What should surely go down as one of literature’s great descriptions of a major urban area is unexpectedly tucked away in a recent My Art Guide booklet. Brett W. Schultz, cofounder and director of one of Mexico City’s prime art fairs, Feria Material, writes of the beloved metropolis, “It’s thirsty, it’s shaking, it’s honking, it’s dusty, it’s calling your mother terrible things, it’s bursting at the seams, and it’s one of the most vibrant, thriving, and life-affirming cities I’ve ever known.”
Also known as CDMX (an abbreviation of its official name, Ciudad de México), the city has a metro area population of an awesome 23 million, placing it among the world’s largest urban areas, and it boasts a rich and growing cultural scene. I dropped in recently during the city’s art week, featuring the Zona Maco fair (really a few fairs in one, with contemporary art, Modern art, photography, and design), founded by Zélika García in 2003, along with Feria Material and Salón ACME, both focused on contemporary art, and, for the design-minded, Unique Design X, which takes place right upstairs from Material, in the Juárez neighborhood.
At time of writing, the world is experiencing whiplash as U.S. president Donald Trump changes his mind repeatedly on whether to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico. He threatened 25 percent tariffs on goods crossing the border, then, on February 3, just as Mexico City’s art week was launching and the tariffs were to be imposed, he and Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum announced that they had struck a deal to avoid tariffs, and Mexico had won a 30-day reprieve.
Then, on March 4, Trump imposed the tariffs, seemingly arbitrarily since Sheinbaum and her government “made major concessions—and delivered results” in negotiations with the U.S., as reported in the New York Times.
On Thursday morning, March 6, I talked to José Kuri, who, with his wife Mónica Manzutto, heads the hugely influential CDMX gallery Kurimanzutto, which celebrated 25 years in 2024 and shows major artists like Gabriel Orozco. Trump had imposed the tariffs, which fortunately don’t apply to art, but it’s widely feared that the tariffs could drive Mexico into a recession. “It creates a very uncertain atmosphere for doing business,” said Kuri. “People are hesitant. In every economic model, if the rules are clear, it creates certainty. The worst thing is when it’s uncertain.
“We’re opening a Julio Galán show today. We have been planning it for years and many people from Mexico have been waiting for it. But there’s not the same traction we felt two weeks ago. It’s depressing.”
Moments after we got off the phone, though, Kuri texted me a screenshot of a post saying that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had told CNBC that Trump was likely to decide that day to exempt all trade from the tariffs for a month.
It all had Kuri shaking his head. “Crazy,” he wrote. “An unreliable kid playing with the world.”
At Art Fairs, Galleries Racked Up Sales Large and Small
Back in February, observers could be forgiven for feeling cautiously optimistic. On February 3, just as art week was launching, Sheinbaum announced that 30-day reprieve. Mexico City would go into art week recharged.
“Mexico is a cultural power,” Pamela Echevarría, who founded the city’s Labor Gallery in 2009, said in a video chat at the time. “We have the best food—it’s insanely great—as well as artists, filmmakers and photographers… the city is extremely exciting.” It doesn’t hurt, she pointed out, that CDMX offers mild weather in February, enticing for those coming from art market centers to the north. Born in Chile in 1973, Echevarría came to Mexico with her family three years later, owing to the Pinochet dictatorship. Her gallery showed a mix of its artists at the Zona Maco art fair; pieces by Étienne Chambaud caught the eye of advisor Ana Sokoloff when I walked the fair with her.
Kuri, looking back on Thursday, said that the gallery had probably its best art week since Zona Maco started in 2003, with Mexican collectors stepping up, which he considers most important, and fantastic museum groups coming through the gallery’s booth, where works by Orozco, Leonor Antunes, Julian Schnabel, and Danh Vo were on offer, with prices ranging from $3,000 to $550,000 for a piece by Oscar Murillo. In fact, he felt that the reprieve from tariffs, combined with the threat in the future, may have driven people to do business, and fast.
The fairs provided an opportunity for dealers visiting from the world over to get their wares in front of major Mexican collectors, such as Jumex juice heir and museum founder Eugenio López Alonso, billionaire venture capitalist María Asunción Aramburuzabala, and media magnate Bernardo Gómez Martínez. They were also vying for the attention of those coming from points abroad, such as Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum; Jorge Pérez, founder of the Pérez Art Museum Miami; and groups of trustees from institutions such as London’s Tate and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who were all in attendance at Zona Maco.
Among the area collectors who have made a splash recently are Guillermo Gonzalez Guajardo and Jana Sanchez Osorio, who opened the Olivia Foundation, named after one of their dogs, in the Roma neighborhood during the 2024 art week, as reported by ARTnews. The pair collects abstract art by women artists from Cecily Brown to Joan Mitchell, as well as sculpture by Carol Bove and Louise Bourgeois; they’ve recently branched out to artists like Willem de Kooning and Jack Whitten.
Some galleries were definitely playing to those big spenders. Global superpower Pace brought an Agnes Martin painting, Untitled #5 (2002), priced at an impressive $5.5 million, and two Julian Schnabel plate-painting portraits of Frida Kahlo for $550,000 each. ARTnews named the Martin as the priciest work on offer at the fair. The gallery confirmed that the Martin did indeed sell.
But Zona Maco had more modest offerings as well, pointed out New York dealer Cristin Tierney in a phone conversation before art week. Unlike other art fairs, which she finds overstocked with figurative painting (and a sprinkling of abstraction for variety), Tierney approvingly said that at Zona Maco, you’ll find plenty of “weird conceptual shit that you have to stand there and be with for a while.” The lower price point for dealers than at major fairs like Frieze or Art Basel allows her to bring works priced in the low four digits.
“People in Mexico City still want to get together and talk about art, not just respond to a PDF,” she added.
The looming prospect of tariffs had her worried in the run-up to the fair, because of lack of clarity on how they would work, she pointed out dryly, saying (Department of Government Efficiency aside), “It’s not like I can just go online and find out, because our government is not working very efficiently right now.”
Feria Material, meanwhile, offered even more affordable price points for both collectors and dealers than Zona Maco.
Feria Material hosted 72 exhibitors, over half from Latin America. Booth prices are low, Schultz pointed out: $375 per square meter for booths that are small, ranging from 7.5 to 26 square meters (80 to about 275 square feet). “That would be the smallest stand at another fair,” said Schultz. At Zona Maco, in the main section, a 40-square meter booth, or 430 square feet, costs $555 per square meter, while one twice that large costs $580 per square meter.
Schultz, who has lived in Mexico City since 2007, said the city saw a massive influx of digital nomads during the Covid-19 pandemic due to fewer restrictions on incoming travelers. The influx never really stopped, he said. “If you go to the Condesa and Roma neighborhoods now, you’ll hear more English than Spanish. It’s a pretty remarkable transformation.”
“One of the interesting things about art week here is that it really attracts a large collecting public, especially from the States but also from Europe and Asia and Latin America,” he said. “There’s a growing number of serious collectors in Mexico City especially, but also nascent collectors from our generation. I think Material has served as a good gateway for that collector.”
The city’s scene is still relatively small, he said, with perhaps two dozen galleries operating at an international level. My Art Guide lists some 45 galleries, but the list is growing. Off the top of his head, Schultz named five galleries founded since 2018: Campeche, General Expenses, JO-HS, Salón Silicón, and N.A.S.A.L. Some already rank among the city’s best, in his view.
The city is also inviting to artists. Austrian-American artist Alois Kronschlaeger and his designer wife Florencia have had a studio in the city since 2019 (provided by real estate developer Enrique Téllez Kuenzler), and largely split their time between Mexico and New York. “It’s an exciting situation for an artist here,” he said in a phone interview in the run-up to art fair week. “Before coming to Mexico my work was very monochromatic, but now I’ve fallen in love with color.” His solo show at Galería Le Laboratoire, in the posh San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood, includes a number of sculptures made by painting on a volcanic rock, recinto, that is widely identified, he said, with Mexican art and design.
Institutions Old and New
The city offers an array of museums, foundations, and cultural centers—My Art Guide lists 25—and they also put their best foot forward for art week. Notable shows include Julieta Aranda’s “Clear Coordinates for Our Confusion” at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC); “David Medalla: In Conversation With the Cosmos” at Museo Tamayo; and Alva Noto’s “HYbr:ID,” a sound project, also at MUAC.
Museo Jumex Arte Contemporáneo is staging a Gabriel Orozco retrospective, “Politécnico Nacional,” which Artnet News’s Annikka Olsen praised, saying it is “approached less as a case study of an artist and more as an open field of exploration, one where time, context, and medium are not presented hierarchically, but as entry points to the core tenets and recurring lines of inquiry of the artist’s practice.”
For a mind-blowing institutional experience, any visitor should be sure to make their way to Chapultepec Park and budget some time to visit the National Museum of Anthropology, opened in 1964 and sprawling over some 850,000 square feet, with some 600,000 objects that, arguably, set the stage for Mexican contemporary art. It really pinned me to the wall.
The Fundación Fernando Romero, founded by the eponymous architect and design curator, chose art week as the moment to announce that La Cuadra San Cristóbal, a 6.7-acre, walled compound designed by renowned architect Luis Barragán in the northwestern part of the city in the 1960s, would be turned into a public venue starting in October. The occasion was marked with an invite-only performance by Marina Abramović; La Cuadra will host an artist performance during Zona Maco each year. The facility will host a permanent exhibition on Barragán, galleries, an artist residency program, a library, a podcast production studio, and more.
Influxes of Foreigners Cause Tension, and a Trade War Looms
Tensions between Mexico and its neighbor to the north do play out on a smaller scale in the city. While the city’s residents welcome tourist income, Echevarría said, there is a certain amount of resentment; some “gringo go home” posters do pop up on the city’s walls.
Trump’s pledges to deport Mexican migrants, she said, are answered with memes saying that Mexico should in turn deport gringos from trendy neighborhoods like Condesa and Roma, where Instagram influencers drive traffic to trendy restaurants. Material’s Schultz does admit a certain amount of grumbling from locals who have been priced out of those establishments. The arts community, though, report interlopers like Kronschlaeger and Tierney, is nothing but welcoming.
Echevarría is more sanguine than Kuri about the economy based on the looming trade war. “The Mexican economy is not as weak as it used to be,” she said via text on Thursday from Madrid, where the ARCO fair was underway. “Nothing happened to the peso in the past week.”
But the conflict does have people thinking in broader terms than the art market. After watching the disastrous February 28 Oval Office brawl between Trump, vice president J.D. Vance, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Kuri said, “I was asking, why am I doing what I’m doing? Should I drop art and go to the streets and protest?
“It makes you ask so many questions,” he said. “Will my kids be proud of me?”
