Fifteen years of SOMA: Why institutionality can be its own political act

“In the history of education, there is a fundamental tension between liberation and discipline that crystallizes in times of crisis,” writes Noah Simblist in his introduction to Living to Learn: Art & Education for the Common Good, co-published by Inventory Press and Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU) this month.1 As the result of a multi-year international research project, Living to Learn compiles contributions from over seventy artists, curators, and scholars that study an international crop of art schools—both formal and informal—as well as museums, artistic practices, and biennials that have used education as methodology to respond to a range of socioeconomic and political challenges.

Focusing only on the past twenty-five years, Living to Learn portrays the “educational turn” of the new millennium as a reaction to the rise of knowledge and attention economies, as well as constraints on academia from government political agendas, the student debt crisis, and how land-grant universities are implicated in ongoing processes of colonialization and real-estate profiteering. The project's scope is ambitious and finds timely urgency as a body of work produced by an American public research university.

My essay, published in full below, focuses on SOMA, an artist-run alternative art school in Mexico City that has operated since 2009. I was a member of its MFA-like program’s second graduating class and its 2011 international summer program cohort. While writing about SOMA over a decade later, the question that emerged was: to what exactly is this school an alternative? To costly MFA programs in the United States? Or to the far narrower array of options in Latin America? To the need to rely on representation by a gallery to achieve financial stability as a professional artist? Is SOMA resisting the Mexican Secretary of Education’s requirement that all faculty must have MFAs and all students must have graduated from high school? Or is it disputing the role that cultural capital plays in Mexico’s soft-power transformation under President Sheinbaum’s pro-tourism “Plan México” policy, which has created a housing crisis and triggered anti-tourism protests? 

The answer, to the degree that there is one, emerges in the form of an institutional paradox that arises from SOMA’s refusal to be pinned down. Throughout its sixteen years of existence, the school has shown a steadfast commitment to sustaining itself as an elastic platform, constantly shifting its facilities, programs, and faculty according to artists’ needs. But the rapidly changing socioeconomics of Mexico City and of the international art industry at large make SOMA’s formalization more pressing. Is this the inevitable tradeoff of growing up? Or does this imperative signal a more seismic shift under foot? As twentieth-century hegemonic structures break down, destabilizing the world in their wake, perhaps SOMA’s formalization points to how artists, such as Yoshua Okón and the Artist Council at SOMA, will have to construct frameworks of stability for themselves by building new arts institutions, while clearly defining who they will serve and how they will be funded.

In keeping with Living to Learn’s focus on education, the publication is being used as a tool to engage conversations at universities and in cities including VCUarts in Doha, Lugar a Dudas in Cali, Center for Art Research and Alliances (CARA) in New York and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. 

—Kim Córdova

Living to Learn: Art & Education for the Common Good, edited by Noah Simblist (Inventory Press, 2026). © Inventory Press.

In November 2024, SOMA, the nonprofit alternative artist-run art school in Mexico City, celebrated fifteen years of operation. There is a macabre irony to writing about the project, which draws deeply on the legacies of arts-education programs in the United States, in the context of the all-consuming culture wars that have empowered a pro-nationalist US administration to vilify, attack, and defund higher education. MAGA’s special reserve of rancor for liberal-arts education makes now a uniquely charged moment to write about the legacy of a radically generous project of collective work by a group of artists in Mexico who use education as practice and who view national borders as provincialisms to be disregarded.

I could never write an objective essay about SOMA or the people who gave it form. It’s had too big an impact on the direction of my life and work. I first participated in SOMA as a member of the second SOMA Summer cohort in 2011. Later that year, I was invited to apply to the second generation of the two-year Spanish-language Programa Educativo SOMA (PES), giving me the honor of being the first US citizen to enroll—and, far more dubiously, making me the reason SOMA had to institute a language-proficiency policy for future PES students. Sentimentality aside, I’m steadfast in the belief that the program has had an outsize impact not only on contemporary art ecosystems and practice in Mexico, but also throughout the Americas and beyond.

With the recognition that I would need help to wade through the muck of my memory and nostalgia to write an essay about SOMA in its quinceñera year, this essay reflects interviews with Eduardo Abaroa, Ricardo Alzati, Laura Cortés Hesselbach, Anthony Graves, Cuauhtémoc Medina, and Yoshua Okón. It goes without saying that there are infinite ways to tell a story of SOMA, and this is just one.

The word “school,” even if modified with a series of academic qualifiers, feels limited as a definition for SOMA, given its scope and the breadth of its impact. A more precise descriptor might be a post-Conceptual artists’ response to a set of social, cultural, economic, and political forces that coalesced into Mexico being a place with a rich artistic history and cultural life but with subpar graduate-level university studio-art programs. “I always have the feeling that one has to speak of SOMA both as an attempt to deal with the problem and as a symptom of the problem. Somehow the fact that these few artists with very little resources in a little house somewhere lost in Mexico City have such an influence is a sign of how wrongly the official [art education] system is being run,” said Cuauhtémoc Medina, the former chief curator of Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo and a researcher at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

It’s important to keep in mind that SOMA was born in the early 2000s, a time when “post-studio” and “post-Fordist” artistic practices were dominant. According to Ricardo Alzati, a faculty member and member of SOMA’s Artist Council, SOMA intentionally “moved away from that more immaterial post-Fordist model of artist as a globetrotter with a video camera and a computer that lived between two or three cities, acquiring instead a focus on the local contexts and their implications for our discourse and outputs.” To this end, a potent source of SOMA’s strength is its rootedness in and its commitment to Mexico. According to Anthony Graves, SOMA Summer 2019 codirector and artist, when SOMA started, in 2009, “artists like Eduardo Abaroa, Mario Garcia, and Yoshua Okón had international careers. SOMA and SOMA Summer planted them back in Mexico City.”

As an institution, SOMA is situated in a shifting, mandala-like Venn diagram of antecedent and descendent networks of organizations within the city, across the country, throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and beyond. As Graves put it: “The networks of associations that SOMA and SOMA Summer created, and the other institutions that spun out of them…it’s exponential.”

Founded in the early 2000s by a group of Mexico City artists led by Yoshua Okón, the project draws inspiration from several institutions for advanced studies in art, including the UCLA and CalArts MFA programs, the Rijksakademie, and the Whitney Independent Study Program, from which members of the Artist Council graduated, as well as historical precedents including Joseph Beuys’s work and Black Mountain College. This diverse set of influences created, for better or worse, a bridging effect that has developed, over time, a circuit of connection between Mexico and international art scenes. Most concretely, this circuit is evidenced by the formal agreements and exchange programs that SOMA has signed with universities including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Texas, Virginia Commonwealth University, CalArts, and Hunter College, among others.

There’s perhaps room for criticism that SOMA has had its institutional gaze overly fixed on northern influences, but, according to Alzati, “the United States, unlike Mexico, has thousands of master’s programs, or at least, it must be hundreds.” SOMA, on the other hand, “arises because of the need, because of the failure of the national institutions to provide postgraduate study in the field of art.” The number of foreign students who have come from across Latin America to study at SOMA suggests the program responds to needs that are more regional than national in scope.

Visitors at the opening of Miguel Calderón: “Ridiculum Vitae,” La Panadería, Mexico City, 1998.

SOMA was started by nineteen artists in Mexico City who are roughly grouped together as “the 1990s generation.” Their largely post-Conceptual and often dematerial approaches toward artistic practice made study abroad necessary because, at the time, neither of the city’s main university programs offered MFA curriculums informed by postwar developments in art. Reflecting the mismatch between artists’ practices and the local higher-education offerings, only seven of these founding artists have MFA degrees. Those that do earned them abroad, mostly in the United States. Graves recounts how Carla Herrera-Prats used to talk about “what it was like to be an artist in Mexico in the 1990s. There wasn’t any real North American exchange pre-NAFTA. So if a friend came and brought an art magazine it would be a very big deal; artists would look at magazines together and trade them. That restrictiveness is what Carla sought to correct” with SOMA.

Okón received his MFA from UCLA and taught an adaptation of his mentor John Baldassari’s famed Class Assignments material at SOMA, and his critique class bore clear parallels to Michael Asher’s legendary marathon Post-Studio course. Artist Council founding members Eduardo Abaroa, who served as academic director of the Programa Educativo SOMA (PES), Herrera-Prats, founding director of SOMA Summer, and Mario García Torres all earned their MFAs at CalArts. Abaroa’s pedagogical approaches were in a way influenced by Asher, who was his mentor during his MFA, but he cites other CalArts artist faculty, Charles Gaines and Leslie Dick, as more direct influences on his teaching. Other artist board members include e-flux cofounder Julieta Aranda, who received her MFA from Columbia, and Carlos Amorales, who attended the Rijksakademie. Herrera-Prats notably also graduated from the Whitney ISP, on which she based her design of SOMA Summer, going so far as to “always dress like [ISP director] Ron Clark during the program. She wore brown shoes, light stonewashed jeans, and a blue striped Oxford. It was her way to settle into the position that she created for herself. She had to sort of be him first before she could really be Carla running the program,” explained Graves, himself an ISP graduate and Herrera-Prats’s partner in their artist collaboration Camel Collective. 

An often-overlooked aspect of SOMA is that of the founding artists who received MFAs in the United States, all but one did so on Fulbright scholarships. Notably, the Fulbright stipulates that students are required to return to their home countries for two years after graduation. The Fulbright is not the reason SOMA was founded. But in a moment in which the program is being dismantled as part of a broad policy of US disengagement and discrediting of soft-power programs, I have to wonder if there’s an argument that the scholarship’s terms created an overall context of return in which artists who studied abroad were looking for community as they processed the experience of their studies abroad and thought about the next steps in their careers and practices.

While SOMA’s influences are numerous, its heritage flows most directly from local artist-run exhibition and gathering spaces La Panadería (1994–2002), which was founded by Okón and Miguel Calderón, and Temistocles 44, founded by Abaroa, Sofía Táobas, and Abraham Cruzvillegas. “The art institutions in the ’90s were very flimsy, they were not functional. So our generation, we didn’t have to demolish anything. It was already destroyed. We had to build something,” says Abaroa. Okón also cites the art classes that Abaroa and Laureana Toledo (daughter of Oaxacan artist Francisco Toledo) were giving at El Centro de Imagen as foundational for SOMA and why he approached Abaroa to be SOMA’s first academic director. At the risk of overly distributing credit for SOMA’s origin, there’s also an argument for the project’s ancestors to include a more expansive list of artist-run projects in the city, including the Museo Ex-Teresa of experimental and performance art, Francis Alÿs and Melanie Smith’s Mel’s Cafe, and La Quiñonera. SOMA’s board president, philanthropist Aimée Labarrere de Servitje, was writing her dissertation about the history of alternative artist-run arts spaces in Mexico City when Okón approached her with the idea to start the school.

Notably, Gabriel Orozco’s Friday workshops are never mentioned as an influence in SOMA’s founding. But they do emphasize an overall context of artists returning from abroad and self-organizing opportunities for communal study in response to gaps in the Mexican arts landscape that they identified based on their observations of other global cities’ art ecosystems. Moreover, several of SOMA’s founding artists are still represented by kurimanzutto, by far the most powerful gallery in Latin America, which Orozco co-founded in 1999, and which was more or less born from his Friday studio workshops. Even SOMA’s first director, Barbara Hernandez-Rosas, was recruited by Abaroa (who is represented by Kurimanzutto) from the gallery’s staff.

Reflecting on why he started SOMA, Okón instinctively begins by pointing to the societal conditions that drove him to start his previous artist-run space, La Panadería, which lasted from 1994–2002: the devastating 1985 earthquake in Mexico City and the rise of neoliberal ideology, symbolically represented in Mexico by the 1994 signing of NAFTA and the Mexican Peso “Tequila Crisis.” This was an era that prioritized markets, private enterprise built on debt leverage, a move to the suburbs, and the rhetoric of individual responsibility. These ideologies contrasted starkly with the destruction and semi-abandonment of neighborhoods like Roma, Condesa, Juarez, and Centro that were decimated by the earthquake and whose process of rebuilding was slowed by a brutal economic contraction when President Ernesto Zedillo devalued the Mexican peso as a response to the debt crisis caused by neoliberal reform of the Mexican banking sector, triggering local banks to over-leverage. “The art world in Mexico was completely crushed. Because we had the error de Diciembre, we had the Zapatismo, and we had a terrible economic crisis. Mexico started to have these waves of violence, especially in Mexico City,” said Abaroa. It was against the ruin of neighborhoods damaged by the quake, the generalized sense of isolation that neoliberalism and recession fomented, and the lack of local opportunity to exhibit post-Conceptual contemporary art in local museums that La Panadería took root as an experimental space for exhibition making and, perhaps most radically, institutionalized intergenerational artists hanging out.

According to Okón, the decision to close La Panadería in 2002, despite its success, had to do with how the Mexico City art scene had changed. Local museums had begun showing and collecting contemporary work, and other alternative spaces had begun to emerge. “So the space just wasn’t quite needed in the same way.” He himself was packing up to start his MFA in California. That said, “Every time I came back people asked when I would reopen La Panadería. It signaled to me that there was a community need still unattended in Mexico City. By then neoliberalism, along with its hyper-individualistic ethos, were fully established and the scene we had managed to build throughout the ’90s had begun to fall apart. That’s what got me thinking about starting the project that would become SOMA.”

It’s also relevant to highlight how there has been “a certain synchronicity, even symbiosis, between Soma and SITAC,” said Medina. SITAC is a biannual art theory conference and the flagship public program of Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo (PAC). Founded in 2000, PAC is a nonprofit organization supported by a community of patrons and philanthropists that funds artistic production, exhibitions, and publishing projects through open calls. SITAC was first held in 2002, a time in which global cities faced a “keeping up with the Joneses”–type pressure to have a biennial—something that to this day Mexico City notably lacks. Rather than respond to the impulse to start a biennial to exhibit art objects, the PAC elected to organize a “biennial” institution whose focus was on conversations about critical theory. Like SOMA, SITAC responded to a moment driven by the logic of markets with a staunchly anti-market and anti–art object proposal.

Over the years, many of SOMA’s artist-professors and leaders have directed or spoken at SITAC, including Abaroa, who directed SITAC 9, and Jesse Lerner and Ruben Ortiz Torres, who directed SITAC 15. Aimée Servitje, president of SOMA’s Board of Patrons, also serves as president of PAC. Today, SOMA’s founding director, Hernandez Rosas, is the general director of PAC. Both institutions facilitate artist conversations, but in different ways.

The outdoor space at SOMA’s new location in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood of Mexico City. Courtesy of SOMA.

SOMA’s move this year to a new location has provoked significant institutional reflection. The new building emphasizes a new chapter in the project’s history. Yearly rent increases had made the school’s original home, located in the middle-class San Pedro de los Pinos neighborhood that has been synonymous with the institution since its founding, too expensive to sustain. SOMA, it seems, like the artists who have graduated from the program, can be seen as a victim of the project’s success—which is itself tangentially connected to Mexico City’s radical soft-power transformation over the last decade. In the last fifteen years the city’s international reputation has radically evolved from a place foreigners feared and thought of as synonymous with street crime to a place synonymous with culture and taste that they aspire to visit. This has had real impacts on the city, including making it more expensive to live in and to operate a program like SOMA.

This moment of reflection and renegotiation points to how radically and rapidly transformative the 2010s have been for Mexico, for the art industry, and for the world. I often think about how, when I first arrived in Mexico City in 2011, my goal was to improve my Spanish so that I could comfortably order a “sitio” taxi from a radio dispatch service on my Nokia burner bar phone. These days, not a word of Spanish is needed to zip around the city as Uber and the logic of the markets have eradicated speaking local languages as a “friction” of international travel. The externalities created by Mexico City’s enviable status in the attention economy became noticeable in SOMA Summer first. “The image of Mexico City became so big and so popular, it became very trendy. In 2018 and 2019 it was really obvious that applicants just wanted to come and see the hip cool stuff. And then we started to see these differences among the group. Participants were coming with other economic possibilities; they were more interested in going to Pujol, or in drinking natural wines,” explained director Cortés Hesselbach. It might sound absurdly bobo to mention the Michelin two-star restaurant and natural wine in the context of the educational turn in contemporary art, but the large July 4, 2025 protests against gentrification and digital nomads, which called for gringos to leave Mexico and left several businesses in Roma and Condesa vandalized, emphasizes the magnitude of the issue and local communities’ frustration with it. It also highlights how radically the sociocultural and economic contexts in which SOMA operates today have changed, and how they oblige the project to adapt as much as its changing internal dynamics do.

Cortés Hesselbach again: “Everything is changing. That understanding has really allowed us to understand how to adapt the programs. For instance, SOMA Summer. Obviously, after Carla passed away, the program changed. There was a lot of resistance at first to changing the program because it was her program and it was perfect. But it was tailor-made according to her personality and her energy.

“Looking back, I think that we were, in a way, really lucky that COVID happened. It really made us think how the program could continue by understanding the core of the program under new circumstances.” She continued, “With COVID, it was obvious that the program could not run the same way as it was happening before, two months in Mexico City with the low-vaccination process happening here and, yes, the inflation in prices that COVID created. The format of the program in 2021, a three-week summer camp outside of Mexico City, really helped to change the profile of the people that were applying. I’m not saying that the previous participants were wrong or anything, but the program recovered the sense that it was a thematic program; people were not [any longer] applying to SOMA Summer just because of the Mexico City art scene.”

As SOMA settles into a new house and grounds in the lovely, leafy, and central San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood—the ten-year lease from local collector Moisés Cosío gives the institution some medium-term stability—it also highlights how the school is rethinking the tensions, opportunities, and dynamics of making art today to understand how to serve emerging artists. This has included questioning everything from confronting the role of art and artists in gentrification at a moment when Mexico City is straining under the effects of rapid migration by digital nomads, to rethinking the ideal hour to schedule public lectures for Gen Z artists who don’t really drink and therefore don’t relate to the dynamics of bars and beers the way that previous generations do. “One of the great things about SOMA is that the programs are constantly being studied and being evaluated. I mean the [PES] program changes every three months, and no generation has had the same program as the generation before,” explained Cortés Hesselbach.

Some dynamics remain constant. SOMA remains committed to keeping tuition as affordable as possible. And they still refuse to pursue accreditation from Mexico’s Secretary of Education (SEP) because doing so makes the program more accessible to artists that might not have had access to formal education like undergraduate university programs or even high school. Moreover, having SEP accreditation would add burdensome bureaucratic requirements that don’t necessarily fit the needs of an art school. For example, though all the faculty are known and respected artists, they do not all have MFAs or PhDs, which SEP accreditation would require. The trade-off is that, as SOMA attracts artists to Mexico from other countries, it cannot sponsor their visas—a critical gap in their integration into the Mexican art system by which artists “rise” through selection for public grants like the FONCA (which today is renamed Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación y Proyectos Culturales, or by the acronym SACPC) or the Carillo Gil (which no longer exists), all of which require formal residency status. “We support them as much as we can, for example with letters. But we are not an accredited school, so I think there is an implicit understanding by the students who come that they have to be a bit resourceful and solve those issues as individuals,” said Alzati.

So what exactly is SOMA?

First, it’s independent and artist-run. Second, it’s nonprofit, noncommercial, and nongovernmental (it receives no government funding). Formally, it comprises four main programs: the heavily subsidized Spanish-language two-year PES or Programa Educativo de SOMA, which is roughly analogous to an MFA (albeit without studios), and has over the years graduated 179 students from sixteen countries. This program for years granted ninety-percent scholarships to all students and has since transitioned to be tuition-free. There is the English-language SOMA Summer for international students, which has graduated 390 students from seventy-two countries. There is a residency program for invited artists, and a public lecture series called Miercoles de SOMA [SOMA Wednesdays], which has now run, with precious few exceptions, every Wednesday for the last fifteen years and is archived on the SOMA YouTube channel.

After a handful of interviews and reflecting upon my own experiences with the institution, SOMA emerges as a bit of a paradox. “I have a feeling that one good thing about SOMA is that it’s not necessarily creating a ‘school,’” said Medina brightly. By this he meant that it has not created a group of artists that produce or think in a cleanly groupable way. This signals the school’s pedagogical approach is elastic enough to serve many kinds of practices rather than impose a kind of aesthetic or ideological tribalism. “It’s a very functional sort of schema rather than an ideology of what we want to do or what we want you to learn from SOMA,” Aboaroa reflected.

At the same time, it’s an institution built to respond to a context of institutional and market failures that in turn has sprouted other institutions—both internally and externally. SOMA houses programs that have evolved to become institution-like: there is the Cuarto de Proyectos [the Projects Room]; the Campeonato Mundial de Ceviche [World Ceviche Championship], which we started as an end-of-term celebration for a class taught by artist Rubén Ortiz Torres and is now an annual community-wide gathering run by artist Ling Sepulveda; an art book library (that is not yet open to the public) intending to address how difficult and expensive it is to access art books in Mexico; the annual benefit auction, which began as a 2011 SOMA Summer participant-led initiative, and helped offset the cost of the school’s stolen laptop when two members of our cohort and SOMA’s then-coordinator were mugged; and the Hymno de SOMA, which, somehow fit- tingly, is to the tune of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.”

These days there seems to be a dip in the number of alternative and artist-run projects in the city. “It’s something that always goes in waves,” commented Okón, sounding unworried. Nevertheless, participants of SOMA’s programs have started their own institutions, including, in Mexico City alone: Taller Tajo, a production studio and artist residency; the Croma artist collective; the Local1 residency, bar, and exhibition space; the currently dormant Biquini Wax collective; and Canalla, in nearby Ciudad Neza. Outside of the capital, other projects include the Almendro artist residency in Culiacán and Bruma Laboratoria in Veracruz. I’m unaware of SOMA Summer students starting artist-run institutions in other countries but if probability is an indicator, the odds seem high.

The program seems to attract those doggedly committed to art. According to Cortés Hesselbach, “93 percent of SOMA’s graduates still primarily identify as artists, even if that work doesn’t earn them their living.” And a majority of them stay in Mexico City for at least a few years before moving on—myself among them. I stayed for ten years before personal circumstances obliged returning to the United States. I do what I can to maintain a connection to Mexico, but admittedly it waxes and wanes based on life’s circumstances. Do I still identify as “an artist”? That feels harder to say. To the extent that I do, my definition of artist is radically expansive, but this is thanks to the influence of SOMA and studying under faculty like Abaroa, Herrara-Prats, Okón, and Minerva Cuevas.

The current context of censorship and institutional collapse—at least in global north contexts—makes for a charged climate for writing an essay about the past, present, and future of SOMA. As of this writing, the future of one of SOMA’s antecedent programs, the storied and admired Whitney ISP, is shockingly in question. Sara Nadal-Melsió, who co-directed SOMA Summer in 2019, was the first ISP Associate Director appointed after ISP founder Ron Clark’s retirement. She was fired and the whole ISP program was “paused” by the Whitney Museum’s new director, Scott Rothkopf, in retaliation for her and the students fighting to maintain the program’s academic independence from the museum. Prior to the ISP, Nadal-Melsió had been hand-picked by Herrera-Prats to codirect SOMA Summer 2019 with Graves when Herrera-Prats’s health declined. The unclear fate of the ISP alludes to how many cultural institutions today find their leadership’s (boards, donors, directors) interests at odds with those implementing programs—staff, artists, and audiences among them. The institutional schisms at programs like the ISP make SOMA’s determination to operate as a rigorously noncommercial and independent space feel particularly trenchant.

As SOMA symbolically becomes an adult, or at least a teen, in its quinceñera year, the challenge is balancing how it conceptualizes itself as an elastic artistic response to a set of societal dynamics with its need to build organizational stability and institutional permanence. “It’s starting to acquire the responsibilities of an institution. There’s an awareness that it has to respond to more requirements than just having a multigenerational conversation about contemporary art. It begins to assume more responsibilities because there are so many people involved. There are the students, graduates, and people who support it with resources, and they all expect to see certain outcomes, right?” says Alzati.

At a certain point, all institutions, even radical communal ones, have to confront the unsexy and often treacherous trade-offs of institutional administration and sustainability. SOMA is no exception. Our present has become so destabilized it’s impossible to say what the future will hold. But for now, SOMA’s determination to find ways to continue to exist as an artist-run space independent of the art market and government funding may emerge as its most miraculous and political act.