Tenth-anniversary celebration

Capping a decade of trailblazing exhibitions and programs that have made it Mexico’s leading institution of contemporary art, Museo Jumex will celebrate its 10th anniversary beginning in November 2023. Established as the main platform of Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, created by philanthropist, art collector, and Foundation president Eugenio López Alonso, Museo Jumex has achieved international recognition for its dual mission of bringing works of renowned international artists to Mexico for the first time and elevating the work of today’s Mexican and Latin American artists. To commemorate its anniversary, Museo Jumex will present a building-wide exhibition of works from the Colección Jumex guest curated by Lisa Phillips and a commemorative book from Rizzoli International Publications.

Eugenio López Alonso said, “I am deeply proud of everything Museo Jumex has accomplished over the past decade and look forward to the insights and experiences we will offer our wide and diverse audience in the future. Museo Jumex has contributed to a thriving Mexico City contemporary art culture with international reach, where innovative art from around the world shares the stage with outstanding works by artists from Mexico and Latin America. To everyone who has participated in our ten-year journey to this milestone, I give my thanks.”

Museo Jumex’s 10th-anniversary exhibition, titled Everything Gets Lighter, will present works from the Colección Jumex by 70 international artists and will be guest curated by Lisa Phillips, the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. While providing a critical survey of the collection, with works created between 1964 and 2020, the exhibition will highlight poetic and personal responses to light as a healing force for today’s issues. Considering “light” as both illumination and freedom from gravity, Everything Gets Lighter invites audiences to explore themes of ecology, identity, society, and spirit through extraordinary contemporary sculptures, installations, and paintings. As part of Everything Gets Lighter, Museo Jumex will present Waterfall (1998), a large-scale sculpture by Olafur Eliasson in the museum’s Plaza. 

In 2024, in celebration of the anniversary, Rizzoli will publish a book documenting all the exhibitions over the past 10 years, featuring important contributions from internationally renowned artists and curators such as Jeff Koons, Melanie Smith, Jessica Morgan, Humberto Moro, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Patrick Charpenel, María Minera, David Chipperfield, and Massimiliano Gioni. 

The anniversary book continues the museum’s dedication to creating insightful and highly regarded publications about contemporary art. Over the past ten years Museo Jumex has published substantial catalogues to accompany its exhibitions, such as Learning to Read with John Baldessari, Gustav Metzger: We must become idealists or die, and Pedro Reyes: the Permanent Revolution; artists books and editions by Lari Pittman, Fischli & Weiss, Michael Lin and Mario García Torres; as well as an ongoing series of affordable guidebooks to accompany every exhibition.

A decade dedicated to contemporary art
Over the past decade, Museo Jumex has organized and presented more than 100 exhibitions and offered robust public programming to engage with and attracting millions of visitors. Notable exhibitions have included Cy Twombly: Paradise (2014); Calder: Discipline of the Dance (2015); Andy Warhol: Dark Star (2017); Memories of Underdevelopment: Art and the Decolonial Turn in Latin America, 1960-1985 (2018); Appearance Stripped Bare: Desire and the Object in the Work of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons, Even (2019); Sofía Táboas: Thermal Range (2021); Urs Fischer: Lovers (2022); Jannis Kounellis in Six Acts (2023); and Gabriel Kuri: Forecast (2023). Museo Jumex has also organized exhibitions dedicated to the work of John Baldessari, Lina Bo Bardi, Ulises Carrión, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Gertrud Goldschmidt (Gego), Xavier Le Roy, Philippe Parreno, Walid Raad, Robert Ryman, James Turrell, and Franz Erhard Walther, among others. 

Monumental art installations presented on the museum’s pubic plaza have included Urs Fischer’s monumental Lovers (2022), Gonzalo Lebrija’s Breve Historia del Tiempo (Brief History of Time) (2020), and Seated Ballerina (2019) by Jeff Koons. Projects including Fritz Haeg & Nils Norman: Proposals for a Plaza; Rirkrit Tiravanija: UFO (Universal Fantastic Occupation) and Michael Lin: Mariposa B1-09 have provided space for public interaction and participation.  

As part of its core mission to bring contemporary art to the public, Museo Jumex’s exhibitions are accompanied by public, community and educational programs in the building and offsite.  Programs include workshops, lectures, artist-led talks and exhibition tours, symposiums, family activities, guided tours for schools and general audiences, volunteer outreach initiatives and digital projects reaching more than 5,000 people a year.

Since 2013, Museo Jumex has collaborated globally with cultural organizations, including Dia Art Foundation, Hammer Museum, LACMA, MALBA Colección Costantini, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), MoMA, MoMA PS1, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and the Walker Art Center.