Mexico City on the move: a new generation of artists and the debut of two museums in the nation's capital are energizing the contemporary art scene - Report From Mexico

Art in America, Dec, 2001 by David Ebony

Mexico's presidential election of last year resulted in a sweeping victory for Vicente Fox and his Alliance for Change Party, the first opposition group to gain control of the presidency in 71 years. Unlike the 2000 presidential election in the U.S., Mexico's was one of the least controversial and smoothest transfers of power in that nation's history. The country suddenly found itself facing the new millennium with a sense of cautious optimism.

Fox's ability to bring about lasting change has yet to be proved, but, in spite of ongoing economic problems, civil rights struggles and separatist movements in the states of Chiapas and the Yucatan, progressive attitudes seem to have taken hold in Mexico. This hopeful outlook is vibrantly manifested in Mexico City's contemporary art scene, which is enjoying something of a boom. The past year has seen the debut of a number of new venues for contemporary art, including two major museums, La Collecion Jumex and El Laboratorio Arte Alameda. These are particularly welcome in the wake of the 1998 closing of Mexico City's Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo after 12 years in existence. Established by Emilio Azcarraga Milmo, head of the media conglomerate Televisa, the Centro Cultural folded when Azcarraga's heirs declined to support the institution after his death in 1997. The Centro's closing left the city without a major contemporary art museum.

The recent enthusiasm for contemporary art has been fueled largely by a generation of young Mexican artists, including Gabriel Orozco, Miguel Calderon, Daniel Guzman, Gerardo Suter and Francis Alys, whose works have received considerable international attention in the past decade, and artists such as Julio Galan and Nahum B. Zenil, who emerged in the mid-1980s and continue to be much admired abroad. Rising art stars, such as Pablo Vargas-Lugo, Ximena Cuevas, Santiago Sierra, Claudia Fernandez, Mario Aguirre, Melanie Smith, Sofia Taboas, Simon Pereyns and Gabriel Kuri, who have established solid reputations at home, are quickly becoming recognized abroad.

Fanning the flames of this heated milieu is a group of energetic young Mexican collectors and dealers. Foremost among them is Eugenio Lopez Alonso, 33, the sole heir to Jumex, an enormous fruit juice and soft drink concern based in the outskirts of Mexico City. Sometimes referred to in the art press as Mexico's answer to Charles Saatchi, Lopez has been equally occupied with developing and expanding Jumex and with putting the country back on the map as a vital contemporary art center, a position Mexico has not enjoyed since the 1930s and `40s, when artists like Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros were the focus of international attention. There is a feeling in the air that contemporary art is finally on its way to a secure place in Mexico's cultural landscape, after a number of false starts that followed on the heels of the nation's entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s [see A.i.A., May `94].

Lopez began collecting about a decade ago, after he saw a New York exhibition of paintings by Agnes Martin, which at once fascinated and confounded him. Since then, he has concentrated exclusively on contemporary art, amassing more than 600 major pieces, ranging from late-20th-century classics, including examples by Donald Judd, John Chamberlain and Joseph Kosuth to more recent works by Gary Simmons, Pipilotti Rist and Ernesto Neto, among many others. In the process, he has become a key patron and promoter of avant-garde work in Mexico and abroad. Besides supporting several local institutions, he is a benefactor of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, frequently assisting it in acquiring "difficult" pieces, such as works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Paul McCarthy. He also sponsored the museum's recent survey of works by Gabriel Orozco, which was curated by Alma Ruiz and debuted in Los Angeles before traveling to Mexico City and Monterrey.

In 1994, Lopez opened Chac Mool Gallery in West Hollywood, a commercial venue directed by Esthella Provas, which handles works by Latin American modernists such as Wifredo Lam, Matta, Francisco Toledo and Gunther Gerzso, as well as West Coast artists including Mary Corse, Ed Ruscha and Charles Arnoldi. Lopez is also known for supporting offbeat art projects, such as last year's "Blown Away," a happening organized by Maurizio Cattelan for the Sixth Carribean Biennial, in which Cattelan invited Vanessa Beecroft, Orozco, Rist, Olafur Eliasson, Rirkrit Tiravanija and others to vacation and "be vacant" on the island of St. Kitts. Also involved in publishing, Lopez has produced a number of exhibition catalogues and monographs, and he is a backer of Trans

His most ambitious project to date is La Coleccion Jumex, a sprawling Mexico City venue for exhibitions of works from his collection as well as for temporary loan shows, which opened this past spring. The two-level, 40,000-square-foot structure contains exhibition areas, offices, a library, a meeting room, archives and storage spaces. A severe, bunkerlike gray concrete structure designed by Mexican architect Gerardo Garcia, the museum is located on the grounds of the Jumex industrial complex in a poor neighborhood at the far northern outskirts of the city, on the way to the pyramids of Teotihuacan, the ancient Toltec capital. In some ways the present austerity, if not the elegance, of those mighty structures is echoed by the museum, with its high, fortresslike surrounding walls. The building features state-of-the-art temperature control, lighting and security systems. Completely devoid of natural light, the main galleries, some with 30-foot-high ceilings, are designed specifically for high-tech pieces and light-sensitive photo works. Countering the physical remoteness of its present site, the fledgling institution plans to launch a number of projects aimed at making it more accessible to the capital's 19 million inhabitants. In the works is an art-education program that calls for new classrooms, studio facilities and satellite exhibition spaces to be located closer to the center of town.