ZACATECAS 3

The MUSEO DEL ARTE ABSTRACTO…..was established in 1997 by local artist Manuel Felguerez and is the only museum in Latin America specializing in abstract art. It is home to some of the best Mexican abstract artists work.

The building was first a seminary for priests but with the Revolution it closed it’s doors and since then has been an army barracks and until the nineties a prison. Some tiny tiny 6 feet square cells are still preserved with the inmates wall decor.

The museum is also home to the particular works created for the World Expo held in Osaka Japan in 1970. Eleven artists were given three weeks to create their works and could do them in any style and were intended to be hung together to make one vast mural 400 square feet in size. This was during a time of political and social revolution in Mexico when the traditional values of mural painting such as social commentary and being responsible for changing society were being discarded in favour of the new subjective experience. José Luis Cuevas invented the name “the rupture” for a group of artists that questioned and rejected the need to keep Mexican painting tied to these principles of muralism.

These paintings may never have actually been hung at that Expo as there is no documentation or photographs at all showing them or anything else in place at the pavillion. The artists themselves were not even invited. Perhaps the sensibilities of the work did not align with the militaristic government of the time who had just two years earlier massacred many protesters in Mexico City just prior to the Olympic Games. After the 1970 World’s Fair, the paintings were scattered throughout art museums in Mexico and only recently gathered together in one place again.