For Mexico, which prides itself on a unique artistic tradition, the crisis resulting from the global economic meltdown and swine flu is particularly acute, and is being felt by the country’s artistic community and museums.
Mexico City’s Diego Rivera murals are undergoing restoration treatment.
It’s not “malinchismo”, no way. I’ve always believed that the internationalization of projects can benefit and nourish the vision of many people in the country where the projects originate as well those who receive the works from abroad.
La Coleccion Jumex, one of the largest private collections of contemporary art open to the public in Latin America, is planning to move from its location on the outskirts of Mexico City closer to the action in the capital’s center.
This week MexicoReporter.com will be publishing a series of extracts from David Lida’s book “First Stop in the New World.”
Nicaragua’s culture, arts and music scene is the focus of a new magazine launched by two American designers living in the country’s capital, Managua.
Visits to some of Mexico City’s museums have fallen by as much as 90% since the outbreak of the H1N1 virus last month that prompted a near shutdown of numerous facilities
Artist Shizu Saldamando was inspired by Mexico City-based writer Daniel Hernandez.
You may remember Colombian street artist Bastardilla from the piece I did on La Plaza a few months back.
Now you can see more of the mystery girl.
Gabriel Orozco, the Mexican contemporary artist, has opened his first solo show in three years in Mexico City. Crowds turned up last month to the unveiling at the Kurimanzutto art gallery despite the H1N1 flu alert alarming the city at the time.
Mexican-Canadian visual artist Alec Dempster, who lives in Xalapa in the state of Veracruz, got in touch to send us some images of his that are part of a series called “Toxic Love.”
As the global media coverage of the swine flu outbreak continues around the world, here in Mexico City people are starting to see the light side of the situation.
I at least expected to see fashionable versions of the blue face masks being combined with the latest clothes labels, but it wasn’t so.
Camilo Lara is the sole member of the Mexican Institute of Sound, and I had the pleasure of interviewing him in his Mexico City home
I’m on the hoof, but wanted to report on some of the films I’ve seen so far here at the Guadalajara International Film Festival.
After writing a song for los Tigres Del Norte about the controversial 670-mile fence project along the U.S.-Mexico border, Cristina Rubalcava got to listening to some of the band’s narcocorridos and created a mural that illustrates phrases from them.
Gael Garcia Bernal is to be honored at the upcoming International Film Festival in Guadalajara for his contributions to cinema.
Mexico City’s Museo de la Ciudad is playing host to a photojournalism exhibition — Expofotoperiodismo — that features nearly 50 photos from 2008.
In a country with such a rich artistic heritage of mural-ism, graffiti is a popular past-time for many of Mexico´s youth.
Mexico visual artist Betsabee Romero used cars to create installations for “A vuelta de rueda (driving slowly),” an outdoor exhibition in downtown Mexico City that has a decidedly green feel to it.
Albinos in Mexico and the “human tragedy” of Mexican society were focuses of the winning entries in one the country’s longest-running photography competitions, the results of which are now on display in Mexico City’s impressive Centro de Imagen.
Five films in the International Festival of Contemporary Cinema (FICCO) are “so bizarre, so completely outside any conventional genre, that it appears organizers liked them, but couldn’t figure out what to do with them.”
A lion cub, a naked girl and a Mexican pop star were just some of the guests at the Yautepec Gallery in Mexico City’s Roma neighborhood on a night in late January. They and a healthy share of Mexico’s young hipsters were there for the opening of New York-based photographer Noah Sheldon’s portrait studio project.
Lieberman spent more than three years working on 100 drawings that are intricate copies of often bad-quality newspaper photographs of missing children, taken from the Mexican newspaper Metro.
Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, two of Mexico’s most bankable movie stars, launched the fourth annual Ambulante documentary film festival Friday morning in a packed cinema screening room on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma.
David LaChapelle, the surrealist photographer, launched his first-ever show in Mexico City last night in a media scrum that resembled one of his chaotic images.
A modern monstrosity out of place amid a dated aesthetic, or a much-needed injection of fresh, voguish design? Whichever side you come down on, Mexico City’s brand new temple to modern art is well worth a visit.
The Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (University Museum of Contemporary Art), also known by its initials MUAC, opened its misted-glass doors to the Mexican public at the end of November 2008.
Rosa Jimenez, a 26-year-old Mexican woman, could currently be serving a sentence of 99 years in a Texas prison for a crime she didn’t commit, according to Lucía Gajá, 34, the young Mexican director of the documentary “Mi Vida Dentro (My Life Inside).”
The film takes aim at the United States criminal-justice system and its treatment of Mexican undocumented female migrants. It is told through the case of Jimenez, who crossed illegally into the United States when she was 17 years old. Clearly on the side of the defendant, the film combines the words of Jimenez, her defense lawyers and the prosecution to lay out what ends up a chilling depiction.
“Mi Vida Dentro” debuted in Mexico last week in cinemas across the capital, and is the first feature-length film from Gajá, who is a graduate of CUEC, the cinema program of the Autonomous National University of Mexico. It’s also the first Mexican documentary to be distributed by Ambulante, the film festival created by two of Mexico’s most bankable stars, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, in 2006.
There were no rabble-rousing speeches, but Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the film version, was greeted by an eager audience at the nearly full Julio Bracho cinema, which hosted the premier of the first part of Steven Soderbergh’s long-awaited portrait of the Argentine revolutionary last night.
“Che, the Argentine,” got its first Mexican screening on the sprawling campus of Mexico’s most influential university, the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico). The movie has, like all upcoming major releases here in Mexico, been selling for weeks now on stands that deal in pirated DVDs, but there remain those who want to see the film on the big screen. The audience was a mixture of all ages, from amorous teenage couples to unaccompanied gray-haired men, and they received the portrait of the much-adored revolutionary with gusto.
Guevara is popular among the sprawling student population here in Mexico City, where he and Fidel Castro, then an exiled Cuban lawyer, planned their Cuban Revolution over dinner and cigars on July 3rd, 1955. The myth and heroic image of the Argentine have replaced a real understanding of the complex man that he was. His face is often emblazoned across flags and T-shirts during student protests and commonly evoked as a universal symbol of social struggle.
A photography exhibition on the fence of Mexico City’s massive Chapultepec Park reflects the importance of the public space in the lives of Mexicans.
“Las bicicletas” (“the bicycles”) outside Mexico City’s Museo de Palacio de Bellas Artes is one of two works created by artist Gilberto Aceves Navarro especially for the museum’s retrospective exhibition of his art.
For Mexico City’s smokers, who were recently deprived of the pleasure of enjoying their habit in restaurants, bars, offices and other public places, an exhibition celebrating the pleasure and history of tobacco might feel like someone’s blowing smoke in their faces.
Three-year-old Ismael Arenas Sosa and his father, Edmundo, enjoyed the artificially produced snow in the Zocalo last week. And it appears Mexico’s mayor has devised a rather ingenious way of limiting the wait time for children eager to build their first snowman.
The beautiful people were out in force on Saturday afternoon in Mexico City for the opening of the new Kurimanzutto contemporary art gallery in the San Miguel de Chapultepec neighborhood.
Guerrilla-knitter Magda Sayeg of KnittaPlease.com hit the streets of Mexico City to take on her biggest challenge yet. It was her task to cover an entire bus with knitting, as is her style, and we caught up with her just as she was completing her task.
Magda Seyeg is a Texan artist who tags – but not with graffiti. She and her collective of guerilla knitters – who you can touch base with at KnittaPlease.com – place knitted stuff on door handles, park benches, statues, lamp posts and virtually anything else standing in the street.
Coyoacan is a sleepy (at least for Mexico City), leafy and green middle class suburb in the south of Distrito Federal, home to many of the capital’s intellectuals and politicians. Strolling along one its main drags – Avenida Mexico – is some of DF’s graffiti.
Phantoms come, phantoms go. They swirl around Leonora Carrington, a tiny woman of 91 with a tart intellect and a posh British accent, as she sips Earl Grey tea at her kitchen table. They rise like black vapors from the pavement of Avenue Reforma in the Mexican capital, where a menagerie of Carringtons nightmarishly enigmatic sculptures startle pedestrians and spook passing cars….
This video was made to go with with this Los Angeles Times piece by Reed Johnson.
Leonora Carrington is a British surrealist artist from Lancashire who left Europe during the Second World War, on the run from the Nazis.
She finally settled in Mexico, and has produced an impressive body of work, some of which is currently on display on one of Mexico’s main thoroughfares – Paseo de Reforma.
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