Tatiana Cuevas

Conference Report. November 2023

The social role of the museum has been reviewed not only after the pandemic but also in the midst of this new era of conflict and violence. Our commitment to promoting social engagement as well as ethical and critical reflection has expanded to the possibility of fostering mental health as well as providing shelter to diverse identities and diverse thinking.

The 2023 CIMAM Conference focused on the social agency and participation of communities within museums, posing key ethical questions for the times we are currently living: How can museums embrace their social responsibility? How can museums affirm their relevance as institutions in contemporary life? Are we art/cultural institutions agents of change?

Considering some of the core questions discussed at the Conference, the following conclusions can be outlined:

• What is a co-creative museum?

An institution that promotes reciprocal making of meaning as a fundamental task.

A place that fosters the togetherness of individuals to promote the development of collective intelligence, hold values and activate audiences through the continuous exchange and mutual upbringing of concepts and ideas.

• How can a museum activate and strengthen mutuality among its many component communities?

Incorporate knowledge, customs, and traditions of every participating group to develop coauthored projects.

Establish relationships with every aspect that surrounds the institution, from communities to climate change.

Understand the meaning of key concepts among participating communities, which may be different from our or other understanding. For instance, as Elvira Espejo Ayca emphasized, for Andean communities, objects are subjects, as opposed to material things.

Some of the ideas that are metaphors for Western Philosophy are methods for indigenous communities.

• How can museums foster co-creative relationships with and among artists and the local communities of situated contexts?

Museums display not only objects but also forms of knowledge.

Place community’s stories into value.

Active and committed audiences can change the values/criteria within museums.

Promote transversal accessibility involving all areas of the museum, not only the education staff.

Understand any physical or intellectual limitation as a possibility.

Basic training to all museum staff to welcome and orientate the visit of any person: sign language, descriptions for blind people, subtitles, etc.

Implementing ethical inclusion policies for diverse communities will have an impact on our audiences to foster consciousness.

• Can we implement different methodologies to question canonical and normative processes and so disrupt colonial legacies?

Rethink language: how we call things we do while cataloguing, transmitting, and mediating.

Place diverse things not only together, but in a dynamic relationship together.

Think of language as action, gesture, not only words.

Consider the possibility of decreasing as a form to synthesize and understand our practice.

Museums must reconfigure collections and taxonomies to properly represent diversities, and minorities.

• How can the museum engage with the social processes affecting our immediate communities?

Micropolitics towards concrete social transformation, community building, and the promotion of social justice.

Bring about social and educational change by grounding the force of actions in the diversity and intrinsic freedom of thought, expression, and creativity.

Create conditions for people collaborating within institutions to be cared for.

Create conditions for diverse audiences to enjoy their right to culture.

Possibility to transform institutional policies: care for artworks, care for staff, care for audiences.

The opportunity to take part in this CIMAM Annual Conference, together with 56 professionals that received the travel grant, as well as the rest of our colleagues from more than 40 countries, shed various light to confirm, potentiate as well as reconsider many aspects within the program we have been developing as a team at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City for the past four years. We have developed a dynamic exhibition and education program conceived to consolidate the museum’s identity and vocation to modern and contemporary art through research and cataloguing our collections, as well as exhibitions and education programs that foster critical thought and exchanges of diverse knowledges. These intense and productive three-day-conference and program of visits, which transversally addressed ethics, values, and methods concerning our current practices, were fundamental to rethinking how and why we do what we do.

Bio

Tatiana Cuevas Guevara (Mexico City, 1975) is Director at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (MACG) in Mexico City since 2019. She holds a BA in Art History from the Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City (1995-1999), and an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London (2001-2003). She has been Curator at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City (2013-2014), Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museo de Arte de Lima (2008-2011), and Associate Curator at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2005-2008).
As Director of the MACG, she has developed a dynamic exhibition and education program conceived to consolidate the museum’s identity and vocation to modern and contemporary art through critical thought, fostering exchanges of diverse knowledges. The program is designed through three curatorial lines: The first one is dedicated to the permanent collection of the museum, presenting a series of critical revisions led by a poet, a filmmaker, a theater collective and a photographer. Led in 1972 to the Mexican Government by Alvar Carrillo Gil and his wife, Carmen Tejero, the foundational collection is constituted by invaluable works of José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, Wolfgang Paalen and Gunther Gerzso, among other artists.

In consonance with the interest of the Carrillo Gil couple to support the art of their time (ca. 1940-1970), since the 1980’s the MACG consolidated a second vocation as a space that has promoted and incited the art of our current times. The second curatorial line has been based on exploring the connections and discrepancies between modern and contemporary art. Through the third line, the MACG has presented mid-career surveys of Mexican artists such as Galia Eibenschutz, Marcela Armas, Cynthia Gutiérrez, and Diego Pérez. The program includes a project room dedicated to younger than 30-years-old artists, presenting newly developed projects by Ana Segovia, Lucas Lugarinho, Enrique López Llamas, Antonia Alarcón, among others.

The MACG has also pursued combined exhibition programs based on its collection of artists books, fostering dialogues between artists, designers and ceramists for the museum’s shop. As well as a research and exhibition program based on the museums’ archive and library, within which the museum has activated a program lending books, music and art to take home for three months.
Her curatorial practice includes numerous solo and collective exhibitions posing an analysis of key contemporary topics. Recent exhibitions include: El jardín no tiene rejas [The Garden without fences] (co-curated with Isabel Sonderéguer, Assistant curator, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, 2023); Erika Verzutti. Tantra (Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City, 2023); Jesus Rafael Soto. The Instability of the Real (co-curated with Paola Santoscoy, Galería RGR, Mexico City); Time in Things. Contemporary Art Galleries (Museo Amparo, Puebla, 2021-2023); Modos de ver [Ways of Seeing]. 5th Edition of the BBVA-MACG Program for Young Artists (Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, 2018); Silvia Gruner. Hemispheres: A Labyrinth Sketchbook (Americas Society, New York; Museo Amparo, Puebla, 2016); Rastros y vestigios. Indagaciones sobre el presente (Centro Cultural Cabañas, Guadalajara; Museo Amparo, Puebla; Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Ciudad de México, 2015-2016). She is currently leading the exhibition project for the 50th Anniversary of the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, to be celebrated from August 2024 until May 2025.