A nightmare attacked David Alfaro Siqueiros at night during his last season in prison. The muralist who marked an era in Mexico dreamed of a gigantic painting, his masterpiece, which provoked the envy of living and dead colleagues. But when he walked away to look at her, all he could see was a tiny blank canvas. He always woke up trembling. “There is no shortage of those who think that in prison we artists enjoy a kind of painful, but fruitful retirement,” he confessed to the journalist Julio Scherer, who visited him several times during his four-year confinement in the Black Palace of Lecumberri. “I wish it were true. My soul is devoted to the monumental work and I curse this cell whose opposite walls I could almost touch just by stretching out my arms ”.
A fervent communist militant, Siqueiros was arrested in 1960, accused of the crime of “social dissolution”. The Government of Adolfo López Mateos used this ground at its discretion against whoever it considered an enemy of the country, and the painter fell after using a mural to denounce the violent repression of the railroad union that ended with the imprisonment of more than 10,000 workers throughout the country. . He spent four years in the Mexico City jail painting screens and small canvases. A year after his pardon, in 1965, he began the construction of the “first study of muralism in the world”, where he would forever bury the nightmare that made him sweat cold in prison.
The Tallera, the study that Siqueiros baptized in feminine as “Tribute to the creative woman of life”, was built in Cuernavaca. In the navel of a small hill, the painter built his last resting place in front of a grave that allowed him to walk his 69-year-old body among the last murals that closed the patio without the need for scaffolding. There he took refuge during the last decade of his life and created his masterpiece, The March of Humanity, a mammoth tribute of eight pieces to reflect the passage of the man who sustains history. In Cuernavaca he left his last murals, two studies of lines and pyramids extended in space, which time corroded after his death and turned them into the silent walls of the most eccentric residence in a well-off neighborhood to the east of the city.
Upon his death in 1974, Siqueiros bequeathed the workshop “to the people of Mexico” with the hope that it would become a nerve center for his obsession: art with political commitment and social function. The Tallera it was the center of a struggle of almost four decades that was conquered by two women. His widow, Angélica Arenal, died 15 years after the muralist, having managed to get the State of Morelos to give up the land in front of the house to turn it into a park. And in 2010, after a public competition that brought together architects from all over the country, the Mexican Frida Escobedo finally turned it into a public room. In an era of colossal museums, his project broke the charts. Escobedo conceived the rebirth of The Tallera with a single movement: turn the two abandoned murals towards the park to open an open-air gallery that today welcomes its visitors with a blow of force. These days, Siqueiros’ workshop in Cuernavaca has become the most important Mexican addition to the Chicago Art Institute’s Architecture collection, one of the most important in the world.
Siqueiros (Chihuahua, 1896 – Morelos, 1974) lived more lives than many other men who died at the age of 77 could count. In 1914 he enlisted in the army of President Venustiano Carranza who persecuted Emiliano Zapata at the end of the Mexican Revolution; in 1936 he left for Spain to defend the republic in the Civil War; and in 1940 he led the first attack against Leon Trotsky, when the Bolshevik revolutionary thought he had found refuge from Stalinism in the arms of President Lázaro Cárdenas. In between, along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, he put Mexican muralism on the map with a monumental work that never neglected his revolutionary commitment. The march of humanity is, perhaps, its most latent example: today, millions of Mexicans can see its masterpiece when passing by Insurgentes Sur Avenue, one of the neuralgic points of the Mexican capital’s traffic.
The dream of an open-air museum
“The practice of Mexican muralism has generated an indisputable link between plastic art and architecture,” explains Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, the curator of the Chicago Art Institute responsible for incorporating Escobedo’s project into the museum’s collection. “Mexico is one of the countries that best understood the political and transformative capacity of aesthetics as a constructor of identity. As one of the axes of modernity, in Mexico architecture cannot be understood without mural art, ”says Borjabad, who after two years of work, shares with EL PAÍS the acquisition of 73 pieces – including models, building fragments, collages and photographs by Rafael Gamo– that the architect Frida Escobedo gathered during the remodeling process of The Tallera.
North of Jardines de Cuernavaca, a silent colony of mansions with high walls and winding streets in the capital of the State of Morelos, The Tallera welcomes its visitors with the view of the last Siqueiros murals open towards a square. One Sunday at the end of summer, three children herd their kites before the imposing sight of the last works of the muralist. Two women wash clothes in a stream on one side of the plaza, looking up at the walls that Escobedo moved on its axis to create a gallery that remains open even if the museum closes its doors.
“Not doing, in architecture, is a radical act,” says Borjabad, who finds a strong political content in Escobedo’s work. “After the construction boom and the atrocities of over-urbanization in its eagerness to build and build, the project understands that doing something is not always throwing it away and starting from scratch. Escobedo’s proposal is an indoor acupuncture intervention, where the domestic rooms of the house begin to be erased so that the cultural space appears ”, says the curator. “The work is not of clean tabIt is not an imposition of the identity of the architect. That, in terms of modernity, may seem naive, but it is very important because we come from a system of star architects, from a certain show that wants to start from scratch towards something totally new. Working with history and leaving traces of the elements that one wants to preserve is something very paradigmatic in this century: taking a private space, the workshop, and opening it to the public far from the idea of the pristine museum ”.
A collection to dialogue with the present
With its inclusion in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the archive of The Tallera becomes part of one of the largest public architecture exhibitions in the world. The city is the epitome of the modernity of this art. After a fire that devoured its riverbank and left more than 100,000 people homeless in 1871, Chicago once again rose to the ambition of men like Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, or Daniel Burnham, whose buildings around the Chicago River still they are its main economic pole and tourist attraction. Almost 100 years after the fire and the architectural explosion, the largest museum in the city began to delve into the archive bequeathed by its architects to form the architecture collection that today is one of the only collections on permanent display to the public.
Maite Borjabad (Madrid, 1988) says that she joined her team of curators in 2017, with the concern of looking for pieces that open a dialogue between the richness of the collection and “other intercultural perspectives”, of race, gender and identity, to rethinking the symbolic place of buildings and deconstructing the narratives that the built environment carries. “Using the collection and new acquisitions as a tool to represent and rethink the world in which we live and challenge the monolithic narratives of history,” says the curator, who recalls that she began to study Architecture during the Great Economic Recession that began to hit to the world in 2008. “A crisis created precisely by the real estate bubble, in which I understood that the role that we architects could have could go far beyond the construction of unnecessary massive equipment”, she describes. After graduating in Madrid, in 2015 he began his work as an assistant to the architecture curatorship of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York while completing his master’s degree at Columbia University, and two years later he made the leap to the Art Institute of Chicago, where She has worked as a curator focused on critical spatial practices, design and architecture, leading an innovative acquisitions strategy and major exhibitions that unite art and architecture.
The two years that he dedicated to acquiring the pieces of The Tallera they are just a tip of the work that he describes as a struggle against time and absences in the historical narrative of the collections, a search for symbolic works that defend themselves by their quality before a dominated archive – as has happened in a large part of the arts – “from a very specific perspective: that of the white, western, heterosexual, normative and middle-aged man”. His acquisitions include other works such as the Monument to Sacolândia by the Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin, who through a model made with cement sacks and a video-performance puts in the center the testimony of the workers who risked their lives in the construction in 1960 of Brasilia, the iconic city of the planned modernity as the capital of Brazil; or Landscapes of [Re]construction by Chicagoan Emmanuel Pratt, a piece that uses mapping tools typical of urban planning to reconstruct the silenced narratives of “black spaces”. Through historical archives, Pratt traces the narrative of black migration and liberation from the violence of slavery in the South to subsequent confrontations with structural racism in the form of housing and urban development in the North of the United States.
The incorporation of The Tallera It is not only a compliment to a fundamental architect of contemporary times or to muralism as a representation of Mexican art, it is also a nod to a very specific sector of Chicago, whose population derives in almost 28% of the migration from this country. Between the murals of the master Siqueiros, the internal courtyards and the lattice walls, the unique aesthetic of diffuse boundaries between the interior and exterior of Mexican life is already part of the memory of one of its capitals in the north.
Subscribe here to newsletter of EL PAÍS México and receive all the informative keys of the current situation of this country