MEXICO CITY — North America’s largest city has long deployed modernism as a way of proving that it’s a contemporary place. Within the natural decay of a crowded, 400-year-old metropolis, where buildings crumble and sidewalks disappear, where corruption is a fact and hope for broad economic prosperity fleeting, there’s been a five-decade, government-sponsored intervention of sleek office towers, high-tech transportation systems and, in so many plazas, over-scaled pieces of public art made from steel or concrete.
The old crashes into the new in ways that are meaningful and undeniably beautiful. Downtown, aging cathedrals are smudged in pollution. But in the Condesa neighborhood, sleek, architecture-forward apartment buildings rise that would look more at home in San Francisco or Berlin. On the broad boulevards of gentrifying Roma Norte, high-speed bus lines set international standards for efficiency, but on the rooftops hang a tangle of clotheslines where laundry dries and the conveniences other countries take for granted seem worlds away.
Art is flourishing here right now — really flourishing — and it’s easy to see why. Since mankind invented paint, art has had a unique ability to delineate the haves from the have-nots. There is much to be said about this conflict between past and present, progress and stagnation.
It’s hard to know yet how much of this story will be told in Denver this summer, but the potential is beguiling. Dozens of Mexico City artists will show new work as part of the Biennial of the Americas — outdoor installations, painting, sculpture, video, performance pieces.
The biennial’s mission is to explore the culture of the entire hemisphere, but for its third edition, the art program will focus on one place in hope that the conversation goes deeper. The choice of Mexico City isn’t random; a third of Denver’s population has Mexican roots and its capital sizes up its dreams and failures.
“We need to have this conversation,” said Lauren Wright, the biennial’s in-house curator. “But how can we do it in creative ways?”
And in honest ways. American perceptions of Mexico’s interior are clouded by media reports of brutal crimes and drug trafficking. No one denies that’s a fact of life — in some places.
But Mexico City is a thriving, safe, culturally rich metropolis that Americans might love as much as Paris if they got to know it. Museums, shopping and restaurants go hand-in-hand with traffic, beggars and endless noise, all adding up to the “complex, complicated and totally cosmopolitan” place it is, as Wright puts it.
Artists are invited to report the story however they see it, and the biennial is fostering the exchange on several levels. Its Ambassadors program is sponsoring four, 10-week residencies. Two Mexico City artists, Cristobal Gracia and Daniel Monroy Cuevas, will come here and two Denver artists, Matt Scobey and Melissa Furness, go there. All will showcase their work at the McNichols Building in Civic Center this July.
There will be a large group show that includes Mexican artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, likely to include important names. Artist Erick Meyenberg, now creating a performance piece at a Mexico City shopping mall featuring girls from a local military academy, will stage a related piece at Denver International Airport.
Marcela Armas will produce an interactive work to reside concurrently in Denver and Mexico City. An all-female collective called De Sitio is hatching a project involving artists, architects and designers.
Most of the work is being dreamed up right now, just four months out, as artists meet one another and explore possibilities. It is a grand experiment in process, a risk considering that projects could succeed or fail. Whatever the outcome, the display will be public, stretching from downtown to DIA.
Meet the ambassador
Matt Scobey looks like a Colorado guy. He’s 6 feet tall and thin, blond and blue-eyed and obsessed with his bike, a royal-blue American Eagle he’s been riding around Mexico City during his residency.
All this makes him stand out in a place where, generally speaking, people are shorter and browner than Scobey, and most locals know better than to bike in a zone where cars and pedestrians see traffic rules as a choice.
But it allows him a unique perspective for soaking in what he calls “the constant balance between beauty and brutality” in the city. If you’re going to be an ambassador, you’ve got to represent; and Scobey is experiencing Mexico City in visceral ways.
Two weeks in, he got food poisoning so bad he dropped 25 pounds in just a few days. His bike was impounded by customs and he had to pay about $250, cash, to get it back.
Scobey, the first ambassador to get started, is a graphic designer, though he also makes sculptures out of concrete, and this is where he has connected creatively. Concrete defines Mexico City, the streets, the best houses, and mostly notably, the sidewalks, which alternately devolve into ruts and rise into platforms. They’ve been paved over so many times a curb can easily rise 16 inches off the street. For Americans, the sidewalks here can feel like one big tripping hazard. “You can see the layering of the eras in their development,” Scobey said.
Like the other ambassador artists, Scobey’s task is to make something out of his experiences, and that has happened organically. Working in his studio, a sunny shotgun of a room six paces wide and 20 long on the fourth floor of an artists co-op in the Centro district, he has poured batch after batch of concrete, molding it into various things.
He’s come up with a plan to make tiles, maybe hundreds of them, about 1 foot square, and lay them on the floor of the McNichols Building. He’s imprinting them with plastic trash bags scavenged from the streets: crinkly, veiny, tactile patterns.
Scobey won’t finalize ideas until he returns to the U.S. March 23. He is considering thickness and color, whether to layer them flat or raise them off the floor, or leave cracks, like the sidewalks themselves. He wants to wrap in notions about urban ecology and the underground economy he’s seen with the thousands of vendors who line the streets in the Centro.
“Some days the pollution is intense here. Some days the smells are intense,” he said. “It’s an intense visual and auditory reality all the time.”
Two art worlds
In many ways, Mexico City is as posh as London or Los Angeles. In the swank Polanco district, Gucci and Cartier shops fuel a daytime bustle that pricey nightclubs sustain into the early morning. Bars are world-class, people dress up for breakfast and the place is wired: Free Wi-Fi in the plazas.
But you don’t have to look hard to see another side. Children selling candy on the streets. People who walk long distances because they can’t afford a 33-cent subway ride. Even folks with good government jobs talk of working 10 or 12 hours a day.
Everyone complains about corruption, and it’s visible on the streets. A few blocks from the Zocalo, police stand by as prostitutes work a busy avenue, many of them teenagers. For $7, you can get a girl and a place to complete the transaction.
Such duality defines the city, and it’s reflected in the burgeoning art scene.
The city’s annual art fair, Zona Maco, is in its 12th year. It has grown nearly as big and expensive as the great fairs in Basel, Hong Kong and Miami and draws dealers from Berlin, Bogata and Manhattan, plus an international corps of collectors (this year, there were a dozen from Colorado and they spent money).
The February fair has pumped up Mexico’s reputation as an art center and created a high-end market. The city supports a number of posh galleries where customers ring the bell to get in and peruse works with price points you’d see in Chelsea.
There is at the same time a grassroots wave rushing in. Complementing Zona Maco is an upstart called Material Art Fair, founded two years ago by expat Brett Schultz, along with Daniela Elbahara and Isa Castilla. It presents small and interesting galleries with younger, experimental artists and has given the fair scene more credibility.
In 2009, a group of artists developed SOMA, an alternative, upper-level art school. Artists come from throughout Mexico for two-year residencies where they take formal classes in history and theory. In the summer, SOMA runs a program, in English, drawing from across the globe.
The school has coalesced a community of young artists and emerged as a hip center for culture. Its Wednesday art talks, convening around 8:30 p.m., are packed.
Small galleries are popping up throughout the city, often produced by artists and independent curators who show daring work that rivals that in any capital city. LuLu, a project space opened by curator Chris Sharp two years ago, presents international artists in a room the size of a one-car garage.
The work is highly conceptual and sometimes profound. LuLu’s recent biennial show in February featured one piece by artist Tania Pérez Córdova that consisted of three counterfeit coins. One was placed on he gallery floor, the other resided in the gallery owner’s pocket. To see the third, you had to walk two blocks to a juice vendor squeezing oranges on the street and ask her to present it.
At the Labor space across town, Santiago’s Sierra’s “La Lona” consisted of a single piece inside a large, white-cube gallery that had 15 people standing under a single cloak. Just standing there. Only one spectator was allowed to enter the gallery at a time.
Artists here make their own opportunities. There’s Bikini Wax, in Condesa, a renegade operation run by Cristobal Gracia that’s part gallery, part party house. It hosts a different exhibit, and a rollicking opening, most every weekend.
In the Santa María la Ribera neighborhood, artists have turned an old house into a studio and resident space called Casa Imelda. It’s shabby but full of energy. In San Rafael, there’s Casa Mauaad, a compound of galleries and bedrooms that hosts artists and exhibits from near and far.
Mirroring cities
Lauren Wright saw a number of parallels between what was happening in Mexico City and Denver. She came on board as the biennial’s artistic director last August and was charged with building its cultural program in just a year.
Denver has RedLine, an exhibition space in Curtis Park founded by Laura Merage in 2008, which provides free studio space to developing artists, shapes careers and exhibits work.
It’s not like Mexico’s SOMA — not a school, less formal — but it has connected regional artists in a way that is bringing some definition of what it means to be a Colorado artist in the 21st century.
Several RedLine artists helped develop Tank Studios in south Denver, a co-op inhabited by talented up-and-comers. Local artists Adam Milner and Jeromie Dorrance opened Dateline, a tiny gallery in RiNo that doubles as a living room.
South Broadway gallerist Adam Gildar, who specializes in emerging talent, separated his business interests out and opened the ArtPlant, a non-profit residency program that has started hosting out-of-town artists for an extended period.
For the Ambassadors program, Wright signed on Gildar and SOMA’s Carla Herrera-Prats. The two selected the four Ambassadors artists and work with them closely as they are developing their ideas for the McNichols show.
By mingling creatives from here and there, the Denver Biennial hopes to capitalize on the energy of these artist-driven things “bubbling up in both places,” said Wright, and in a way that inspires artists to continue making their city’s culture more interesting while making interesting work themselves.
Wright asks the question: “How can we learn from one another, in a concrete way, about how to make something out of nothing?”
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
