A young woman locked in a refrigerator of those that retail stores use to keep beers cold. The young woman has her eyes lowered, her dark face tired, although she has a shy smile. His arms, thin, extended to the sides of the refrigerator door frame, as if he wanted to break the glass, to free himself. He wears a red shirt that is the uniform of the chain he works for, a huge consortium in the State of Nuevo León, in northern Mexico, one of the main industrial regions of the country. Photography is a complaint, a call for attention: thousands of young people spend hours locked up in precarious jobs, spending their lives to earn a little money to help them continue their studies or bring food home, but they must always be smiling. This piece is part of a powerful exhibition titled Nuevo León: The future is not writtenwith which the Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey (MARCO) tries to explore how complex it is to live in an industrialized city that expands and grows in a permanent tension between modernity and its social problems.
“We try to position the discourses from the north of the country, all these artists who have emerged in Monterrey and who have migrated because they have not found the cultural infrastructure that sustains their developments. What we are doing is putting them back in relationship with this city,” explains Taiyana Pimentel, director of MARCO. The museum has become the great gateway to contemporary art for the northern regions of a country where it seems that great culture is centered in its capital, Mexico City, a city with more than 200 museums. Monterrey has not wanted to be left behind and since the founding of MARCO in 1991, this venue by Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta has established itself as an important promoter of art and a forum to promote young artistic talent.
“It is a very ambitious museum,” Pimentel proudly states. “It began as a research museum, because it opened with an important exhibition titled Myth and magic, the art of the eighties, with works by (the Brazilian artist) Tunga, (the Cuban painter) José Bedia, by North American artists. It is a transcendental catalogue, an important investigation, a transcendental exhibition. Between the north of Mexico and the south of the United States it plays the role of a great museum, contributing to generating important discourses,” says Pimentel. “Our line of work has been to study artists who are in the middle of their career and who had not yet been reviewed in Mexico for some reason. We have taken over those absences in the history of contemporary art exhibitions in the country to open that range towards the north,” he explains.
Pimentel took over the reins of MARCO in 2019 and had to deal with the nightmare of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced the closure of commercial spaces and cultural venues and prevented the transfer of works from other places. “What I did was very simple: address those mid-career artists who had not yet had their practices analyzed and reviewed in Mexico,” explains the director. Among these creators, names such as Mario García Torres, a visual and conceptual artist originally from Coahuila, stand out; the sculptor Pedro Reyes, the visual artist Miguel Calderón and Damián Ortega, one of the main exponents of contemporary art in Mexico. On Pimentel’s agenda is an upcoming exhibition by Teresa Margolles, the creator of Culiacán whose artistic proposal focuses on denouncing the violence caused by drug trafficking that is bleeding this country dry.
That connection with current Mexican events is also one of the museum’s objectives. The image of the woman in the refrigerator is part of the exhibition by the team of artists Colectivo Estética Unisex within the exhibition Nuevo León: The future is not written, inaugurated in August and will be available until February. The pieces reflect on the working conditions of young people who work in customer service in large Mexican franchises. The boys photographed are the face of these companies and must always smile at the customer, show their friendly side, despite the hours they spend on their feet or dedicated to strenuous work. The artists of the collective, the Mexican Lorena Estrada and the Colombian Futuro Moncada, show these uniformed boys, in some moving images, with their limbs flexed or during their few hours of rest, lying on a sofa or on a table listening to music. The culmination is an image of one of the messages engraved on one of those uniforms: “Make every moment something special.”
The main artist of the exhibition is the photographer Aristeo Jiménez, in a tribute to his 46 years of experience. Jiménez has portrayed life in popular sectors, neighborhoods that concentrate prostitution and violence, and homes on the urban periphery. They are energetic images of dazzling beauty: the cowboy portrayed on the door of the ladies’ bathroom with a photo of a sensual Marilyn Monroe; a trans person also dressed as a cowgirl, with her charro hat and huge rings hanging from her ears; a group of men watching another dance on a stage, with bare legs, but wearing boots; the couple of boys who eat at Café Nuevo Brasil, in Monterrey; or the lovers Lucero and Felipa, he with his left leg mutilated, sitting in a wheelchair, while she hugs him. The photo is from 1995 and Jiménez took it in the popular neighborhood of La Coyotera, in Monterrey.
The contrast with that poverty and decadence is provided by the photographer Yvonne Venegas, who with her lens has explored the spaces of San Pedro Garza García, one of the richest municipalities in Latin America. Here we do not show transvestite people, prostitutes or popular bars, but we do show perfectly coiffed ladies dressed in luxury brand clothes and bags, young people playing polo or the image that may even be shocking, but which is part of normality. of high-income families in Mexico and Latin America: it is titled Boy and his nanny (2013) and shows a little boy with a big pompadour and sunglasses making the peace sign while being carried by a young woman with indigenous features. In the background, a bearded man, dressed in a dark jacket, looks out the sliding glass door that leads to a terrace with comfortable sofas and armchairs and a bar with glasses and bottles of vodka and rum waiting to be consumed.
Also notable is the work of Alejandro Cartagena, who, standing on a bridge in the city, photographed vans transporting workers from the outskirts of the Monterrey capital. The workers rush through the early morning with a last sleep in the trucks before arriving at work. The set of images is heartbreaking, moving and comical at the same time, while inciting the viewer about how hard life is for millions of people in a country with low salaries and difficult working conditions. “He stood for months on a pedestrian bridge and from there he photographed these vans. Cartagena’s work is brilliant, because it has a great sense of humor, but it also marks the passage of time, as if it were on the skin,” explains the director of MARCO. The artist will present a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. “He is a transcendental artist and this is a glorious series,” says Pimentel.
The director is committed to this museum, which is already one of the great pillars of Mexican art, also becoming a place of meeting, reflection and distraction. In the summer they organize concerts in the central patio, this year dedicated to artists who perform the so-called lowered cumbias, famous internationally for the film I’m not here anymore. One of those concerts brought together 3,000 people. Many young people who had never been to the museum have come for these activities or for the free days, Wednesdays and Sundays, when low-income families can also avoid the cost of tickets. “I’m betting a lot,” says the director, “on the other being in conflict here, on protesting; that MARCO is located more with the possibility of being a public square,” he says.