When Professor Anna Indych López was researching her book on modern Mexican art, she did not expect to do the work without going out of the country. While the Covid-19 pandemic hindered on-site research and archival work, it encouraged the art historian to refine her topic and gather information through Zoom interviews and online sources.
As a result, Indych López received a $50,000 Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to support her project. She was among the 30 awardees selected from over 500 applicants. Her book, “Mexico City: Spatial Politics in Art at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century,” explores early 2000s artists who used the city as a muse to depict the relationships between urban spaces and its inhabitants.
Photo courtesy of Anna Indych López
Indych López’s family lives in the outskirts of the city, her home base when she visits. In the 1990s, she rubbed shoulders with artist collectives who were relatively unknown at the time, and formed underground, alternative, non-state sponsored spaces to show their work. During this period, the Mexican peso experienced a collapse. unemployment rates, debt, and political instability rose. Around 2000 many of these artists suddenly became the face of contemporary Mexican art on the global stage.
For some, the Mexican Revolution at the turn of the 20th century fell short of its promises of democracy and progress. Muralism, its visual accompaniment, turned off contemporary artists. In the early 1920s, after the revolution, the government-funded art movement depicted idealist scenes of rural peasant life, often through the medium of murals.
“And the artists, the generation that I’m working on now, especially early on, did everything they could to disassociate themselves from that type of art,” making figurative, didactic leftist art,” Indych López said. “They took on much more experimental means– performance, suspended sculpture, urban interventions, much more experimental modes and indirect subject matter to make politicized statements.”
Damien Ortega’s “Cosmic Thing” dissects the parts of a Volkswagen Beetle and suspends its components in midair. The sculpture was internationally acclaimed and shown at the 2003 Venice Biennale – the same year production of the vehicle was discontinued in Mexico City. Ortega’s work examines the cultural currency and historical importance of everyday objects.
While Ortega cut ups found materials to be shown in institutional spaces, other artists like Minerva Cuevas treat Mexico City as a playground for public participation, economic critique, and “micro sabotage.” Her ongoing project “Mejor Vida Corp.” (Better Life Corporation) has distributed discounted counterfeit grocery bar codes, free subway cards, and cleaned public buildings, to name a few acts of chaotic activism.
Cuevas’ work isn’t mere mischief— it taunts the government for its inefficiency in public maintenance and outreach to Mexico City’s working class. By showcasing and distributing these services to the underclass, the artist also allows them to view and partake in artistic spaces, a privilege often reserved for the upper class.
Indych López plans to continue her research, despite the unprecedented budget cuts and paused funding in academia. She cites City College’s diversity and innovation as a pillar of perseverance.
“We’re living through a very complicated moment, and for those of us in the humanities, in academia, in the arts, we’re being attacked and assaulted from all sides. That being said, I personally have felt very lucky to be part of a Hispanic serving institution. Public universities are the backbone of this nation…We have a huge responsibility at places like CUNY, and I see that mission as very important.”
While the subjects in her research may seem fixed in a particular time and place, Indych López stressed the importance of cultural critique and that the power of personal expression transcends borders.
“Art matters… It doesn’t just express things about the world, but it makes us see the world in distinct ways and visual literacy is so key to living in this current world.”
Mia Euceda is an alumna of Baruch College, where they studied journalism and served as an editor for The Ticker newspaper and Refract Magazine. Their work has been published in The New York Review of Books and Treble Zine.