The New Public Art: Collectivity and Activism in Mexico since the 1980s edited by Maria Polgovsky Ezcurra examines a range of artistic-activist projects carried out in Mexico between 1985 and 2017. These were years of political and economic transformation and growing drug-related violence, bracketed by two major earthquakes in Mexico City. Especially since President Felipe Calderón’s initiation of a war on drugs in 2006, fear and violence have shut down public dialogue, historical memory, and possibilities for mourning. This volume explores practices that resist disenfranchisement and aim to strengthen social bonds, and ultimately, the public sphere. 

Some of the artists included in this volume are well-known and work within established art circuits: Mónica Mayer, Teresa Margolles, and Francis Alÿs. Editor Polgovsky Ezcurra puts their work alongside that of less established artists such as Lukas Avendaño and Guadalupe García-Vasquez, as well as collaborative projects such as Campamento Audiovisual Itinerante, Bordamos por la Paz, and Brigada Antimonumentos. Polgovsky Ezcurra writes that the book takes the form of “a curated dialogue between scholars and as a gathering of living artists,” many of whom have not been widely translated before (300). In addition to ten academic chapters on activist art topics, the volume offers eight “dossiers,” written by participants, in which they describe their work. 

While the artists and collectives in this volume vary widely in their scopes and methods, what they have in common is the desire to cultivate spaces for respect and self-determination and interrupt prevailing dehumanizing logics—not only disappearances, but also misogyny, racism, and economic deprivation. Referring to Mayer’s performances, Karen Cordero’s assertion holds for many of the projects described in the volume: “These works create a model for another, more horizontal politics tied to everyday practices. It also situates dialogue with others as an objective in itself, while recognizing the radical potentiality of this position in a society characterized by the repression of dissent” (91). Nearly every dossier emphasizes the importance of collaboration and horizontality. 

The volume opens with an essay by Natalia de la Rosa and Julio García Murillo that takes readers through the Mexican art scene in the seventies and eighties: Siqueiros’s Sala de Arte Público, and ephemeral and self-made murals by José Luis Cuevas, Felipe Ehrenberg, and Melquiades Herrera. The authors describe the mid-century dynamic of a national public space dominated by the government, and the emergence, in the 1970s, of new kinds of public gestures to critique authoritarianism as well as spectacle and commodity culture.

In their essay, Abeyamí Ortega Domínguez and Sarah Abel analyze the muxe (a nonbinary Zapotec identity) artist Lukas Avendaño’s performance Buscando a Bruno, calling attention to how Avendaño makes visible a racialized, gendered, “class-oppressed” subjectivity in public spaces (173). Avendaño’s brother Bruno disappeared in 2018 and his remains were found in a mass grave in 2020. The performance’s iterations have included acts of public protest: displaying posters demanding, “Where are the missing people going?,” delivering letters to political leaders, and having collaborators (often family members of the disappeared) wear coroner’s uniforms in public gatherings. “This action . . . was not born as a performance. It was born out of an act of desperation,” explains Avendaño (175). 

Similarly, the work of Menos Días Aquí and Bordamos por la Paz, analyzed by Adriana Ortega Orozco, engages in visible forms of political protest. Menos Días Aquí is a website for which volunteers aggregate information about the deceased and disappeared, while members of Bordamos por la Paz, usually women, meet in public spaces to embroider the names of victims onto white handkerchiefs, which are then placed on clotheslines.

These practices evoke aspects of performances by Teresa Margolles, who is a significant presence in the volume, especially in essays by Enea Zaramella and Carlos Fonseca and by the late scholar Erica Segre (to whom the book is dedicated). Active since the early 1990s, Margolles commanded significant international attention by representing Mexico in the 2009 Venice Biennale; her commission Mil Veces un Instante (A Thousand Times An Instant) opened on September 18, 2024, at the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. Zaramella and Fonseca read Margolles’s oeuvre through the work of Eyal Weizman (of Forensic Architecture) as a shift away from the subjectivity of the witness of violence, toward an approach that situates truth in the abject remnants of violence. Margolles “turn[s] the gallery space into a public forum” by, for example, inviting family members of victims of drug violence to participate in her work (144). The viewers “are asked to bear witness and speak on behalf of the testimonial residues left behind by violence and terror” (147). 

Margolles’s international profile is quite different from the otherwise community-oriented artists included in this volume. Her work is included in the collections of the Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art. At this point in her career, Margolles’s principal intervention is not in the Mexican public sphere but in a global conversation about drugs, violence, and power dynamics that make Mexico the site of so much death and the United States consumers of drugs and of elite culture. 

Various essays draw attention to how public spaces are organized and occupied. The graffiti collective Grupo German paints murals in Pachuca in consultation with residents; this group has been funded by the government of Pachuca as part of the National Crime Prevention Program, a detail that is unfortunately left without further comment. The architect and artist Arturo Ortiz-Struck writes about Mexico’s affordable housing program, Infonavit, which has created an urban landscape that contributes to social isolation and inhibits economic opportunity. Margolles has worked on this problem, notably in the 2012 piece La promesa; Segre details how Margolles dismantled and transported an abandoned home in Ciudad Juárez to the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. Finally, the dossier of the Brigada Antimonumentos describes its work erecting unauthorized, ephemeral monuments to victims of violence—a stark contrast to the anodyne official monuments that Michael R. Orwicz and Robin Adèle Greeley critique in their piece on the Campo Algodonero Memorial Park in Ciudad Juárez. 

One of the most striking dossiers is authored by Gabriela Carrillo, a member of Brigada Tlayacapan, a group consisting primarily of architecture students of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the public university in Mexico City. The dossier recounts the Brigada’s ambitious project to rebuild homes destroyed by the 2017 earthquake in Tlayacapan, Morelos, according to sustainable and local building practices. Carrillo writes, “we spent hours listening to the victims, asking them how they wanted to live or how they used to live before the disaster, what their everyday lives were like, and what they lacked. In our tiny way (but always hoping it would be significant), we tried to support them throughout the long and painful reconstruction process, as well as learn from their local knowledge” (267). Following an eight-month collaborative planning period, community members opted not to rebuild their homes according to the plans created by the Brigada, fearing the structures would not be safe. The importance the students placed on dialogue fell short: “Did we fail? Did we fail? Today, I don’t think so. We probably didn’t have the impact or achieve the results we’d hoped for. And yet, at least for me, we opened a door, developed an important means to acknowledge the reality of our country, the place where we work, the people who inhabit it” (270). 

The practices described in this volume exceed the field of art; they are forms of collaboration, protest, solidarity, witnessing, or even forging opportunities for togetherness. How can we connect Mexico’s present moment to a broader Latin American trajectory of public art and performance: escraches (public denunciations of the accused) organized by H.I.J.O.S. in Argentina or Lava la bandera (Wash the flag) performances in Peru? Or more recently, to activists like the Iconoclasistas and the Serigrafistas Queer, also in Argentina, or Mujeres Creando in Bolivia? Or does its history of a long period of authoritarianism under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, and its present reality of cartel and state violence, constitute a set of circumstances that have shaped its art scene in ways that are exclusive to Mexico? 

In her selections for the chapters of The New Public Art: Collectivity and Activism in Mexico since the 1980s, Polgovsky Ezcurra has assembled a collection of contemporary Mexican art based on collective practices. The breadth of projects offers myriad points of departure for carrying out further research and for creating connections to other activist art projects. While this volume will appeal to students of Mexican art history, it would be a shame if it were missed by those interested in Mexico’s political and social realities more broadly. It offers many powerful examples of how artists are grappling with some of the most pressing questions of the present moment: how to make the country’s structural injustices visible, how to mourn as a society, and how members of the public might revitalize the public sphere.