Constellations and Drifts: Art from Latin America in the FEMSA Collection

As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations, the FEMSA Collection opens the exhibition Constellations and Drifts: Art from Latin America in the FEMSA Collection at the Monterrey Museum of Contemporary Art (MARCO), offering new perspectives that highlight the depth and significance of one of the most influential collections of 20th- and 21st-century contemporary Latin American art.

Over five decades, the FEMSA Collection has gathered works by artists of distinct generations that reflect the evolution, complexity, and diversity of artistic production in the region, with a special emphasis on Mexican art. With 170 works by more than 100 Latin American artists, the exhibition offers the most comprehensive presentation of the collection to date in Mexico, while offering a compelling look at how it continues to evolve.

Far from being organized as a chronological journey, Constellations and Drifts proposes a curatorial structure based on five curatorial themes which draw connections and establish relationships between works from different eras, geographies, and generations.

Curated by Eugenia Braniff, Paulina Bravo, and Beto Díaz Suárez, curators of the FEMSA Collection, and Adriana Melchor, an independent curator, the exhibition is organized around five constellations: Territories: The Symbolic Limits of Geography; Architectures of Colonization: Between Language and Bodies; Debating Abstraction: Geometry and Form in Latin America; Alchemy: Transformation, Transmutation, and Change; and Identities: Identities on the (Im)Possibility of a Chorus, all of which reflect the curatorial vision currently guiding the development and direction of the collection.

The exhibition features works by key figures in Latin American art, including Jesús Rafael Soto, Rufino Tamayo, María Izquierdo, Diego Rivera, Joaquín Torres-García, Fanny Sanín, Helen Escobedo and Gego, along with recent acquisitions and contemporary artists, whose practices broaden the collection’s perspectives.

The exhibition holds special significance in the context of its presentation at MARCO, an institution whose history is closely intertwined with that of the FEMSA Collection. This collaboration carries added resonance as the collection marks its 50th anniversary. Presented in the city where the collection first took shape, the exhibition returns to its point of origin, revisiting the intellectual and artistic inquiries that have defined it while projecting new lines of research for the years ahead. 

An exhibition that comes alive beyond the galleries

In addition to the works from the collection, Constellations and Drifts includes commissioned artwork by the Argentine artist Ad Minoliti, conceived as an active space within the exhibition. His project proposes collage as a tool for exploring the construction of identities and will be activated through workshops and encounters with artists, activists, and researchers.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a public program that will expand upon the conceptual themes of the show through talks, workshops, artistic activations, and interdisciplinary encounters. These activities aim to create spaces for dialogue that allow diverse audiences to establish new connections with the works.

Among the programming accompanying the exhibition, Metabolic Routes stands out as an initiative that extends the exhibition's themes to other spaces within the museum. Through residencies led by guest Mexican chefs, the project explores the relationships between art, territory, memory, and transformative processes through the lens of cuisine. These immersive food experiences, presented at the MARCO restaurant, will result in temporary menus inspired by the constellations of the exhibition, inviting visitors to literally taste the ideas explored in the galleries. The program will remind guests that cultural knowledge is not only seen, but tasted, smelled, and embodied by all the senses.