This post was originally published on artnews.com
Proyectos Públicos, an organization that restores historic buildings in Mexico City, launched a new arts initiative called Trayectos this week, headed by the opening of the group exhibition “Misrepresented: Landscapes” featuring eight Mexican artists that have yet to receive recognition in the international art world.
Started in 2013, Proyectos Públicos owns eight properties in Mexico City as well as a country in Wyoming and a ranch in the coastal state of Veracruz. The best known is General Prim, a beautiful Porfiriato-era house in Colonia Juárez that has served as the venue for Salón Acme, a satellite fair to Mexico City’s much larger Zona Maco, since its first edition in 2013. But the other properties are similarly architectural jewels, including Hotel Reforma, a once luxurious hotel dating to 1936, and Casa Barcelona, another Porfiriato-era mansion in Juarez, which has become the venue for “Misrepresented.”
For the Trayectos program, Proyectos Públicos has opened six of their Mexico City spaces to the public with cultural activities throughout Mexico City Art Week, including exhibitions, installations, lectures, talks, and tours. In addition, the program—the title of which translates to “journeys” in English—asked 20 of the city’s artists and creatives to provide recommendations for shops, restaurants, and other points of interest, which are accessible via “routes” on Google Maps. Through a partnership with the mayor’s office of Cuauhtémoc, the borough encompassing Roma, Centro, Juarez, and other adjacent neighborhoods, there is free transportation connecting each of the venues.
Ana María Sánchez, the organization’s culture and community director and a veteran of Mexico City’s gallery scene, told ARTnews that the goal of the project is to provide the public ongoing free access to art. “Our mission is to rescue these very important, historic heritage buildings and to allow people to have the chance to get inside these places,” Sánchez said.
The larger plan, according to Sánchez, is to build year-round arts and culture programming at the venues, a goal most immediately associated with “Misrepresented,” which features eight artists from different regions of Mexico who have long-standing practices but who are still underknown both in Mexico and abroad. In addition to the exhibition, which is mostly composed of works commissioned by Proyectos Públicos for the occasion, the organization is planning to provide a year of support to the cohort of artists.
According to David Miranda, the curator of the program and a long-standing curator at the city’s Museo Experimental El Eco, the plan is to arrange talks, studio visits, and other forms of support for the artists that will connect them with galleries, curators, and collectors year-round, beginning with Mexico City Art Week.
“We wanted to work with a small group of artists, unlike some other programs, because we want to make a platform for these artists that can make a difference,” Miranda told ARTnews.
The exhibition which is comprised of landscape works in a variety of different artistic modes and genres includes several stunning large-scale works, including an acrylic-on-wood work by Yolanda Paulsen that measures 12 by 9 feet, and painting made from an aerial shots of the Xico Volcano in Mexico City by Goethe David Pontón. The latter work, which measures 13 by 14 feet, is made with natural pigments from the volcano and hangs from the ceiling.
Miranda said that he chose landscapes as a curatorial theme for Trayectos’s inaugural edition because it allowed him to draw connections between Mexican artists from different regions who work in different styles and with very different practices.
“Sometimes we only concentrate [in the art world] on the center of the country. But from the beginning, we wanted this project to make a connection with the entire country,” he said. (Salón Acme also includes a section focused on a different Mexican state each year.)
The wider scope of Trayectos was on view on Tuesday, when the organization hosted a reading and performance by Catherine Lacey, the writer of acclaimed novel Biography of X, among other works, as part of Spoken Word Gallery, an initiative of publisher Juan De La Cosa to create exhibitions solely out of spoken and written language.
The performance, which also featured British artist Dexter Dalwood and writer and translator Heather Cleary, was held at Casa Margarita, the organization’s newest venue once the home of Margarita Quijano, a writer and muse to poet Ramón López Velarde. The house once served as a salon to Quijano’s literary circle and the partnership with Spoken Word Gallery is meant to revive that literary connection. Later in the week, Mexican poet Luis Felipe Fabre will also perform a piece, in addition to other events at the space.