MEXICO CITY'S ART WORLD COMES OF AGE

Museo Rufino Tamayo "It's important for us to continue experimenting," Brett Schultz and Daniela Elbahara tell me. We are in the midst of a fevered, packed party for the opening of their gallery's new exhibit of gun-adorned prints by Artemio, a Mexican artist.

Yautepec Gallery is a contemporary art space in Mexico City. It opened last year in a converted colonial mansion that used to prepare food for taco restaurants. Schultz and Elbahara, a bi-national couple (he is American, she is Mexican), say they are trying to bridge the gap between international and Mexican art and to cultivate a young, local audience for emerging artists. They have granted solo shows to a number of bright, edgy talents, including Ruben Gutierrez and Ichiro Irie.

Mexico City's contemporary art scene has blossomed: grand private collections are proliferating alongside many new galleries featuring work by both established and rising artists. There are even spaces devoted to street art and graffiti. And finally the stars of the capital's art world are Mexican artists.

Eugenio López's airy La Colección Jumex, situated in a juice factory complex just outside of the city, is one of the the largest private contemporary art collections in Latin America. It holds over 1,800 works from artists as diverse as Damián Ortega, Jeff Koons, Minerva Cuevas and Andy Warhol, and has succeeded in putting Mexican talent on the map in the United States. A new affiliated gallery in the city's posh Polanco neighbourhood will house works from this expanding collection from next year. López raves about Museo Rufino Tamayo (pictured above), another impressive contemporary art gallery, hidden in leafy Chapultepec Park.

Down in the Centro Histórico, Casa Vecina specialises in "creative experimentation". This gallery has been helped by the city's recent efforts to revitalise the historic downtown centre, a clean-up spearheaded by Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire. Slim has also opened his own space, Museo Soumaya, where the collection ranges from pre-Hispanic to modern Mexican and foreign art.

Perhaps most the buzzed about art spaces are the funky, DIY-style Kurimanzutto Gallery--home to such Mexican-art giants as Miguel Calderón and Gabriel Orozco--and the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC), both of which celebrated inaugurations in the past year that drew art world glitterati from Los Angeles and New York. Also there is Border, a unique space devoted to street art and graffiti in the equally graffiti-covered neighbourhood of La Roma.

~ ALEXIS OKEOWO

Picture Credit: JoePhoto (via Flickr)