Today "Art Gangs" is honored to have a text from the architecture critic and author Stephen Zacks. Stephen reports from Mexico City, where the renowned Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) has opened a remarkable and historically important show of Mexican artists' collectives in the snazzy new MUAC building designed by Teodoro González de León (2008).
The massive exhibition entitled "Groups and Other Artistic Uprisings: Networks and Collectivities in Mexico, 1976-1985" occupies 5 galleries in the museum, and runs through the end of August, 2026.
These collectives are the groups of creative people who refused to stay silent after the government crackdown on student dissent in 1968. They organized, propagandized on behalf of their murdered, tortured and disappeared colleagues, and resisted their brutal lying government in every way and with a panoply of inventive tactics.
It took a while to recover from the trauma of the 1968 massacre of peaceful demonstrators in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City. (I recall talking about this with Willoughby Sharp, a curator of the U.S. art exhibition for the Olympics at the time. All the USA artists were shocked by the killings, and immediately withdrew their art from that show.) But by the 1970s Mexican artists had got it together. This exhibition tells their story. Stephen Zacks interviews Julio Garcia Murillo, a curator of the show.
Museum publicity is at:
https://muac.unam.mx/exposicion/los-grupos-y-otras-revueltas-artisticas?lang=en
A PDF of the bilingual catalogue is available online at:
https://muac.unam.mx/assets/docs/115-folio-muac-los-grupos-digital.pdf
-- Editor
First meeting of the groups at the Centro Proceso Pentagono, 1978
During the opening of “Groups and Other Uprisings” in early February at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), generations of Mexico City artists and curators converged to celebrate the reappraisal of a critical, lost period in the development of Mexican contemporary art. The political art groups of the 1970s form a crucial missing link to much of what emerged thereafter, although they have been overshadowed by the subsequent generation of famous international figures like Gabriel Orozco and Damián Ortega. The groups in this show were committed activists against political repression and suppression of speech by the government using visual art, graphics, environments, street art, and performance as media to expose information that wasn’t being represented in the news media and civil society, and to organize collectively.
Founded in 2008, MUAC is Mexico’s preeminent contemporary art museum and the first museum dedicated to collecting Mexican art since 1952. With special collections rooted in donations and relationships with the artists of the period, and access to university researchers dedicated to the assembly and study of the collections, it is the only institution that could have mounted such an extensive show and devoted years to situating it in an adequate historical perspective.
The exhibition opened during the 2026 Zona Maco art fair—which since launching in 2002 has stimulated an immense convergence of openings, fairs, talks, and performances in galleries, museums, and alternative spaces throughout the city. This event placed the MUAC at the center of the vibrant Mexican art scene.
I interviewed Julio García Murillo, co-curator and deputy director of public programs at MUAC. He was accompanied by Milene Zozaya, a Mexico City-based artist and educator.
Stephen Zacks: The history of Mexico, Mexican politics, and the artist groups of the 1970s are virtually unknown outside of Mexico, so it would be helpful to have a guide to the history of the exhibition. I understand from the catalog that there are some archives behind the exhibition. It must have been a huge task to bring all of that together and also recreate some of the works.
Julio García Murillo: I'll talk about the context of the exhibition’s production and some keys to articulating the affinities of that historical moment with other spaces and other places. A previous exhibition, “Defying Stability” [“Desafîo a la Estabilidad: Procesos artísticos en México 1952-1967”, at MUAC-UNAM in 2014] recounts the period when the Mexican neo-avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s experiences a moment of developmentalist joy. A lot of money was coming in, especially from the United States, to fund production. And then came a break in 1968. Mexico was generating protests similar to those occurring in Paris, San Francisco, Berlin, and Eastern Europe. But in Mexico, although the government claimed it was a democratic state, repressive policies were quite evident. The main demands of 1968 were the release of political prisoners, changes in the curriculum, and also a protest against the university’s move from the Centro Histórico [historic city center] to a campus outside the city at that time.
Many of the artists who were in the university in 1968 would become part of this generation of artistic groups. These are artists who were mostly trained at the two public art universities. One was the UNAM, the Academy of San Carlos, which was in the Centro Histórico, and the other was La Esmeralda, which was also in the Centro Histórico and is now in Churubusco. They experienced a moment of change in their academic programs, with the advent of topics such as advertising and poststructuralism. News about artistic and political processes, especially from Argentina and Chile were also arriving.
Happy Happy 1960s
On the other hand, the 1960s were as effervescent in Mexico City as in many other cities around the world. What mainly emerged was a critique of Mexican muralism and of realism in art, and a type of politicization linked to the Cold War and the post-revolutionary processes in Mexico. There was also a strong influence from Europe and the United States, the Organization of American States, and the oil industry. They pay for competitions where abstract art will be promoted above all else.
Alejandro Jodorowsky was living in Mexico during this period. He was close to many circles of both writers and artists from the 1960s. Many of the artists in this exhibition also got to see Jodorowsky’s work, and there was the emergence of the Happening. Those were more or less the happy 1960s. At the same time, global protests against Vietnam and other things were happening. This moment of cultural effervescence was broken in 1968. They are criticizing the artistic structure of Mexico, and the artistic object as an auratic object. Then the expansion of painting to other media is interrupted by political massacre and violence. [Hundreds of student protesters were killed by the police and 1,345 arrested on October 2, 1968 at Tlatelolco, Mexico City.]
Maris Bustamonte for No Grupo, El día que desapericieron los pintores, los escultores y los grabadores [The Day They Abducted the Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers], 1980
The Political Aftemath of Bloody Shocks
Then there is a moment, after 1968, when these artists graduate from university and spend a few years in silence. After 1968, Mexico City was a city heavily monitored by the police. There was a great deal of persecution of intellectuals who were going underground and joining guerrilla groups. And we can think of the period from 1973 to 1976 as a time when this process of going underground intensified. These artists were also part of generations that were very close to the Communist Party and also strongly criticized the dogmatism of the Communist Party. They traveled extensively, especially to Central America. The Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, the emergence of Colombian guerrilla groups, and two or three Mexican guerrilla groups mainly in Guerrero and Michoacán became part of their imaginaries in the 1970s.
At the same time, in Mexico, there were many discussions emerging about conceptualism, the political function of muralism, and about the institutional spaces in Mexico City. There was a political change brought about by one of the most terrible presidents, Luis Echeverría [Secretary of the Interior, 1963–69, president, 1970–76], who was probably the one who gave the order in 1968. He proposes a democratic opening to calm things down, at the same time that students and political dissidents continued to disappear, and then, at the end of his term in 1977, he was forced to carry out political reform. The Communist Party and left-wing parties are accepted as official parties and gain proportional representation in Congress.
So there was a kind of democratic shift in the country. And on the other hand, there was also a political amnesty for all exiles after 1968. Sixty-eight is the most important year because of what happened in Tlatelolco. But on June 10, 1971, there was another massacre of students, and those events also shaped the visual imagery of these artists. That’s a little bit of context for what we’re working on in the exhibition.
How to Show Collectives
As a curatorial program, we work on a historical exhibition of this type almost every five years with production, grants, etc. Three years ago we realized that we already had enough documentary material [to do an exhibition on artistic groups of the ’70s]. To date, we have the archives of twelve of the groups in the exhibition and the personal archives of several others who were engaged during the period, including curators, art critics, etc. The challenge was how to present the work of collectives. And that is the core: the curatorial idea comes from the realization that between 1976 and 1985 there was an effervescence of collectives in Mexico. For the most part they had some kind of political commitment, and above all, generated networks of collaboration.
SZ: Can you talk about the role of the crucial 1977 exhibition in Paris [10th Biennale de Paris, or the 10th International Exhibition of Young Artists, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Palais de Tokyo,]? Is it true that the groups came together around the exhibition? They existed before, but did they come together with more power?
JGMThere are more or less ten theories about the history. Since 1969, several groups already existed that were transforming themselves in order to work collectively. In 1976, they met for the first time to think about some kind of group collaboration. The person who brought them together was an art critic named Juan Acha, who worked at the Museum of Modern Art [NYC], and wanted to organize an exhibition of Mexican conceptualism. He was in frequent contact with critics in Argentina and had the idea of organizing a trip of Mexicans to Argentina. They never reached an agreement. The meeting turned into a drinking session. But it began to lay the groundwork for the critics to realize that this movement of groups was happening.
Institutions Juggle Artists
Then the Paris Biennale invited Helen Escobedo, director of the Museo Universitario in the 1960s, to be essentially a curator of the Mexican section. She decided not to invite individual artists but rather to invite groups that she knew already existed. It is a kind of institutional consolidation, and offered the possibility for them to go to Paris to collaborate with other artists and collectives.
But a dispute arose because Helen Escobedo chose four groups, three of which were deeply politicized. One of them was focused on architectural and utopian explorations. The editor of the Museum of Modern Art’s visual arts magazine went directly to the director of the Biennial and proposed another group. This generated a fight between the political groups and the more abstract groups, who are not interested in the political side of production. It started a process in which the groups document their fights and discussions with the institutions.
They start a network of relationships based on connections made in Paris. Something interesting, in terms of artistic practice, is that they decide to replicate the works. What they send to Paris is exhibited at the same time in Mexico, so from the beginning, the environments and projects already had a notion that they could be multiples or replicable. The SUMA group inscribed their practices in the street, which they could occupy again starting in 1976 and 1977 after the period of repression following 1968. Proceso Pentágono work from that moment on staging installations of torture processes through photos and installations.
There is also speculative architecture in response to the housing crisis in Mexico City. They were constantly pushing processes between exploration of media and social or political problems.
When the three most political groups returned from Paris, they decided to create the Frente Mexicano de Grupos Trabajadores de la Cultura [Mexican Front of Cultural Workers' Groups] with other groups that were working in Mexico. This was their platform for producing traveling collective exhibitions, collaborations with social movements, and collaborations with the Sandinista Revolution.
Sculpture by Grupo Proceso Pentágono
There are even groups that began collaborating with indigenous artists in Michoacán, in the Purépecha Plateau, and they collaborated in the Communist Party fair, which was called the Oposición magazine fair, which had booths from all over the world presenting. That is the second section of the exhibition. It is a brief display of some of the things the Front did, such as instances of collaboration, generating assemblies, creating places where they could meet, and working with unions.
Traveling Graphics
The work of Grupo Germinal probably stands out in the room. They are the ones who make these high-contrast banners for public marches. They put together a traveling exhibition called “América en la Mira” [America in the Crosshairs], which consisted of printing three sets of graphics in an international call for entries. We also have that entire graphic exhibition in the show. We found it at UCLA, because a set remained at Los Angeles Contemporary. When they donated their archive to Chicano Studies at UCLA, that’s where it ended up.
The connections they were establishing were what allowed them to generate these traveling exhibitions. But you can also see, for example, the graphic communiqué at the end of the room, shows the informational intentions of this type of practice. Television did not report on disappeared activists, nor did the newspapers, so they were using art to tell those stories. The bagged and burned are a plastic typology that appears throughout the exhibition.
At specific moments, the groups collaborated with political entities. The third section curated by Jaime González includes parodic, comical moments, playfulness and humor. Although they had a political commitment, they did not live up to the social realistic expectations of the most dogmatic artists, thinkers, and leftist leaders. The artists seemed to them to be imperialists because they were too curious about things. That section includes linguistic games by Grupo Março, parodies like the Hotel Marx, and video and sketches by No Grupo, and the emergence of groups of feminist artists.
Poster for Oposición magazine fair
SZ: When I began to think about the exhibition, I started writing something, on the relationship between what they did and museums like Jumex or contemporary art museums at the moment, which is more related to commercial art or artwork assembled by wealthy collectors. The government also runs many museums that do very good things, which can be very important. But this exhibition reflects an institutional critique.
JGM: There’s a tension there—productive in a sense—but also there is a constant erasure of local genealogies that somehow ends up articulating the fantasy that contemporary art discourses are shared interchangeably from one country to another. The question about contemporary art that ongoing violence in Mexico raises is the forgetting of things that happened in the 1970s and 1980s. The crimes they talk about remain unresolved in real legal terms. There has been no Truth Commission on 1968 or 1971, or on what went on in Nicaragua. There has been no political process in Mexico.
The absence of law or justice was something that constantly accompanied these practices. The paradox is that these artists—or perhaps it is not paradoxical, but rather important—remained political throughout their lives, and therefore did not participate in the current contemporary art networks. Almost all of those who are still alive decided to join universities in order to make a living from it, rather than from selling their works, or to cancel their artistic practice and devote themselves to political practice. Above all, universities.
How to Forget
The grotesque character of contemporary art in Mexico is articulated through the remembering and forgetting of these moments. Or generating the technologies of forgetting, of forgetting these moments. It’s been a long time since either the MUAC or other museums in Mexico City addressed such a specific problem as thinking about the collectives that criticized the structure of the state and the artistic structure simultaneously.
SZ: I go to many exhibitions and gallery openings and I always say that I don't understand the context of art in Mexico very well. Sometimes it seems that the links between art forms such as conceptualism or some forms of abstraction seem very related to what I know from the US, but I don't understand why this art exists in Mexico. So this exhibition helps me a lot to find a place in history.
JGM: These groups of artists were part of the imagination of artists in the 1990s, and in the 2000s, they were the obsession of several curators who are in a way the first curators in Mexico in a strict sense. They formulate this as a genealogical moment. A book that we have posted online called The Age of Discrepancies [La era de la discrepancia: Arte y cultura visual en México 1968–1997, MUAC-UNAM, 2014], tells the story from 1968 to 1997.
The book argues that there is an institutional and historical amnesia in Mexico where Gabriel Orozco appears to emerge spontaneously. This book describes the context of production: on the one hand the collectives, but also networks that produced artist books, networks studying Joseph Beuys or Duchamp, and the emergence of a style of painting known as Neo-Mexican in the 1980s. From the 1970s to the 1990s, there was also a commercial consolidation, with the privatization of these art spaces. By the 2000s, a more global understanding of art becomes linked to a marked classism.
Changing Museum Landscapes
Most of the things that happen with these groups happen in public institutional spaces or spaces created by artists, at a time when there were no private museums in Mexico, the first private museum was founded in 1983, I believe, with the founding of the Tamayo Museum with money from Televisa. Later, Televisa had a falling out with the Tamayo, and they donated the museum to the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, and Televisa created the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea. On the other hand, from the 1960s to the present, a complex ecosystem of galleries has been developing, which is now exploding. It was very complex, circulating mainly in restricted fields. For galleries, they sold important artistic paintings for the upper classes, but some of them also created places to sell artist books and things like that.
The Jumex collection, at first located in a factory in Ecatepec, then moving to Polanco, became the first private museum of contemporary art. It is almost the only world that many people know about now. For us, in putting together this exhibition and making it so didactic and schematic, we did intend to speak to other generations who don’t know this history.
Banners, Frente Mexicano de Grupos Trabajadores de la Cultura
Milene Zozaya: You mentioned the concept of politicizing on several occasions, but I think it’s more about taking a political stance or making a political critique than politicizing. To politicize would be to make propaganda. I think they were making visible what was not visible.
JGM: I agree with the difference, although I am using the term in a very colloquial way. We decided more or less to use their own nomenclatures when we did the expo. Even though they are part of the Communist Party, they are not doing propaganda. They did not work for the Communist Party. How to explain their street practices, like putting up posters of the corrupt police chief Durazo [Arturo "El Negro" Durazo Moreno, chief of Mexico City police, 1976–1982] in 1977, and his meeting with the rector of the university, which had risks for them. There are many artists who wondered in retrospect if it was a moment of institutional critique similar to the Anglo-Saxon concept. Yes and no. They had no contact with that concept, but they were using the medium and the artistic process to do two things: to think about the medium, but also to challenge a problem. So, at the same time, yes. They use specific political terms, taking up notions of cultural work from Louis Althusser [the French Marxist theorist and Communist Party member]. They see themselves as intervening in ideological structures of the state or of capital. That is the paradigm they were operating within.
Installation of outlined corpse, Proceso Pentágono; Grupo Códice, Códice [Codex], 1977
On the other hand, artistic terminology is also important. They did not call these things installations, but environments. Based on the legacy of the American Happening and environment as well, the notion of environment is used in Mexico until 1983, and then the term installation begins to be used. They prefer to use “action” rather than “performance,” but they are already negotiating with that terminology. Another person who inspires them is Antonio Gramsci. The Taller de Arte e Ideología introduces Foucault’s studies into artistic spaces, alluding to his ideas on surveillance, but also to the work examining semiotic or discursive practices.
Pedagogical Discriminations
It was important that they were university students. The Taller de Arte e Ideología is part of the Faculty of Architecture. It was as if they were very nerdy, focused on the development of theoretical tools, because they realized that the critical paradigms of the first part of the twentieth century were no longer useful for thinking. When Víctor Muñoz from Proceso Pentágono was drawing the line around the corpse for the exhibition, we worked for about seven hours because he said that even though it was possible to allude to a body, he didn’t want to create an allusion: he wanted it to feel like a body. It was like a class in architecture, sculpture—in beautiful necropolitics.
Speculative architecture drawings, Grupo Tetraedro
Grupo Tetraedro is a fascinating group led by a sculptor named Sebastián, who now makes horrible things—million-dollar public sculptures in different cities around the country. But at that time, he was the architect Mathias Goeritz’s assistant. So much of his work had to do with sculpture workshops, closely linked to the development of projections or models, in this case to the possibility of a city traveling in space to solve the housing problems in Mexico City. So speculative architecture was happening, and we simply hadn’t registered it.
Now there is no longer a dynamic of collaborative networks, historically speaking, I don’t think. There was, but the world was also different. In the nineties and 2000s, they no longer had these relationships of political representation that were important in everyday life. This is before the Internet. For example, important groups like Biquini Wax and Cooperativa Cráter Invertido came along, but it’s not a time when collectives collaborate with each other.
Quinceñera performance, Tlacuilas y Retrateras, 1984
Women Artists Step Up
Another point that had not been present in these narratives was the emergence of feminist groups. And La Revuelta was a key group in that regard, starting in 1975. They began to engage with the second wave of American and European feminism, situated in a logic that we would now call intersectional, that involved thinking about social classes, race, and racialization.
This group is important for the exhibition because many of its members were also collaborators with other groups. It is also an exhibition of groups, but also of their own networks where they were working. Curator Karen Cordero is part of the group Tlacuilas y Retrateras. When Karen arrives in Mexico, she gets together with others and forms this feminist study group, and she is one of the founders of Tlacuilas y Retrateras [Tlacuilas were painters of codices in ancient times; Retrateras is a feminist neologism for portraitist]. If you look at the photos, they are having a parody quinceañera party at the Academy of San Carlos. Another feminist collective, Polvo de Gallina Negra, did mail art projects and projects on the disappeared in Latin America.
Hotel Marx
Proceso Pentágono created Hotel Marx for an opening on the comemoration of Marx’s birth and death. The Communist Party organized an exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and invited them, thinking that they were going to do something in honor of Marx. Instead they portrayed him as a hotel guest. They were at the opening, drinking until it got ugly. The more dogmatic members of the party didn't like it. But that’s something that interested us a lot. The groups remembered themselves as strict and dogmatic groups fighting for a better world from a partisan political perspective. But they were artists who were experimenting, who had clear commitments, but whose artistic forms did not depend on what the institution, party, or state told them to do.
Grupo Março, Urban Poem
Grupo Março worked on a piece with words that can be arranged to create a participatory urban poem on the street. Another group working on the level of urbanism was Tepito Arte, and it was probably the most popular group. In 1964, Tlatelolco was built, breaking up the Guerrero neighborhood to build ejes [axial freeways], and Reforma was extended. A lot of people were displaced. In the 1970s, the government wanted to do the same thing with Tepito. They built the ejes and started to build housing units and built up the neighborhood like crazy. Then Taller Cinco, which is a workshop in the UNAM Faculty of Architecture, and Tepito Arte, made a counterproposal to the government’s plan. They didn’t realize it, but they managed to stop the government’s program. The leader of Tepito, Daniel Manrique, spoke, wrote, and worked in a way that drew from the musicality of the Tepito neighborhood, and he defended it all the time to differentiate himself from the other groups.
There was another moment similar to the Paris Biennale, in which an institutional event was held in the lobby of the old National Auditorium. It was called the Salon of Experimentation. It was the first and only Salon of Experimentation, because after doing it, the government didn’t want to repeat it. They decided to mount an exhibition organized by open call. It was the first time in Mexico that an open call did not ask for finished works, but rather projects to be developed by the artists. The jury chose nine projects, and instead of prizes, they gave the money to the groups for production.
Stenciled graffiti by Grupo Suma
To the Streets
Grupo Suma were possibly the first group to do graffiti in Mexico, using representations of street characters in their stencils. They trained at the muralism workshop at the Academy of San Carlos, but the teacher also had them do these guerrilla things and intervene in the city’s spaces. They began to generate typologies of people, like the teporocho [drunk] or the fire-breather. We don’t see that anymore today, people spitting fire during performances at traffic lights in Mexico City to collect change. It still happens today, but not as much. There’s a figure of the “bureaucrat,” and “Tania, the disappeared woman.” It was like a game of urban graphics.
We didn’t decide on all the replicas of original artworks ourselves; we had to work with the artists. That was a rule that the museum set. Pilar García, one of the curators and curator of the collection, developed it in an increasingly subtle and systematic way. We could have all the documentation, but unless there were at least two artists from the group to work with and approval of the rest of the group, we didn’t reproduce it.
Museum publicity is at:
https://muac.unam.mx/exposicion/los-grupos-y-otras-revueltas-artisticas?lang=en
A PDF of the bilingual catalogue is available online at:
https://muac.unam.mx/assets/docs/115-folio-muac-los-grupos-digital.pdf
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