Oaxaca is alive with street art these days — even more than usual and that’s saying a lot! As part of their Hecho en Oaxaca (Made in Oaxaca) exhibition, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca) invited a dozen well-known and accomplished urban artists to transform the walls of the museum and the Historic District of the city.
A lifetime ago, prior to becoming a librarian, I was a registered nurse, first working in a hospital and then as a visiting nurse. The current MACO exhibit reminded me of one of the primary reasons why I much preferred the latter — it was the creativity needed in creating treatment plans to provide care in a patient’s often-times challenging home environment.
The imagination and inventiveness required to create art on crumbling walls with windows, doors, meters, and electrical boxes, never ceases to amaze me. As you can see below, even in MACO, that same vision is evident in the use of the museum’s many rooms and courtyards — including incorporating doorways, window sills, and colonial era frescos.
If you love Oaxaca’s street art, get yourself to MACO. The exhibition runs through the first week of October 2013.
Mexican Peso Converter
Thanks so much for this. All the new art around town is wonderful & it’s great to know the artists’ names & to hear about the MACO exhibition. Also, nice to know there are plenty of new pieces I haven’t discovered yet.
Wow! I’m bummed that I will miss this! Take lots more photos that you can show us on our return. Their imagination and artistic ability is astounding.
Two welcome additions to the usual suspects were Lulu, a new project space in the apartment of artist Martin Soto Climent and independent curator Chris Sharp, featuring Jochen Lempert’s poetic black-and-white photographs that delicately question the anthropocentric gaze. And “Raw Material / Materia Prima,” a new multi-gallery pop-up show featuring a young and well-assorted group: Yautepec (Mexico City), Proyectos Ultravioleta (Guatemala City), DiabloRosso (Panama City), Sultana (Paris), and La Central (Bogota)—which was also included in the Zona Maco Sur projects. Highlights at “Raw Material” were Olivier Millagou’s humorous masks (especially both of the Dr. Doom ones [1997]); Calixto Ramirez’s short sculptural video of a man blowing dust in the air called Nube (2009); Pia Camil’s hand-dyed canvas Espectacular Atardecer (2012); and Buró de intervenciones públicas’s very useful Hamacario (2013), which echoed a piece by Gabriel Orozco years ago in the MoMA sculpture garden for his first show there. Indeed, the epic night ended with Orozco’s much-awaited exhibition at kurimanzutto, which was his first one at the gallery—and in Mexico City—in four years. Orozco chose stones from the Río Papagallo and carved them with a diamond tip. Their circular motifs echoed some of his well-known paintings, but also Inuit stone carvings or Australian accretion stones. He then placed several of them throughout the gallery and on long wooden planks like benches so that we could sit in the spaces in between. It was a welcome meditative moment after so much action.
Thank you for the information. The arts scene here is so alive and often challenges!