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SINCE COMING TO POWER IN 2018, Mexico’s “Fourth Transformation” political force has often found itself at odds with the country’s left-leaning arts and culture sectors. The movement—which mixes populism with selective neoliberal austerity—quickly cast contemporary art as an expression aligned with the ideology of the old regime. Individual artists have been publicly denounced by former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador as hoarders of state resources. Public art institutions in Mexico have found themselves in dire straits; last year, the nation’s budget for art and culture sank to its lowest level since 2013. Within Mexico’s national arts infrastructure, austerity is routinely framed as a form of redistributive justice while the arts are mischaracterized as a boondoggle for elites.
Consider the state-run Palacio de Bellas Artes—a bellwether of artistic legitimacy, where aesthetic value and national relevance have long converged. Designed in the late nineteenth century as an Italian-style opera house, the public museum opened in 1934, displaying mural paintings that remain among the country’s most canonical artworks. Back then, a loose group of artists—Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros among them—penned a manifesto calling for the socialization of an art that would function as a collective form of address. As mural paintings turned buildings into vehicles of historical narrative and ideological projection, Bellas Artes came to embody the promise of a public culture insulated from capitalism and individualism.
Two recent Bellas Artes exhibitions are emblematic of a reconfigured network of influence in Mexico’s arts scene, exemplifying the role that private initiatives play in remedying an ailing public arts sector. “Lilia Carrillo: Everything Is Evocative” revisited the prolific but brief career of painter, illustrator, and costume designer Lilia Carrillo. Reportedly two years in the making, the show explored the ways Carrillo reconciled abstraction with a figurative language that engaged with repression, authoritarianism, and environmental crisis. Carrillo’s career was cut short by her premature death in 1974, and she has remained under-recognized. At Bellas Artes, her works were presented through an innovative museographic design: Panels unfolded in a serpentine sequence across the palace’s monumental galleries, culminating in the mural painting La ciudad desbordada, contaminación del aire (The Overflowing City, Air Pollution, 1969), a large-format commission for the Mexican pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka.
Daniel Garza Usabiaga is the former director of Bellas Artes who curated the museum’s Carrillo exhibition. In 2025, the gallery Kurimanzutto began working with Carrillo’s estate and organized an exhibition consisting largely of works rarely shown since the artist’s death; Garza Usabiaga also wrote a press release for the Kurimanzutto exhibition. As he told me, it was thanks to the gallery’s significant investment of time and resources in gathering source material (sketches, photographs, press clippings) and documents from the artist’s family archive that the museum show could be realized in its current form. Research initiated by the gallery had a positive impact on Garza Usabiaga’s work for the exhibition (the museum did trace ancient Peruvian textiles for an exhibition Carrillo once organized at the Galería Juan Martín in 1963, and sourced short stories she illustrated for the National University’s magazine). What emerged was less a straightforward collaboration than a redistribution of research labor, in which the museum became partially dependent on infrastructures it did not control.
Another exhibition at Bellas Artes, “Geles Cabrera: Body Scores,” was a survey of the seven-decade oeuvre of ninety-nine-year-old Geles Cabrera, who is considered Mexico’s first formally trained woman sculptor. The artist worked primarily in carved stone, bronze, and papier-mâché, making stark female figures that looked to non-Western aesthetic traditions, such as Mesoamerican and Afro-Caribbean cultures, as well as modern dance and other forms of body movement charged with sensuality and jouissance. Her curvy, sinuous figures operate as records of gesture and movement.
In 2018, Cabrera’s work was rediscovered after the artist Pedro Reyes curated an exhibition of her pieces at Mexico City’s Museo Experimental El Eco, a space maintained by Mexico’s National Autonomous University. Since then, Agustina Ferreyra—an Argentinian-born dealer who ran her own gallery until 2013—has continued to champion Cabrera’s work. Last year, Ferreyra joined OMR as director, and her choice of artists has been reflected in the gallery’s programming. Aside from the El Eco presentation, Cabrera’s sculptures had circulated primarily in commercial spaces, including a Nairy Baghramian–curated exhibition at Kurimanzutto and a group exhibition at Lago Algo, OMR’s cultural center at Chapultepec Park. While this renewed attention positioned Cabrera’s work within a highly visible milieu, it did not translate into public museum exposure in Mexico until now. What was billed as a rediscovery was, in fact, the culmination of a sequence in which visibility was first consolidated in the market before being ratified by public institutions.
Taken together, the two recent exhibitions at Bellas Artes suggest a symbolic shift—less as isolated curatorial decisions than as symptomatic outcomes of a broader structural reconfiguration in which public institutions increasingly rely on external infrastructures. The question here is not whether museums or their curators encounter artists through galleries—a long-standing and largely uncontroversial practice—but the diminished independence of national museums’ research and collecting capacities. In the case of Bellas Artes, galleries provided not funding but information and access to artists whose legacies were historically sidelined. The problem emerges when such access is not complemented by an equally robust public research infrastructure, effectively positioning private actors as the primary arbiters of historical framing rather than as collaborators within a plural research ecology.
As is increasingly the case elsewhere in the global contemporary art system, public institutions in Mexico now often turn to private galleries for indirect or direct support. As researcher Victoria D. Alexander has argued, funding from private entities is a source of competing interests for museums, since the preferences and biases of corporate or private funders might collide with the values institutionalized within museums. What happens when what is granted is not funding but “access”—an unquantifiable asset? And when the research interests of curators overlap with the agendas of commercial entities, how do museums retain autonomy?
Mexico City’s Laboratorio de Arte Alameda recently staged an exhibition by Zapotec artist Ana Hernández shortly after her debut show at Campeche Galería. Although state-led cultural policy—particularly through the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature—has explicitly pushed for gender parity and supported the representation of Indigenous women across public institutions, Indigenous female artists remain chronically under-shown. Cases like Hernández’s could be misread as evidence of a broader shift. While private galleries have arguably increased their visibility, galleries’ engagement remains selective and, even where it converges with the redistributive efforts advanced (unevenly) by public institutions, still does not dictate the terms of that agenda.
If Bellas Artes exemplifies how public institutions increasingly rely on private intervention to sustain their programming, the Centro Cultural Los Pinos—the former presidential residence, which was rebranded as a cultural center in 2018 and run by the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature—offers a markedly different response to the state’s effort to reclaim authorship over the public sphere. Unlike Bellas Artes, whose authority rests on a long-established narrative of national culture, Los Pinos’ transformation from presidential palace to art center promised a redistribution of symbolic access: a gesture toward transparency and inclusion through open doors to previously restricted spaces and by making visible the objects of national patrimony that had long been treated as private. Yet the opacity of its artistic programming signals not renewal but a disquieting reiteration of the desire to repurpose art as a vehicle of historical storytelling and ideological projection—only now aligned with the narrative pursued by the Fourth Transformation.
“Painting and Sculpture in Mexico’s Cultural Heritage: An Overview for Our Right of Usufruct and Creative Affirmations” is the unwieldy title of a show curated by Guillermo Santamarina, a respected artist-curator with a long institutional background. The show, still on view, hinges on the discovery that, in the late 1980s, former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari commissioned works from thirty-three prominent artists to decorate his private—and obscenely opulent—residence. Together with those now infamous works, the exhibition gathered holdings from the collection of the National Center for the Conservation and Registration of Movable Artistic Heritage and from the Ministry of the Treasury’s collection, the latter partly formed through a scheme allowing artists to pay taxes in kind with artworks. Installed in the very space where many of these works once circulated as symbols of elite power, the exhibition casts the episode as evidence of the damage inflicted by previous “neoliberal administrations.” In doing so, it collapses critique into moral exposition, substituting historical analysis with denunciation, and accountability with spectacle. It begs the question: Is Los Pinos the testing ground for the current government’s idea of public culture?
For all its vitality, Mexico City’s art scene faces not only a crisis of funding and a realignment of institutional priorities, but a deeper uncertainty about who and which activities constitute the public’s shared horizon. When research, visibility, and historical narration are either outsourced to private galleries or symbolically instrumentalized by state politics, public institutions risk becoming conduits rather than authors of meaning—spaces where legitimacy is either borrowed or prescribed. The question, then, is no longer whether the market or the government exerts greater influence over cultural production, but whether an institutional form still exists that can provide sustained research, historical accountability, and critical autonomy without collapsing into spectacle or dependency. What is at stake is not the disappearance of the public, but its fragmentation: a public produced in pieces, provisionally, and often elsewhere—leaving museums to negotiate their relevance in a field where authority still circulates, but responsibility remains diffuse.