COWBOYS, COMMUNISM, AND CRYSTALS

On one side of Mexico City’s Centro Citibanamex, one of the largest convention centers in Mexico, a slanted window looks out onto a racetrack, which in early February looked as if it had been dormant for a while — the field looked bare, the grass had turned tawny. Opposite the window, however, was a vibrant scene — Zona Maco, Latin America’s largest art fair, was in full swing, with three galleries filled with art collectors, artists, gallerists, journalists, and more looking at works from over 200 galleries in 29 countries. A sushi counter rendered in blond wood bookended one end of the galleries, while an antique fair with booths filled with ornate chess sets and an antique Red Mercedes with a Pebble Beach license plate closed out another. In between, there were ad-hoc patisseries, taquerias, and one of those nouveau-tech machines that promises to measure your biological age. It was easier to find a shot of mezcal walking through the galleries than it was to find a bottle of water.

Zélika García started Zona Maco 21 years ago in Monterrey with a few dozen booths, moving the intrepid young fair to the metropolitan capital the following year. “Nobody understood why we were trying to make a fair in Mexico City,” she said of those early years. 21 years later, and nobody would blink twice at the idea of establishing an art fair in Mexico City. The city’s art scene has exploded in the past two decades — supported by a tight-knit gallery network and an influx of international artists and curators. In fact, Zona Maco has spurred an Art Week that rivals that of any city, with satellite fairs such as Material, Salón Acme, and Unique Design X popping up in the years since.

I only had three full days in the capital — and racked up what felt like a full day of sitting in traffic, trying to squeeze as much in as possible. What follows is a diary of those three days: a fast-moving, slightly chaotic attempt to get a sense of what Mexico City’s Art Week feels like from the ground.

DAY 1

My Aéromexico flight arrived at night, so I didn’t have much time to see art on what was technically day one in Mexico City. I walked by a gallery filled with hot young people, which I realized later was Café Gaga, the temporary space that hosted takeovers, music performances, book launches, and readings, hosted by Mexico City gallery Gaga in their original space in Durango 204 (next to Contramar). Later that night, I ended up at a different “art bar” — BACAL, run by Eric Namour, who lets guest chefs or interesting people — he’s said he prefers when they aren’t actually cooks — take over the kitchen every few weeks. That night, there was an installation on the sidewalk — a tall sculpture that looked like it would fit among the roadside desert art that you pass by along desert highways. Music was playing out of it from speakers hung on a wire, but it was emitting totally blown out sounds — basically just pulsing out air. “That’s the art,” said a friend of a friend. We moved away from it – noise art isn’t necessarily what you want to listen to when you’re drinking mezcal out of a pedialyte bottle — but I did appreciate that that was technically the first piece of art that I saw this trip.

DAY 2

My more intentional experience at Mexico City’s art week started and ended with Zona. One of the first things I saw was the Casa Hoffmann booth featuring Colombian sound artist Leonel Vásquez’s sculptures, which look more like instruments, that Vásquez creates to acknowledge nature’s silent suffering in Colombia’s armed conflicts. Rocks sourced from dried-up rivers in Colombia slide against a wooden needle, creating an uncanny noise transmitted out of a copper horn that you need to put your ear up against to hear. The music the rocks make sound like the eerie background hums of a David Lynch film — resonant, yet beautiful — and though it posits listening as a political act, giving voice to waterscapes that have been silenced through human violence, their appeal is visceral; I saw a little boy cranking, listening, and smiling, immersed in solitary playtime amidst the chaos of the fair.

Nearby was a setting fit for a sacred burial — a quiet, meditative scene that felt out of step with the commotion of the rest of the fair. A dappled, rust colored sarcophagus lay atop an oval of white sand. The funeral vessel was surrounded by what looked like shields. I assumed all of it, as sturdy as it looked, was rendered clay, but it was all papier mâché, the preferred medium of late artist Luis Fernando Zapata (1951–1994). Exhibited by Colombian gallery Galería Elvira Moreno, Zapata’s work was inspired by his research on Mesoamerican and Egyptian cultures, ancient funerary rites, and his experience of living with AIDS, which he died of in Mexico City in 1994. His deceptively light yet grounded pieces pushed towards “doors of light,” offering new visions of the world — perhaps the afterlife, or a space where grief gives way to clarity.

As is common at art fairs this size, the tonal shifts were dramatic, and the next motif I noticed was the presence of cowboys, which found their way to two anticipated booths from Mexico City galleries. At OMR, José Davila’s archival pigment print Untitled (Cowboy) (2024) inverts the aesthetics of the familiar image of cowboys riding off into the sunset, and in doing so, casts an eerie lens on the Western trope; the color scale of the print is dusky and dark, which makes them look like they’re riding off on sand dunes in a misty rain. Davila’s sculpture Don’t think twice (2024) captured a more subdued moment of dramatic tension, with two clementine-colored metal beams suspended by a smooth boulder, a blob of concrete hanging off the top, tantalizingly placed so that it looks as if it’s about to topple over, though it never will. And at Kurimanzutto’s booth, Mexico City-based artist Ana Segovia’s triptych focused on a suspenseful moment of Lee Van Cleef as Angel Eyes from his classic Spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Segovia often pulls from the masculine iconography of the charro (Mexican cowboy) and the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in their vivid paintings, and with their current show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, they create paintings around a fictional film, a musical romance between artist Buck and undocumented ranch hand Mario, creating their own “gay cowboy 80s movie” that they wish they had watched when they were younger. Segovia invents these characters, but with this one, they’re highlighting the gaze of a character forever set within the Western canon.

From Zona, I did exactly what I was told by Mexico City locals not to do: cross the city to the Museo Anahuacalli during peak traffic. The monumental museum, founded and designed by Diego Rivera in 1964 in Coyoacán, displays his vast collection of pre-Columbian art in a fortress-like structure made from local volcanic stone. Drawing on the architecture and sanctity of Aztec and Teotihuacan temples, Rivera considered it a sacred space for art connected to the underworld, not just a museum. Two hours of stop-and-go traffic later, I stretch out of my cab, nauseous from the ride, and get swept through ¿Cómo se escribe muerte al sur? by TONO Festival artistic director Sam Ozer, who co-curated the exhibition with Karla Niño de Rivera, the museum’s curator. The double exhibit, which runs through June 8, features work made just for the show by artists Carolina Fusilier and Paloma Contreras Lomas. Each artist responded to the Anahuacalli’s architecture, its collections, and the looming legacy of Rivera differently. “In the process of making the show, both of the artists were really inspired by ideas of immortality, death, and the failure of modernity,” Ozer says.

Contreras Lomas’s ceramic maquette opens the show, a representation of the museum-in-miniature that features figures like a frog sacrifice, Xipe Totec, the wolf-like creature that’s the Mesoamerican god of resurrection, and Virgil and Caronte from Dante’s Divine Comedy; a diminutive scene that turns Rivera’s palace for art into a stage, bringing to life the underworld Rivera envisioned. Fusilier, on the other hand, reimagines the museum as a laboratory, channeling the energy of ghosts, spirits, and the theories of 19th-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov, who created a whole “set of speculations around reanimating dead matter — very Frankenstein, bringing any dead animal back to life,” says Ozer. Fusilier’s paintings look like sci-fi machines flattened to a two-dimensional scale, or what the mysticism of Clarice Lispector’s prose might look like if it took physical form. While Contreras Lomas’s works sometimes look like they fit right in to the museum — like the aforementioned maquette — Fusilier’s paintings contrast with the tiny figurines representing Olmecs or Toltecs that surround them, or the carved ceramic vessels and sculptures that are carefully arranged in display cases, notably without any wall text or accompanying context.

The pièce de resistance of the exhibit comes on the upper floor, where big, gridded windows that provide panoramic views of lush flora are on the same scale as Contreras Lomas’s floor to ceiling murals, which hang down from the wall and semi-carpet the rest of the room. Within the murals’ baroque cacophony, hammer and sickles contrast with Sailor Moon’s pink and yellow crescent wand, while the limbs of grotesque, cartoonish pig figures are bloated and unruly. Taking the failed Rockefeller Center fresco by Rivera as her referent, Contreras Lomas’s oil stick charcoal and graphite composition unfolds almost like an exquisite corpse, says Ozer. Contreras Lomas filters the political tension between Diego and Rockefeller into the language of our time — of a “liberal democracy” inundated with fascist imagery and ideas that get nonchalantly disseminated through YouTube, Instagram, and other livestreamers. Ozer translates one scrawl of text on the mural that represents this: “The sons of bitches who talk about and politics are probably going to parties and having cocktails, but while I’m saying this, I’ll probably be speaking about this work to a group of Americans, hoping they’ll buy it, while drinking a negroni.” Woven through self-awareness and humor, Contreras Lomas’s mural captures the contradictions of making political art inside global art circuits — critical of power, yet complicit in its systems.

DAY 3

I was a bit scared about going to another design fair after the art marathon I experienced the day before. But in contrast to Zona Maco’s major art fair energy — little dogs in big bags, long lines for tacos, and hordes of art collectors scanning QR codes and hopping between VIP lounges — Unique Design X (UDX), the newest satellite fair to join Mexico City Art Week, felt like an oasis. At one end of the room, a gauzy textile by Fischbacher 1819 draped down from the ceiling to create a nook for crystal store Stan House’s installation of massive, jagged geological formations — a space explicitly designed to realign your chakras. The other end of the room featured wellness brand Morphus’s lounge chairs, which harness vibrations of light and sound to “optimize your body and align it with its natural rhythms,” which involves wearing a VR-type headset. Enclosed within a sleek, mirrored structure, the “meditative wellness chamber,” as Unique Design X founder Morgan Morris Sans describes it, was part of Atra’s “dystopian” installation — the whole thing was set upon a bed of pebbles, with smoke machines emitting atmospheric clouds of fog in the corners. In between the two sanctuaries, a woody scent wafted out of a tower of blond timber topped with tropical fauna, an installation by Héctor Esrawe and Xinu, a Mexico City perfumery brand. Crystals, healing headsets, and “aromatic botany” — a softer set of experiences than those of the usual blue chip art fair. Morris Sans founded the nomadic design fair in Shanghai in 2019, after decades spent organizing  fairs in China, from the Beijing Design Week to Design Shanghai. “But because China is of such a scale, there was a huge amount of tear down — it was a mountain. You literally could have skied on it. After a while, that really starts to wear on your psyche,” Morris Sans says. “I just wanted to rethink everything and do something that was more of a passion project — encouraging intersections between creative fields, creating a cleaner, lighter, more collaborative model where we could show collectible design while building cultural crossovers.” Her answer was UDX, which strives for a lower carbon footprint, consolidating all shipments and movements as much as possible, using recycled or upcycled materials and an open plan scenography that minimizes the need for built-out fair infrastructure. Though Morris Sans is based in Paris, it’s the second edition of the fair in Mexico City —  she wanted to tap the city’s wellspring of creative talent and encourage reciprocity between the metropolitan cities, so that artists, designers, and architects can come from France to Mexico to live and work, and vice versa.

As much as cross-cultural exchange is important to her, elevating the object’s status in the art world is even more so. “I think the term decorative arts is very pejorative,” she says. “The object needs to regain its esteem and status in our world.” On the top floor of the Expo Reforma convention center, many objects got the shine they deserved, from Turkish interior designer and architect Sema Topaloğlu’s blown glass “non-conformist garden,” a development of what she showed at Alcova last year — a bed frame adorned with clusters of hand blown glass flowers and spheres, which she creates with her network of Istanbul-based metalworkers and foundrymen. Latin American contemporary art and collectible design firm Unno Gallery blurred the lines between the interiority of a painting with actual interiors with a collection of chairs by Paris-based artist, architect, and designer Garance Vallée — the Modernist chairs within Vallée’s paintings almost seep to jump out of their frames into the real world, a double representation that only underlines their sculptural presence. On the other end of the room, a fountain made by Parisian duo Xolo Cuintle — Valentine Vie Binet and Romy Texier — is one of the more baroque objects on display, made from residues of Murano chandeliers, a 19th-century planter, and “a standing bowl from the Second Empire period.”