zona MACOcontemporary art fair, which launched in 2004 atthe city’s World Trade Center, drew some 50,000visitors and 160 art and design exhibitors thatincluded Honor Fraser, Regen Projects, CarpentersWorkshop Gallery, Venus Over Manhattan, Gagosianand David Zwirner, not to mention all the localpowerhouses like Kurimanzutto, Galería OMR,Proyectos Monclova and Labor.

Of course, it takes more than boldface galleriesto make an art scene. Foundationally, it takes

artists, and aside from the wealth of local talent,there’s a long history of international stars comingto Mexico to live and create art. This past year,Pritzker-winning architect Toyo Ito completed hisfluted white concrete Museo Internacional delBarroco in Puebla; Andrea Fraser made hermuseum debut in a Spanish-speaking country atthe Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo; theGuggenheim retrospective for Peter Fischli andDavid Weiss traveled to Eugenio Lopez’s MuseoJumex; and Candida Höfer created an entirely newbody of work illuminating iconic buildings of Mexicofor a Gallery Weekend show at the new Brutalistexhibition space (carved out of a former recordshop) of Galería OMR, the blue-chip, family-runstalwart of the Mexican scene.

“There are so many different places that attractme and that’s what I like,” says Höfer, who shot infive Mexican states last year and will show additionalimages next year at the Antiguo Colegio de San

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Cristóbal Gracia’s multimedia“Aquatania Part I” exhibition at ElCuarto de Máquinas, Mexico City.

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Ildefonso that will later travel to Museo Amparo. Such testimonies are the embodiment of a

new cultural MeMo, or Mexico Moment,appropriating the branding device conceived to sellMexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s earlyeconomic reforms. This second-wave MeMo ishelping the country project its creative talent ontothe world stage: In 2016 alone The New York Times’travel section gave the Distrito Federal its top slotin its annual “52 Places to Go” feature; thePhiladelphia Museum of Art opened a blockbusterMexican Modernism survey; Pedro Reyes had asculpture show at Dallas Contemporary and turnedthe Brooklyn Army Terminal into a political hauntedhouse called Doomocracy; Jose Dávila opened hissecond solo show (and produced a Thirsty Coyotewine with Hacienda La Lomita) at Sean Kelly whilepreparing for a traveling, multi-venue outdoorsculpture project with the Los Angeles NomadicDivision through 2018; Gabriel Orozco was awardedthe 2016 Aspen Award for Art during Art Crush andunveiled his stunning redesign of South LondonGallery’s garden; and Abraham Cruzvillegasconstructed his inimitable “Autoconcanción”sculptural show with indigenous Angeleno plants atRegen Projects on the heels of his epic—andorganic—Turbine Hall takeover. (Meanwhile,Cruzvillegas’ hometown gallery, Kurimanzutto, made

a big splash with an acclaimed group show atJessica Silverman Gallery last January.)

“I invited them to curate a show of theirprogram with the hope that the exhibition wouldfoster a rewarding international conversation. As theart world expands with a never-ending amount offairs, to see a program as distinctive asKurimanzutto’s in a gallery show was hugelysuccessful and well-received,” says Silverman. “Thefood and art scene is also very hot right nowbecause Mexico is full of culture and innovation.Plus, it’s outside of a tech epicenter, which givesway to more handmade creativity.”

Such DIY scrappiness is certainly at play withMexico’s young curators like Kurimanzutto’s Boston-born Bree Zucker, who organized the gallery’s newpop-up billboard project, Sonora 128, in Condesa,which has already featured social engagements byAntonio Caro and Nobuyoshi Araki. She’s also partof the independent collective Galería La Esperanza,which produced a buzzy group show during GalleryWeekend, “Touching Hands With SomeoneSeriously Beautiful,” which was organized by iconiccurator Gerardo Contreras, who founded thelegendary (and legendarily experimental) PreteenGallery in the late aughts.

“La Esperanza is a smokescreen platform forthe return of Preteen Gallery to Mexico City,” says

Zucker of their group show in a bodega shopwindow, which employed a list of artists includingPetra Cortright, Donna Huanca, Jeff Zilm andHarmony Korine as a platform to create an entirelynew model: not showing individual works by theartists, but rather, by “channeling” their souls.

“The statement of the show is ‘an exercise incuratorial divination’ and Gerardo’s statement is ‘theartist is the message,’ which is brilliantly terrifying,”adds Zucker. “The ‘group show’ in that vitrinefunctions as one whole work, a mandala, authoredby the artists via Gerardo. Of course we’ve had manyquestions already: Is it the artists, or is it Gerardo?Is the artist a curator or the curator an artist? Andwhat is Galería La Esperanza anyway? The show is aRussian doll, because we keep adding layers. Mexicois the land of the possible. What is important is thatthese spaces display the work of artists we trulybelieve in and add to the dialogue here in the city.”

Meanwhile, Gloria Cortina, the DF’s first lady ofinterior design, is hoping to export the local dialogue(specifically the one she maintains with artisanalwood, stone and metal workers from Teotihuacan,Michoacán and Puebla) to the international stagein a new furniture collection she debuted inNovember at New York’s Cristina Grajales Gallery.

“Mexico has a new light and Mexican clientsand internationals alike are discovering the country’s

COURTESY OF SEAN KELLY GALLERY, NEW

YOR

K

“La Esperanza is

a smokescreen

platform for the

return of Preteen

Gallery to Mexico

City,” says Zucker

Jose Davila’s Untitled (Femme d’Alger) IX, 2016

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Jose Dávila, Guadalajara’s breakout art star, iscurrently having his second solo show at NewYork’s Sean Kelly gallery, “Stones Don’t Move,”and preparing for a multi-venue sculpture project with the Los Angeles Nomadic Division.

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new vision,” says Cortina. “With this new generationof designers and artists a very interesting movementis developing where you can find all these dialoguesand connections not only within Mexican culture butalso with international scenarios.”

In addition to the increased demand forMexican artists and designers on the internationalstage, the country’s hospitality mavens are alsoredefining the popular notions of their land’s imagewith a raft of new stateside ventures. Grupo Habitajust opened the Hollander and the Robey inChicago’s Wicker Park and are breaking ground ona new hotel in Los Angeles’ downtown Arts Districtaround the corner from Hauser Wirth & Schimmel.Top chef Enrique Olvera, whose Mexico Cityrestaurant Pujol just ranked number 25 on TheWorld’s 50 Best Restaurants list, spent the past twoyears expanding his beloved restaurant group toNew York with the opening of Cosme, which recentlyhosted President Obama. “Our main concern wasnot to be presumptuous, because we knewbeforehand that nobody likes it when a foreignindividual comes to ‘teach’ you how to do things,”says Olvera. “We just tried to do what we know the

best way we can, taking care of every detail.” The question is, will all this exposure attract

more young creatives like Zucker and friends to stay,or push them further and further away? Aninteresting case study might be found in CristóbalGracia, an ascendant young Mexico City-born artistwith a lumberjack beard and build, whosemultimedia “Aquatania Part I” exhibition at El Cuartode Máquinas proved to be one of the highlights ofGallery Weekend. The show precisely examined thecontradictions of Acapulco—tourist destination;narco-terror hot zone—and its elisions with Tarzan,whose star Johnny Weissmuller not only shot the lastfilm in the series on location in the seaside resorttown but also lived out his final years in the iconicHotel Los Flamingos. While such deeply consideredconceits might be hard to tease out from abroad,Gracia—whose shoulder-scraping earring andtrucker hat were never far from a fawning dealer orcurator at the Gallery Weekend gala dinner inside thecourtyard of the Noguchi-esque Instituto Nacional deAntropología e Historia—admitted he was currentlyapplying to MFA programs in Los Angeles.

“The force of alternative spaces and a new

generation of artists that I consider myself part ofare doing amazing things. It’s the strangeness andcontradictions of the city that allow us to do this.But I also could fall into a comfort zone in Mexico,and I don’t want this,” says Gracia. “I love and atthe same time hate Mexico City.”

These living contradictions—and let’s behonest, they’re shared by nearly every young artistin New York City—were stunningly illuminated viaJonathan Hernandez’s unforgettable display ofknives, vacuum hoses, rubber floors, illegallylogged lumber, scales, package sealers, a chainsaw, walkie talkies and burner cell phones. Allsourced from state auctions of assets seized fromnarcos and mafias, he re-appropriated these itemsfrom the criminal black market into the art worldblack market as sculptures spread throughout, andembedded in the walls of, Kurimanzutto’skunsthalle. In the work, as in Mexico, Hernandezexplains, “Fiction is always present.”

Or as Oscar Wilde, whose name graces apopular street in Polanco, might have put it: En

México, la vida imita al arte muchos más que el

arte imita a la vida.

Nobuyoshi Araki’s qARADISE, 2016

PHOTO BY PJ R

OUNTREE, COU

RTESY OF THE ARTIST AND KURIMANZUTTO, CIUDAD DE MÉXICO

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Top, Gloria Cortina and Bree Zucker;center, Galeria La Esperanza in MexicoCity; left, Cortina’s Mathias Table, 2014.

PHOT

O BY PJ R

OUNTRE

E, COU

RTESY OF

CRISTINA GR

AJALES GALLERY

BEYOND THE D.F.GuadalajaraOnce home to Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco,Guadalajara is still a town built by and around artistsincluding Gonzalo Lebrija, Jorge Méndez Blake and thecity’s breakout star, Jose Dávila, all of whom show insidea Barragán-designed house that is now home to the hipMadrid-based gallery Travesía Cuatro. “Mexico needed asecond scene and Guadalajara is the perfect frame,”says gallery co-founder Inés López-Quesada. ArtistDávila adds, “The last five years have been especiallyproductive with newly opened spaces like Ladera Oeste,PAOS, Páramo, Travesía Cuatro and Tiro Al Blanco, noneof which existed before.”

MéridaDuring Gallery Weekend, José García, Mx and TravesíaCuatro invaded a 19th-century building in ColoniaJuarez with shows of Edgardo Aragón and GonzaloLebrija, respectively. José García, Mx, the Mexico City-based gallery that represents Simon Fujiwara, ChristianJankowski and Nina Beier, followed up on that outingwith a Jorge Pardo show at their second space inMérida, the Spanish colonial capital of the Yucatán thatis also home to many top artisans. “Mérida has adifferent gallery profile than our space in Mexico City,”says director Leticia Vilalta. “This space is created withthe idea of expanding the possibilities for artists todevelop projects not only in this culturally rich andtropical environment, but also to use the space as amixture of a venue that stands between gallery spaceand a production site.”

OaxacaSince opening in the fall of 2014, Bosco Sodi’s TadaoAndo-designed arts foundation/studio space, CasaWabi, has offered residencies to 90 international artists.Four of them were featured in the inaugural exhibition(of photos inspired by the space) for the foundation’snew Alberto Kalach-designed non-profit gallery inMexico City’s up-and-coming Santa Maria de la Riveraarea. “Mexico and especially Mexico City are in a greatartistic moment, but for the young artist it is still verydifficult,” says Sodi. “We want to give opportunities toyoung Mexican artists who do not have a gallery yet.”

AguascalientesAs the name of this mountainous estado suggests,Aguascalientes has long been known for its hot springs.But with the addition of Museo Espacio in the industrialshell of the former railway workshops, “we foreseeAguascalientes becoming a contemporary art center,offering projects that involve the local, national andinternational art scene, and creating a place forknowledge and dialogue,” says museum director AnuarAtala Mendoza. “Specifically, Museo Espacio gives localartists, students and visitors the chance to experiencethe work of leading international artists like JannisKounellis and Daniel Buren, as well as lectures aboutcontemporary art, group discussions and public eventslike our Noches de Museo programs.” Through April themuseum is presenting “Wirikuta: Mexican Time-Slip,” agroup exhibition referencing the parallel worlds of PhilipK. Dick’s 1964 novel “Martian Time-Slip,” featuring worksby Carsten Höller, Philippe Parreno, Pamela Rosenkranzand Bosco Sodi, among others.

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