Contemporary art gets new home south of the border

I have always loved contemporary homes. I always thought that they were so classy and sheek. Mexico City’s vast new contemporary art museum, Muac, opened to the public on 27 November with an inaugural installation that is as provocative as it is political. The Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, to give it its full title, is a significant addition to the Mexican art world, providing 3,300 sq. m of gallery space, which its chief curator, Guillermo Santamarina, plans to fill with large-scale international exhibitions, installations and Mexico’s largest public collection of contemporary art.


For its opening, the most cavernous of the museum’s nine galleries is filled by Miguel Ventura’s sprawling installation Cantos Civico, 2008, a labyrinth with walls carpeted in swastikas and dollar signs. Visitors encounter a maze of live rats amid a chaotic display of suffed animals and photographs of Nazi soldiers, pornography and overflowing toilets juxtaposed with pictures of art world luminaries, including Tate director Nicholas Serota, US artist Ellsworth Kelly, as well as members of Mexico’s social and artistic elite. Part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the 270m-peso ($20m) museum is on its campus in the southern suburbs of the Mexican capital. The university already boasts a cultural centre, several museums and the national library. The new contemporary art museum has been designed by leading Mexican architect Teodoro González de León, who 30 Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, also in Mexico City.

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