As you likely know, if you’ve been here for a little while, I love an art fair. I find they provide a great avenue to see a lot of art in a small amount of time, which lends well to discovering new artists you’d like to revisit. Fairs also provide a platform to discover new galleries from around the globe, while meeting incredibly interesting people along the way.
As you also likely know, I am obsessed with Mexico City, so I was thrilled to be able to finally make it to their fair week this February to visit ZONAMACO, Material, and Salon Acme. While I loved the fairs for many reasons — it was the community surrounding the fairs that made the week stand out.
🌊 Deep Dive: Mexico City’s Community-Driven Art Scene
Mexico City has an incredibly interesting and dynamic art scene, that is more and more vibrant every time I visit (even more so since my last write-up about it).
The local galleries do a lot for the city’s cultural presence on the whole — a highlight being OMR’s revamp of LAGO/ALGO, a historic and important architectural gem that has recently been revamped as a cultural exhibition space and restaurant. When visiting LAGO/ALGO I was surprised but simultaneously thrilled to see that the queue for tickets was over 100+ long — many of those potential visitors, were also extremely young, which was refreshing.
The Mexico City-based fairs in February had many characteristics of a typical fair week — a large fair with blue-chip art (ZONAMACO) and some fun events with younger discoveries (Material and Salon Acme).
One of the most notable trends from the week was the engagement level of the local art scene. In Mexico City, young galleries are interspersed with blue-chip mainstays, and during the fair week, there was a ton of collaboration among them all to bring excitement. Every gallery in the city seemed to be highly-visible and vibrant — occupying booths at the fairs themselves, collaborating on openings, book signings, and, of course, parties. At dinners around the city in popular neighborhoods, every table seemed to be discussing art.
Another notable observation was the age demographic of viewers. The younger crowd seemed much more apparent and engaged than I’ve found in other cities — typically, fair weeks skew a bit older, but not in Mexico. Art parties, openings, and cultural institutions were filled with young people and friends.
I loved seeing both the local gallery rallying around the fair, as well as the younger viewer involvement. Typically, art fair weeks are seen as an industry-specific, commercial trade endeavor — which they are (there is a stat out there that says galleries often make 80% of their year-round sales at fairs), however, it would be silly to overlook the power and tools a fair has to engage the art-curious in a meaningful way, to build the next generations of collectors.
One does not simply wake up one day and become a collector. The advice I often give to someone who is just beginning to be curious about art is to look, often and at everything. What better place to do just that than a fair? And the younger one starts looking the more impactful and long-lasting a relationship with art and culture can be.
I am excited to continue to visit Mexico City and participate in its vibrant art scene. The youthful-skewing demographic of art and culture-curious individuals, I predict will have a meaningful impact on supporting the next generation of artists and culture as well as, frankly, keeping the city more dynamic and relevant as a result.
Feel free to check out some highlights from the fair on Peggy (peggy.com/app, use BRONWYN for access) here and for more on art fairs and Mexico City feel free to check out my previous write-ups on the subjects:
🔥 Trending
Florida — a Florida school principal is forced to resign after complaints about the appearance of Michelangelo's David sculpture in the Renaissance art syllabus (can you even discuss the Renaissance without it?) Ironically — a 1991 Simpsons episode parodied a similar scene, how far we’ve come? (Twitter thread here.)
Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum. The largest exhibition of Vermeer works ever staged has been met with insatiable demand — so much so that the museum’s ticketing functionality crashed the site.
Forgery! A group of eight Norval Morrisseau forgers have been caught. The group has likely forged thousands of works attributed to the Indigenous artist, and can likely be considered the largest art fraud in world history.
💸 Advisory Picks
Women gallerists — I am loving tchotchke gallery’s vibrant exhibitions and I am super excited about Lio Project’s Toronto pop-up for the month of April.
Every month I create a round-up of my favorite artwork available on Peggy, check out this month’s picks here.
👋 Parting Words…
Curious about visiting an art fair week in your city? Questions about my love for Mexico? Don’t hesitate to reach out, my inbox is always open!
Until next year…
XX, B
🇲🇽 🌮 🎨 🖼️