Siqueiros Public Art Hall Activity Program
May 25–August 25, 2024
During this period, three collaborative proposals are presented. They have as an integral part of their museographic concept formats such as workshops, conversation forums, and activities that trace connection paths between the museum and the cultural ecosystem of Bosque de Chapultepec. Based on the concept of “citizen artist”, coined by David Alfaro Siqueiros to refer to art committed to the social transformations of his time, the Public Art Gallery seeks to encourage projects that explore the public dimension of art, culture, and communication in contemporaneity.
A vast landscape of ruins, intervention by the artist Claudia Luna on the façade of the museum, it consists of geometric paintings that resemble the forms of objects in urban furniture, some of which, lacking function, become obstacles in the paths of passers-by, or they also become “public sculptures”. Selected by Claudia Luna after her tours of the vicinity of the Hall, some of these objects are reproduced on cardboard, becoming sculptural-paintings placed in the mural courtyard or on the sidewalk in front of the museum to establish a visual relationship between Siqueiros’ monumental works, the façade and the urban environment. Likewise, these cardboard pictorial sculptures are mobile devices used in workshop sessions where participants trace routes and group routes through the Chapultepec Forest to relocate them as “public sculptures” along with their counterparts in the space adjacent to the museum.
In the Cubo, Obrera Centro, a non-profit space, designed a modular museographic device with plywood panels to carry out its initiative DIBUJE, a study group that meets periodically to study and think about drawing in contemporary art. This proposal of spatial articulation, rather than an exhibition, is conceived as a meeting place as well as a support for the realization of seven sessions of collective drawing.
In the Gallery, a brief historical review of memes as a cultural phenomenon unfolds. The exhibition accompanies The Subversive Art of Memes, a project conceived as a forum for concurrence and discussion between creators of digital content and different audiences. Related to the vocation of the museum, which includes the question of how communication and artistic expressions affect the configuration of collective imaginaries, this forum highlights the characterization of memes as subversive vehicles, in most cases of anonymous authorship, for the aesthetic circulation of information units that address issues of public interest. The concepts of eloquence and political message of the work of art, as well as the relationship between new technologies and art with a social purpose, were fundamental themes for Siqueiros, typical of the narratives of democratization raised by the slogans of public art.
