Art, con todo, in Mexico City
I don’t really speak fluent ‘art’.
I can hold my own, don’t get me wrong. I can walk into a gallery, spend time with a piece, and know if it does something for me. I just draw the line at confidently talking about references and market trajectories.
But what I do know is Mexico City. And I’ve been here long enough to have watched what happens every February when Art Week rolls in. And it’s… a lot. There are a few reasons why Mexico City has quietly become one of the world’s hotspots for contemporary art. During the pandemic, a lot of artists came here and stayed. Not just because life here is good (which it is), but because it’s a place where it’s easy to produce things. There’s access to artisans, workshops, materials (ceramics, textiles, wood, metal….) and to people who know what they’re doing. It makes the city something of a playground for creators. Add to that the joint efforts of institutions like the Museo Tamayo, together with Zona Maco, and independent galleries like Kurimanzutto… and the rest is history.
It all technically starts with Zona Maco, which twenty-two years ago, was a relatively modest fair. Today, it’s the largest in Latin America, with more than 200 galleries from all over the world setting up shop in one giant, very well air-conditioned space on the edge of the city. It’s amazing. Let me tell you how.
You can be walking past a piece by someone like Fernando Botero, and then, literally a few steps later, you’re standing next to an artist who’s just starting out, who is there, in person, next to their work. And you can talk to them. Which, at first, can feel… a bit uncomfortable. There’s that moment where you think: if I ask a question, are they going to try to sell it to me? Am I about to accidentally buy a sculpture? But that’s not really how it works. Most of the time, you end up having a completely normal conversation. About how something was made. Why they chose that material. What went wrong halfway through? What they’re trying to figure out next. It’s very refreshing. Because unless you spend your life flying from Basel to New York to Berlin, visiting 200 galleries one by one, you don’t really get this kind of access. Here, it’s all in one place, and with the right contacts, you can find yourself in a private visit to the Tamayo Museum storage with access to their private collection including Picassos and Rothkos to name a few…. a dream for any art lover.
Zelika García, who started Zona Maco back in the day, explained it in a way that made a lot of sense to me. People are more relaxed here, she said, and when people are more relaxed, they do better business. And you can feel that immediately. The art is serious. Very serious. Big galleries, important collectors, proper money being spent. But the atmosphere isn’t stiff. People drift. Conversations happen between things, not in front of them. And when you leave the fair, things get properly interesting, because the real magic of Art Week isn’t contained just inside Zona Maco, its spread out into the city.
Mexico City is already enormous, but the way I always explain it is that it doesn’t feel like one city. It feels like a collection of small, very different towns stitched together. Take the Juárez neighborhood, for example. The way it was ten or fifteen years ago, it wasn’t necessarily where you’d send someone for a day out. Now, it’s one of the most interesting areas to walk of a weekday. Old buildings have morphed into galleries. New spaces keep opening. And the beauty of it is that you can spend an entire day just wandering. You go from one gallery to another, places like Kurimanzuto, Galería RGR, or smaller, more independent spaces, and somewhere in between you stop for lunch, or a coffee, or a drink that turns into two. Before you know it, the whole thing becomes less about “seeing art” and more about being in it. And it’s just so much fun.
If Zona Maco is the polished, global version of art week, then Salón Acme is where things loosen up a bit. It started around fifteen years ago as a platform for emerging artists, and it still has that slightly chaotic, experimental energy. This is where you’ll see things that make you pause and think: is this genius, or am I missing something? And the answer is usually: both. It’s less about finished, market-ready work and more about ideas being tested in real time, which makes it one of the most fun places to spend an afternoon. And then there are the spaces that don’t quite fit into either category. Lago Algo is one of them. Set inside Chapultepec Park, it’s part exhibition space, part social hub, part something else entirely. You go for the art, but you end up staying because of the setting, the mix of people, and the feeling that you’re slightly outside the usual circuits.
By the end of the week, you’ve seen too much, missed even more, had too many conversations, and definitely not enough sleep. But after a recovery day, you’ll be thinking about going back next year.
