A New Show of Contemporary Mexican Design Explores the Explosive Scene on Its Own Terms

Mexican art, architecture, and design have long garnered attention, more so in recent years as the country’s capital has emerged as a cultural agora for Latin America, if not the wider world. The renewed interest, however, has the potential to bring with it certain stereotypes. For many, Mexican design consists of thick woven tapestries, bright geometric patterns, and the use of natural fibers like rattan—items we might expect to find in a touristy market.

With the “Everything Here Is Volcanic” show, running January 12 to February 18 at New York gallery Friedman Benda, curator Mario Ballesteros has set out to challenge these cliches. He’s borrowed the metaphor of volcanoes from Swiss architect Hannes Meyer’s observations of Mexico’s eruptive creative scene in the 1940s to reveal that such categorical thinking does little to encompass the full scope of its contemporary output. Residing in Mexico City for over a decade, Meyer (formerly the director of Bauhaus Dessau) aimed to counteract how certain forces work to overlook undefinable talents simply to maintain easily packaged images.

“There is something about Mexico that makes it impossible to categorize neatly,” Ballesteros told Artnet News. “The show is a small attempt to contain this flowing, vibrant, chaotic energy that transcends professional or typological concerns. Are these works by artists or designers? Is this furniture or sculpture? Are these objects speaking to the past, to the present, or the future? Where do they all meet? Where do they all point to?” 

In the exhibition, while art and architecture studio Tezontle reinterprets a suite of age-old cooking devices using volcanic rock in , fashion designer and artist Bárbara Sánchez Kane crafts her (2022) bucket seats out of leather and pinewood. Pedro Reyes’s organicist is literally made out of hardened lava. Amorphous figurines abound in Tony Mascarena and Ángela Esteban’s ceramics. In keeping with the rebellious theme of the exhibition, Andrés Souto’s riffs on Italian architect and designer Achille Castiglioni‘s iconic luminaire.

Other noted exhibitors include renowned architect Frida Escobedo; rising talent Fernando Laposse; sculptor Lorena Ancona; ceramicist Alejandro García; fashion polymath Víctor Barragán; and young artists Allan Villavicencio, Tony Macarena, and Wendy Cabrera Rubio.

What curator Mario Ballesteros is demonstrating is that there is as much sophisticated conceptual ideations, material transmutation, and personal expression enacted through various creative disciplines in Mexico as there is in the United States and Europe, not that those scenes should be the rock against which all else is measured.