At the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, a New Vision of Mexico’s Contemporary Art Landscape Rises

In the center of Monterrey, near its historic quarter and across from its city hall and main cathedral, stands a brunt orange postmodern building by renowned Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta. Its sharp lines and stucco finish nod to traditional Mexican architecture, contrasting with the nearby rolling hills. Completed in 1991, it is home to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), which for the past three decades has brought international contemporary art to this northern Mexican city, the country’s industrial capital. Notable exhibitions traveling from other museums include solos for Annette Messager, Ernesto Neto, and Ron Mueck.

Since the arrival of its executive director Taiyana Pimentel in 2019, the museum has been undergoing a radical shift. Born in Havana, she first began visiting Monterrey in the mid-’90s, where she met the artist collective marcelaygina (active between 1997 and 2010), whose performances imagined alternative social structures. It was unlike anything Pimentel had seen in Mexico City, where she had recently moved.

“Here [in Monterrey], there were strong political positions linked to issues of class, race, and wages, which made me question whether the ‘North’ could be a significant departure from the art scene in the country’s center,” she recently told ARTnews. 

This perspective, she believes, forms the foundation of her curatorial program at MARCO, which centers on showcasing the artistic production of northern Mexico, like a recent exhibition focused on photography from Nuevo León, alongside the work of artists with international renown who had not had significant museum exhibitions in Mexico, like Mario García Torres, Miguel Calderón, Pedro Reyes, and Damián Ortega, who have all had solo shows at MARCO since she took over.

“Pimentel shattered the administrative barriers that had long hindered the presentation of many artists who have been … exhibiting primarily outside of Mexico,” said Ortega, whose mid-career survey at the museum opened in 2023. “I myself had not exhibited my work in my own country—it’s akin to a writer never publishing in their native language.”

Pimentel’s vision for a new MARCO also includes an emphasis on showing the work of women artists, with exhibitions for marcelaygina, Melanie Smith, Sofía Taboas, and Helen Escobedo, as well as its current solo for Teresa Serrano and an upcoming retrospective on Teresa Margolles. Renovated exhibitions spaces have been made into project spaces for mid-career and emerging artists, like Aurora Pellizzi and Adeline de Monseignat. And in keeping with MARCO’s roots, Pimentel has also focused on strengthening the museum’s international connections, whether via partnerships with museums in Texan cities like Dallas, Houston, and El Paso, on the other side of the border from Nuevo León, or with an institution like the Dia Art Foundation in New York. The latter collaboration brought a major show by Dan Flavin to Monterrey, which brought more than 119,000 visitors to the museum, by far the most visited during her tenure.

“Showing artists that for some reason had not been analyzed served as one of the cracks in the construction of exhibition histories in Mexico, which allowed me to quickly enter and position myself in the great discourse of museums in Mexico,” Pimentel told ARTnews.

The museum’s recent thought-provoking exhibition, “Nuevo León: El futuro no está escrito” (Nuevo León: The Future is Not Written), is the latest example of Pimentel’s revitalization of MARCO. Curated by Mauricio Maillé and Ariadna Ramonetti Liceaga, this exhibition presented a diverse array of photographic perspectives from 10 artists and one collective with ties to Nuevo León. Instead of a monolithic presentation, the exhibition unfolded as a series of intimate solo shows, offering a more nuanced examination of this dynamic region through each artist’s unique vision of it. Legendary Monterrey-based photographer Aristeo Jiménez severed as a starting point.

In “El futuro no está escrito,” which closed on February 23, the contrasting realities that coexist within Nuevo León, from the urban sprawl of Monterrey to the rugged beauty of the Sierra Madre, were on full display. The exhibition opened, for example, with the work of Jiménez, who documented the nightlife and social realities of the city’s neighborhoods, including La Coyotera and the historic Tierra y Libertad, founded by landowners who had migrated from San Luis Potosi and later the site of one of the most important popular leftist movements in Latin America. Imbued with a strong sense of social justice, Jiménez’s images offer a critical perspective on the challenges faced by marginalized communities, such as undergound subculture, LGBTQ+ people, sex workers, and those struggling with addiction.

Further along were Yvonne Venegas’s images of the opulent world of San Pedro Garza García, a suburb of Monterrey that is among the wealthiest municipalities in Latin America. The pairing of these two photographers revealed the stark social and economic disparities that exist within the region.

“[The exhibition] is not about the city we want, but about the city we have, with all its problems and particular situations,” cocurator Ramonetti Liceaga told ARTnews. “It asks us to think about the future and how we can improve our current reality. Of course, it is an exhibition that tries to confront uncomfortable truths.”

One of those uncomfortable truths is the grueling labor practices of globalization. The collective Estética Unisex offers a poignant critique of these conditions via their portraits of employees at large convenience store chains, like OXXO and 7-Eleven. Their lens focuses on the young people navigating the precariousness of the gig economy. In one set of images, workers nap while still wearing their uniforms, while another shows the workers, still in their uniforms, in dancerly poses out on the streets. Similarly, Oswaldo Ruiz, who was born and raised in Monterrey, meticulously documents the impact of cement production on the city’s surrounding landscape in his series “Todo lo sólido” (2018–24). For six years, he chronicled the numerous quarries in the region—many of which have already been abandoned—and their subsequent environmental degradation. The pursuit of producing what is considered the best cement in the world often overshadows the ecological cost. The wealth generated in Monterrey is not without its consequences, these artists say.

“El futuro no está escrito” served not only as a reflection on Nuevo León’s present but, as with MARCO’s new direction as a whole, a powerful reminder that narratives emerging from the periphery are essential to understanding the broader cultural landscape and shaping its future.

Pimentel questioned whether the North’s distance created a blind spot for the country’s center, resulting in the unrecognized and misunderstood nature of its unique practices. She added, “The northern perspective has been the most compelling curatorial argument, enabling me to develop a program rooted in the region and reflective of its unique identity.”