Whenever I’m rattling through the many museums of Chapultepec Park, or jogging past the modernist towers along the boulevards of Reforma, I’m struck again by how many different eras Mexico City allows you to visit in one day.
The city is the largest metropolis in North America, and has been stratified with seven centuries of cultural history: Indigenous sculpture, colonial monuments, modernist marvels and, most recently, some of the world’s best contemporary art and architecture. The art and architecture of Mexico City can take your breath away, and not only because you are 7,350 feet above sea level; let me point you to five sites, some landmark-famous and some fairly obscure, that begin to map this city’s inexhaustible cultural prosperity.
Find these five and discover more art on our Google map of Mexico City.
1. The Museo Anahuacalli’s sublime new expansion
Most of the city’s major museums are in the historic downtown core or the huge Chapultepec Park, but Mexico City’s artists and intellectuals of the 20th century gravitated to the southern extremes of the capital. Down here in Coyoacán, in the years after World War II, the muralist Diego Rivera devoted himself to the construction of a pseudo-Indigenous fortress: an “odd sort of ranch,” as he called it, that would house his large collection of Olmec, Nahua and Toltec masks and effigies.
The Museo Anahaucalli, a concrete bunker covered in volcanic stone, rises like a black tomb from a bare central plaza. Inside, the labels are minimal, the shadows theatrical. Mosaics by the great Juan O’Gorman intermingle Mesoamerican and Communist motifs.
Other museums here, above all the large Museum of Anthropology, can give you a proper grounding in pre-Hispanic cultural history. Anahuacalli … is not that. Demented excess, modern reverie: Anahuacalli is an imaginary Aztec Renaissance pastiche, all light and shadow, sublime and ridiculous in equal measure.
My own passion for Anahuacalli developed on a visit after the opening in 2021 of an extension by Mauricio Rocha — one of the greatest architects working in Mexico or indeed anywhere in the Americas. Rocha’s additions take the form of three low-slung pavilions of local basalt, nestled into the volcanic landscape: horizontal and harmonious where Rivera’s original gives vertical dread. Rocha’s warehouse, where more than 60,000 objects from the collection are now on view in visible storage, is the city’s most beautiful museum space.
Museo Anahaucalli, Museo 150, Col. San Pablo Tepetlapa, Coyoacán.
2. A white (and black) whale in a stupefying library
With its roughly 600,000 books defying gravity on staggered and suspended shelves of steel, the Biblioteca Vasconcelos is one of the most dumbfounding, even intimidating buildings in town. The city’s 21st-century library, by the architect Alberto Kalach, is a building where writing turns into infrastructure. In Mexico City they sometimes call it the “Megabiblioteca,” and, looking up, you can feel like you’ve entered an Enlightenment vision of an infinite hall of knowledge.
But I don’t come here to read. Hanging in the center of this giant hall of books is one of my favorite works of public art: “Mátrix Móvil” (2006), a sculpture by Gabriel Orozco, Mexico’s most important living artist. It takes the form of a whale skeleton — not a cast of a skeleton, but the bones themselves, excavated from sand dunes in Baja California — which the artist overlaid with concentric arcs of finely drawn pencil.
Remembrance rites in southern Mexico have long included the bleaching and displaying of the bones of the dead, and in earlier works Orozco had used skulls as unusual grounds for three-dimensional black-and-white abstract drawings.
With the whale he took that project to an entirely new scale: a megastructure inside an architectural megastructure, given its own act of memorial display. The whale swims through the air, through history, through literature; it marries zoology to topology; it is a reconciliation of dreaming with life.
Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Eje 1 Nte. S/N, Buenavista, Cuauhtémoc.
3. Isamu Noguchi’s youthful antifascist frieze
An art for the people! From the early 1920s, the government in post-revolutionary Mexico gave the country’s painters a paramount task: inspire the nation with grand visions of historical achievement and nationalist pride. Embody, for what was then still a majority illiterate population, the nationalist dream of cultural hybridity known as “mestizaje.” Paint over the colonial walls with the colors of a modern Mexico.
Mexican Muralism has been drawing Americans since its first years — Jackson Pollock channeled the murals’ churning forms into his allover drips — and crowds of foreigners still assemble in front of the frescoes of Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros (my favorite muralist). But away from the tourist track, in a blue-collar market selling fresh fruit, condensed milk and Dora the Explorer backpacks, you can still encounter the optimism of a young American artist who found his voice on the walls.
Isamu Noguchi was in his 20s when he went to Mexico (he had an affair with Frida Kahlo while he was there, if you’re into art gossip), and for the walls of the Mercado Presidente Abelardo L. Rodriguez he conceived a deep sculptural relief that interweaves Wall Street skyscrapers, test tubes and beakers, and faceless workers charging to victory over a looming swastika.
Spanning three walls and 72 feet, built up out of cement and brick, Noguchi’s “History Mexico” is his first public artwork, completed in 1936. What I appreciate most here is the civic confidence he expressed through the collisions of bayonets and skyscrapers, rising cranes and workers’ fists — the certainty of a young artist that painting and sculpture were not personal utterances but public works. “Here I suddenly no longer felt estranged as an artist,” Noguchi remembered later. In Mexico City, “artists were useful people.”
República de Venezuela 72, Centro Histórico.
4. The extravagant beauty of Sebastián López de Arteaga
Mexico City, in constant reconstruction, may not be as rich in monuments of colonial Baroque architecture as Lima or Santo Domingo. But what the historical core does have is a great museum, an underrated one, whose collection of Spanish viceregal art lures me back every time I’m in town. At the Museo Nacional de Arte, better known as MUNAL, you can watch the flourishing of a passionate, hybridized style of painting in New Spain, where artists redeployed European techniques in another hemisphere.
In the 17th century, Spain, Flanders and what’s now Mexico were all part of a single empire in constant motion, and their painters were linked up too. Artists from the continent set up shop in Mexico City. Local practitioners discovered innovations from the continent through a robust trans-Atlantic print culture.
The gallery that always stops me in my tracks is a little room, a cabinet really, that lies about halfway through the viceregal wing. In Sebastián López de Arteaga’s “Betrothal of the Virgin and St. Joseph” (circa 1640), in the MUNAL collection, the dramatic shadows of Caravaggio collide with joyful dispersions of flowers. Heavily and even garishly ornamental, so delirious and death haunted, this is the headspring of a national imagery that endures today.
Museo Nacional de Arte, Tacuba 8, Centro Histórico.
5. A monolithic riddle of land art, right on campus
The campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Latin America’s largest university, is something of an outdoor museum. Its dense collection of Bauhaus-influenced buildings, above all its mosaic-clad central library by Juan O’Gorman, reconciled Aztec design and planning with modern steel and concrete.
More discreetly and excitingly, UNAM is also a significant venue for land art, and there’s an ecological preserve to the south of the campus that offers a very different conception of Mexican monumentality.
The Espacio Escultórico, inaugurated in 1979 by Federico Silva and a collective of artists, comprises 64 large triangular stone prisms, forming a ring around a lake of hardened lava 400 feet in diameter. Where the Muralists painted for society, here was an art for the earth: hard and ceremonial, grand and indifferent, as conversant with pre-Hispanic cosmology as with the geometric abstraction that was in vogue here through the 1960s and 1970s.
The university liked it so much that it invited the artists individually to make other large-scale sculptures, but their collective wheel of stone is by far the most unusual and compelling. Of course the concrete and the lava make for prime selfie backdrops, but the real reason to trek to this strange ring is to rediscover an era of experimentation between the Muralists’ era and ours. These artists knew that Mexican art had more than one way to be monumental, and were ready to forge it.
National Autonomous University of Mexico, Calle Mario de La Cueva, Ciudad Universitaria.
More Art to Discover
Find all of these on our Google map of Mexico City.
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Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Historical Center: a former Jesuit college whose central courtyard is ringed by a three-story arcade festooned with murals by the masters Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros.
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San Bernardo Church, Historical Center: a rare 17th-century survivor in the center of town, with none of the crowds of the main cathedral. Less lavish than some, but marvel at the herringbone brickwork on the facade.
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Capuchin Convent Chapel, Tlalpan: one of the least appreciated but most moving works by the modernist Luis Barragán. Leave his residence to the selfie-stick crowd and ponder the mysteries of light through stone lattice.
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Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán: an imposing collection of painting, ceramics and textiles from New Spain. The former church on the complex is a lavish masterpiece of the Mexican Baroque. It’s about 45 minutes out of town.
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National Museum of Anthropology, Chapultepec: the country’s richest collection of Mexican art before European contact. Seek out the astonishing Zapotec bas-reliefs.
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Casa del Lago, Chapultepec: some of the city’s most ambitious cultural programming takes place in this university-run museum, perched on a little lake.
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Kurimanzutto, San Miguel Chapultepec: the country’s most important contemporary art gallery, housed in a sublime courtyard designed by Alberto Kalach.
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Casa Bosques, Roma: the city’s coolest art bookstore, with a bilingual selection, and also a prime site for literary readings and debates. I rent one of the rooms upstairs when I’m in town.
Jason Farago, a critic at large for The Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad.
The post My Five Favorite Works of Art in Mexico City appeared first on New York Times.
