Amanda de la Garza or how to bring the margins to cultural institutions

It is March 7, 2022 at the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center. It is the eve of the 8M marches in Mexico City. The curator, sociologist and anthropologist Amanda de la Garza, director of the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) and Visual Arts of the UNAM, dressed in a black skirt and blazer, but with the casualness of sports tennis shoes, participates in a meeting of women to rethink the world after patriarchy. She reads her cards and asks the assembled audience: “Is including women in art history the same as producing a feminist art history?” She is not, she responds in a deep voice, and it remains in a YouTube video.

A screen projects photographic pieces by Elsa Oviedo, Tania Candiani and Azahara Gómez. We see a woman holding the national flag intervened by the colors of the feminist struggle. Then, a group of women playing the teponaztli—a pre-Hispanic musical instrument—on the platforms of the Zócalo subway, the center of the Mexican capital, an action that seeks political enunciation about space. Finally, a searching mother, from one of the groups of relatives of missing people, cooks her relative's favorite recipe.

“That is the world of post-patriarchy, where it is not only about complying with the conditions of equality and equity [...] but about being able to go further and analyze the objects of the theory of feminist art methodology. In that sense, how does it translate into making culture?: into cultural policies, management and curatorial criteria, and into a profound transformation of cultural institutions. Of course we are not at that moment yet, but we would like to imagine that possible future,” she says.

De la Garza, 42 years old, originally from Monclova, Coahuila, is the curator and cultural manager who has curated and coordinated more than thirty exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, who will assume the position of deputy artistic director of the Museo Centro de Arte next May. Reina Sofía in Madrid, and who joins a list of Mexicans who are leading museums outside their country. Since his arrival at the MUAC, at the beginning of 2020, he proposed to deconstruct the canon, depatriarchalize it, decolonize it, shed light on the margins, what was not made visible by art history, artists who had not been collected or exhibited, programmed, the infinite debts. Her rise has been meteoric. After eight years of working as an associate curator of the MUAC —under the direction of Cuauhtémoc Medina—, during which time she was also a curator in independent projects, co-curator of the XVII Photography Biennial and the first review of the Museum's collection Amparo assumed the direction of that university museum, and four years later, she applied and won a place at the Reina Sofía, among around fifty applications.

We are experiencing a generational change in cultural institutions: “we are participating in the great conversations, the gender conversation and

queer

theory , participating in the conversation about the art of indigenous peoples and how the margins are now linked to the cultural institutions. It's a generational change. “It is happening in many parts of the world at an institutional level, where great historical figures of directors, directors of important museums who have left their positions. A change comes naturally. We have shown that there is a group of professionals, curators, who are up to the challenge of directing institutions,” says De la Garza.

Two worlds at once

“There are two worlds, two worlds at the same time,” he says and repeats in his office. “I am finishing my management, everything I have to get ready. The entire process when a management ends is a complex part to document, but also an emotional one. I'm not there yet [the Reina Sofía], but I'm already starting to think in terms of that new position. It is an interesting moment, I say this with mixed feelings, leaving the museum, the team, the institution where I have been for so many years. The MUAC is going to move forward but I am not going to be on that path anymore,” she says. Above the office, a reflecting pool illuminates the façade at noon on a Wednesday in February 2024.

Everything that happens in the museum happens here. Ban Vautier, Francis Alÿs, Amor Muñoz, Mariana Castillo. Artists who have exhibited under his management, ranging from

performance

, installation, movement-image and even photography. De la Garza takes the interview in an armchair, wearing a cream-colored blouse, green pants and phosphorescent yellow tennis shoes that she moves from time to time. In addition to some diplomas, some posters of the museum's public programs stand out on the walls, such as

The Pink Book

, a sale of feminist and

queer

fanzines , and a group portrait with all the

staff

that has accompanied her in the museum. His office is in the basement of this building owned by Teodoro González de León, which was born giving “space to the artists who began to gain visibility in the nineties and who operated independent spaces—the generation of the Panadería, the Quiñonera or Temístocles 44 —, artists who had to make their way out of museums in times when institutions only accommodated artists linked to painting,” says critic Édgar Hernández.

“I feel happy because we managed to overcome the pandemic. The museum was strong in its contents, in its relationship with the public, we were able to adapt.” The MUAC's commitment, armored by the academic apparatus of UNAM, the largest university in Latin America, has been to become a public arena, a space for conversation, from art, about society, the world, history. For that you have to “know what the questions should be to do it, something that the curatorial team does well. These are our functions as a public museum. What will be the perspective to adopt in a very broad framework of practices that are happening and that is an incomprehensible universe,” he says.

Above his office, in the curatorial rooms, the lines of work that he began to outline throughout his management are reflected. The 380,000 UNAM students for the 2023-2024 cycle have to pay 20 pesos (1.20 dollars) with their valid credential. A group enters the museum and the first thing they find is a 1955 Hillman intervened with tiles and curtains, it is a piece by the Mexican Betsabeé Romero that evokes the dilapidated and abandoned cars in Latin American slums. In the rooms, a painting by Beatriz González, from Colombia, shows a group of sex workers who were murdered, whose naked bodies were abandoned on the edge of a river. From Venezuela, Alexander Apóstol, a homosexual artist, exhibits portraits of his country's stereotypes, gender, race and identity codes that accompany South American ideologies. From Argentina, a sculpture of armored glass riddled by three hundred bullet holes; one is overwhelmed by the sound of a shotgun that covers the room, a piece by Enrique Ježik.

“It seems to me that social sensitivity has changed, even though we no longer use face masks,” he says, playing with a ring, which he takes off and puts on. “I am referring to how young people interact, they have another dynamic, they had to go through fundamental years of their personal development, at a distance, with virtual classes. It transformed their social dynamics. If before photography was the technology that modified our relationship with the world, now social networks are transforming it and art is not exempt from that.”

An assistant interrupts. She asks him to sign some documents. Meanwhile, she talks about Las Brillantinas: a collective of artists who share feminist art projects on Instagram. Its emblem is

glitter

, a symbol of the feminist march of 2020. “It is a digital wall newspaper about important women in feminist, gender and

queer

thought ,” she says.

On the day of the 8M 2024 march, Las Brillantinas created a “brillamobile”, a bicycle and a station at the same time where they were printing posters for the march. “Long live the glitter!” wrote one user. The meeting point was the “Glorieta de las mujeres que fighting”, on Paseo de la Reforma, the main artery of the capital.

“The [post-pandemic] map is also being configured for institutions; we do not know how it will end or what it will result in. But I do notice the change more in terms of those who enjoy the museum, how they relate to certain works, a certain social taste has been configured through the image,” he says.

Too many things

Journalist Sergio Rodríguez Blanco wrote that they called her Amanda after a song by Víctor Jara, the troubadour of Salvador Allende's socialist Revolution. Her parents had been active on the left during the years of the Dirty War. “My father was a sociologist, a professor at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UAM) and my mother is a chemical engineer, who works at the University of Chapingo. For them it was always important that we go to a museum, we had no connection with artists, none of their friends were artists, but rather people from their professional fields,” he recalls. Enrique, his father, an emeritus member of the National System of Researchers and an important figure in the development of labor studies in Latin America, died in March 2021. The magazine

Sociology of Work

, from the Complutense, remembered him: “He supported union movements in conflicts and for that reason he suffered several days in prison. "He was always attentive to the evolution of unionism in Mexico, supporting those who maintained autonomy from the State."

De la Garza was born in Monclova in 1981 because his father's family was from there, northern, but he always lived in the center of the country between Puebla, Oaxaca and Guanajuato, until at 14 he arrived in Mexico City to study high school in the CCH Sur, belonging to the UNAM. “In my house there were always books, my parents encouraged literature. “They never imagined that I was going to dedicate myself to something related to art.” She began to like photography, interested in the body. In those years she toured the Ciudad Universitaria campus, which offered her enormous possibilities for intellectual development and artistic appreciation. She took dance classes. She walked from the CCH to the choreographic workshop and went to the film shows, took workshops on literature, poetry, “things that the university offers you, that allow you to grow.”

He studied Sociology there and began working in a civil association dedicated to the evaluation of social programs. She completed a postgraduate degree in Anthropological Sciences at the UAM-Iztapalapa and later a master's degree in Art History-Curatorial Studies at the UNAM, which would connect her with the MUAC. She “I became interested in connecting the visual field with social theory, as a means of research. But also how the images provided a density to which other types of ideas could be developed. In my youth I had a series of curiosities related to that, links between literature, body and photography. But I wasn't very clear about the path to working in a museum. I took a photography seminar at the Image Center, there I met a group of important people in my life, especially a fellow artist, the first person who invited me to write about art, Isaac Torres [artist and urban planner], who “He had an individual exhibition that had to do with photography and sociology.”

“The world seemed extraordinarily interesting to me, I was interested in architecture, anthropology, sociology. Also write. To the best of my ability, having to work or study, I always tried to make room for those curiosities, to get a little into documentaries with a Uruguayan colleague, Guillermo Amato. I made scripts for these documentaries with a FONCA scholarship, about social housing, very homemade, I was interested in urban sociology and visual anthropology and I took diploma courses about that. Like in my life, from age twenty to age 35, I had a very rich world in terms of everything that interested me,” he says.

He would write about art, architecture, urban planning, photography, dance and poems in the pages of

La Tempestad

,

Arquine

,

Domus

, among other publications. Literature continued to haunt her, she took workshops with Cristina Rivera Garza, Rocío Cerón, Hernán Bravo Varela. She confesses that she tried to enter the Fundación de las Letras Mexicanas to also embark on a writing career, but she did not succeed. She was a programmer and coordinator of the Enclave poetry festival. The list goes on. She reviews her professional work, from one discipline to another, and then stops:

“I was doing too many things, at a certain point I had to stop. And when I joined MUAC, we still made two editions of Enclave, until it was no longer possible for me. I made the decision to focus and say this [art] is what I want for my life. For me the objectives are not 'I want to achieve this position', the objectives I had were 'I want to write as many articles this year', 'I want to write, I want to curate an exhibition of this artist in the future'. 'I'm going to apply to so many projects to have an exhibition abroad and expand my work network.' In those eight years at the MUAC I was dedicated to meeting the objectives I set for myself.”

Admiration and rejection

It is a day in June 2017. De la Garza takes the microphone at the Third Museum Forum held in Guadalajara. The camera flashes illuminate her face. To break the ice, she says: “You know that curating is a term used for all kinds of things: wine curating, food curating, music curating. The term 'programmer' of live arts festivals or film festivals has become obsolete […]. All the time we find a mixture of admiration and rejection towards the work of curators. We can understand it by feeling bad because people do not understand us, or from another point of view, that of a social phenomenon.”

It is 2012. She enters the MUAC with the position of associate curator. “It is in this space where she developed her career, with many parallel projects, that was where she deployed her, the institution in which she grew up and ended up directing. It was an important space for her as for many of us, who have trained there,” says Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, curator and researcher at the Aesthetic Research Institute. She remembers her working on projects that had to do with film and documentation, leading the exhibitions of Jonas Mekas (2013), Harun Faroki (2014), Jeremy Deller.

(2015), who explore the movement-image from the artistic field.

It is 2014. Verónica Gerber intervenes on the walls of the museum for the exhibition

The Speakers

, the assigned curators were De la Garza and Cecilia Delgado Masse. “Amanda contacted me, she invited me to intervene in the walls, any nook that was not an exhibition space,” she recalls. Gerber had just written a book, she showed him the drawings that had come from that project and told him that she wanted to do something about Venn diagrams, black and white, in a visual essay. “Amanda works hand in hand, the practices dialogue and accompany each other from a deep place. The process was revealing, sensitive, intelligent. I remember sitting looking through my notebooks and hearing her say that my drawings were falling away from that book to become something else. It sounds small but it was an important process, the ability to point out at the exact moment that there is a process transforming,” she says.

It is 2015. More than a hundred volunteers walk between the National Library and the MUAC, at a distance of 200 meters, in Ciudad Universitaria. They choose a book of poetry and return to the museum, to a room, where there is a table with a typewriter, and they type the phrases they remember. It is a piece by Jorge Méndez Blake, invited to explore the proximity between the library and the museum. The curatorship was carried out by De la Garza and Alejandra Labastida. “The interesting thing was working with an expanded vision of what the museum can be. The curators worked in the negotiation with the Library, they were essential to push the traditional limits of the museum beyond. And expand this vision of the curator, as a negotiator,” says Méndez Blake.

Life outside the institution

On the wall there are two paintings by Pablo Helguera that belong to the

Artoons

series . One has the provocative phrase: “

What gets lost when one becomes institutionalized?”

”. Amanda de la Garza, with a light light dress, due to the heat wave that was announced for these last days of February, explains the painting.

“Pablo Helguera is a Mexican artist who has been living in New York for years. In this series he has phrases that he writes down about what is said in work meetings. I really liked that phrase, putting it here, in the management office, thinking about what is lost when one assumes an institutional role, an institutional voice. [To] understand that there are processes in the ecosystem of culture in which it is important that many things happen outside of museums. Let there be a strong independent scene. Product of the need to have other types of more ductile, fresh, contestatory processes, that there is a world that occurs outside the institution.”

De la Garza says that a change in institutions is urgent, to rethink

the

relationship with independent spaces, artistic communities and how the link is established with other types of dialogues that benefit the cultural ecosystem. “I used this phrase to remind myself that there is life outside the institution.”

After

Colectivo Cherani

(2021), which brought together artists from the Purépecha community; of

Maternar

(2022), an exhibition of how art has revised the social forms in which motherhood is configured —and which generated a day of conversations—; Turning

chart

(2022), a meeting of embroiderers, representatives of groups related to disappearances; of

Fighters

(2023), which covers the history of women in wrestling and which reached the Casa de México Foundation in Spain; and Nuria Güell's pieces about human trafficking, which sparked a discussion with specialists, Amanda de la Garza assures that she was able to connect the museum with the present time. “If an institution is not capable of understanding where it is moving, if it is not capable of asking future questions, it is difficult for it to have relevance.”

Now look at the path we have traveled. “The challenges I faced when assuming the leadership [of the MUAC] was adopting a position regarding how power can be exercised differently […]. At this relevant moment of social transformation, women who access leadership positions, at the heads of institutions, have to ask ourselves how we want to exercise that leadership. In a patriarchal way or not. Open other possibilities or learn how to do it differently, because no one knows how to do it de facto.” And before ending the interview, she adds one more thing:

“In Mexico, a country with profound inequalities, with enormous problems of racism and classism, a woman, who studied in public universities, dark-skinned, who comes from a family of professionals, who does not come from the upper classes, what does it mean in terms of what you can contribute to an institution. I mean how a leadership position has to translate into a reflection on power and what art makes possible.”

What will the last day at the MUAC be like before leaving for the Reina Sofía? "Emotional. This office is going to be empty of my objects and affections. And probably that photo [of the

staff

] will no longer be here. It's going to be an emotional day. Thanks to my team, the MUAC, the UNAM. Yes, it will be an important day in my life.”

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