FEATURE: Contemporary Art in San Luis Potosí

Alexandra Rauscher, editor of the Art in San Miguel magazine (artinsanmiguel.com) interviews art writer Jon Bonfiglio about the unique offerings of San Luis Potosí, in Mexico's north. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to Less Time Than Ideas, Art Across the Americas. My name is Alexander Foscher. I'm a writer and editor at artsanmiguel.com, the art post of San Miguel de Allende and beyond. Today I have the pleasure to speak to regular host of this podcast, John Bonfiglio, about his recent trip to San Luis Potosi. Welcome, John. Hey Alex, how are you? You've recently been to San Luis Potosi, where there's a fair share of uh contemporary art going on, and I wanted to ask you if you could walk us through the highlights of your what you saw there and visited.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Yeah, of course. Um yeah, San Luis Potosi is um a few hours northeast of Mexico City on your way up into the north of Mexico. Sometimes it sort of gets lost a little bit um alongside another city, which is a few hours further north of Monterey, which is sort of a um a major uh business, industrial, sporting, and cultural hub. But um San Luis Potosí, I think, is a real gem. It's um San Luis Potosí that this the city and the state that surrounds it are probably um regarded as being among the lesser known sort of highlights, jewels in in in the crown of of Mexico, and um and certainly it is um it has a real richness, I mean a real richness of of history. Actually, it was um the capital of Mexico on two separate occasions. It has a um a really expansive uh historic colonial center, uh one of the biggest in in Mexico, and it has a really developed sort of art scene, I think, as well. Um one of the reasons why it is uh relatively known is because of the Leonora Carrington Museum. I'm sure a lot of listeners will already know of um Leonora Carrington, British born, but basically now regarded as being a sort of a Mexican artist, spent her life, gave her life to uh to Mexico and is one of the sort of the really important figures in the surrealist scene of the of the 20th century, and her her figures are really distinctive and um and unique, and there is uh yeah, there is a museum uh uh uh I guess sort of um focused around her in in San Luis Potosi. There's actually another one in Hilitla, just um uh a few hours further away as well. But this is the main one. And I think one of the the interesting things about this this museum is well, there's a few interesting points. The first is it's she it has some of her really big sculptures, distinct sculptures in it. And um what's unique about how they're placed is that they're actually located in an old museum, sorry, not an old museum, an old prison which has been converted into a sort of cultural space. And so this prison has a number of different open spaces, walkways, corridors, and so on. So what you end up finding yourself doing is actually seeing Counton's sculptures from a number of different vantage points. I guess when we see sculpture, normally we're used to seeing it sort of head-on. Sometimes you can sort of walk around it, but here actually it it you come you come at the sculptures often by surprise, and the sort of elevated walkways as well. So you end up sort of re-engaging with the sculpture in a number of different ways. And um then the other thing I'd say about the the Carrington Museum is that it's not just sort of at the end point of her work. There's lots of in a lot of the little cells, there are sort of essays or or tests, um uh experiments that she did with with her arts, sculptural as well as drawing. So it's a really um interesting and I think unique sort of homage to Carrington and her entire uh and her entire process. Um the it's worth saying as well that I mentioned the prison that the Lenora Carrington Museum is actually set in amongst a um a broader sort of um hub, cultural hub at the Central de las Artes, which is really uh uh huge to be um uh truthfully, expansive, um, and contains a number of different sort of um areas for uh for workshops, a theatre, music rooms, and uh and the like, also. And then alongside the Lionero Carrington Museum, I think there's two other highlights that I would sort of bring up. The the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, is really well worth a visit. It's in a unique building which has uh reinvented itself and on a number of occasions. It was sort of a meat packing uh factory at uh at one point. It's um it's really distinct, it has really distinctive architecture in its set alone, and it has uh it always has um sort of rotating exhibitions of surprise artists in in temporary in temporary galleries. So that's really well worth a visit. And the other gem, I think, is the Museo Federico Silva. So this is the um when it was initially established, it was the only museum dedicated to contemporary sculpture in Latin America, and it is predominantly focused on this Mexican sculptor uh from Mexico City, uh Federico Silva, uh, whose parents emigrated from uh from Spain, and he sort of grew up in a living in a market. They made their home in a market in Mexico City, but he he took to sculpture um and was sort of self-taught, and um a lot of the sculptures, I guess a significant part of the museum is set over to his really distinct um sort of sculptural practices, which are somewhere between abstract and also they take uh the sort of the imagery and iconography, I suppose, of a lot of sort of pre-Columbian civilizations as well. But they're really um really stunning pieces set in what is also an incredible building. But it's also not just his work, there's also a number of other gallery spaces that sort of bring um contemporary sculpture much more up to date and have uh have rotating exhibitions of different um individuals and artists that that are in there as well. So, yeah, so the Federico Silva uh museum and Museo Federico Silva is is also a a highlight.

SPEAKER_00 6:04

Thanks, John, for walking us through here. You already mentioned that all of the buildings that host these museums ha have these layered paths, like for example, the one that's hosting Leonardo Carrington. From your perspective, what does that say about how Mexican cities hold onto their history?

SPEAKER_01 6:20

Yeah, sometimes these buildings are at risk. And and and there's uh you know, and and sometimes there's a problem as well, because sometimes a bit a building can be so uh unique and um sort of suffused with history that you can't actually see the artwork because you're s you're sort of trapped by the building itself. But I think with the with the ex prison, it just actually works really, really uh well and and uniquely it sort of complements uh the sculpture in a way that I'm not sure I've ever quite seen before because it is it's not just uh again a small space, it is such a big space that you I mean unless you know the the Centro de las Artas, this ex prison, really well, you're gonna get lost in it. There's no way around it. So what ends up happening is you end up sort of walking through a labyrinth where you end up sort of discovering lots of different artworks. And actually in the Museo de Federico Silva, Museo Federico Silva, I think that's also interesting because what they did there was that um despite it being a sort of a unique uh sort of historic protected facade, they actually um opened up the they've got a sort of a temporary roof on it, which they can lift off in order to bring sculptures in and and and out. And what they've done is they've actually um they then sort of restored the building around the sculptures, the uh Federico Silva sculptures itself. So you've got kind of unique light coming in in different places. You've got this this uh huge um I guess almost sort of Jaguar-like rock figure that's buried in the ground that was uh that was that had a dome built uh around it. So it's not the sculpture fitting into the building, it's almost the building being created around the sculpture. And actually, uh I think you bring up a really good point, but the juxtaposition between the buildings and the work just works, just functions uniquely well, I think, in these three museums in San Luis Potosí.

SPEAKER_00 8:10

Definitely worth a visit, it sounds like.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Yeah, I know I I think definitely would recommend it to anybody sort of passing through the north um of Mexico. Absolutely a sort of a cultural highlight, and very specifically a sort of contemporary art highlight.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Thanks. And you also wrote about it in more detail um on the platform Art in San Miguel. So uh for our listeners, if you want to dive deeper into contemporary art in in San Luis Potes, uh you can pay a visit to Art in San Miguel. Thanks, John.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

Thanks for that, Alex.