Image: Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Museo Tamayo in Mexico City is preparing to present 'Ante el eclipse: Arqueologías del arte en México', a collective exhibition that gathers more than sixty artists whose work in the 1980s looked at Mexico through pre-Hispanic history, territory, popular culture, ecology and spirituality. The show is scheduled to run from June 10 to October 18, 2026, at the museum’s venue in Mexico City.
According to the museum’s curatorial text, the exhibition focuses on artists, Mexican and foreign, who lived in Mexico City during the decade and explored the country through archaeological, ecological and spiritual references. It brings together works made between 1981, the year Museo Tamayo opened, and 1991, the year of Rufino Tamayo’s death and a total solar eclipse. The museum frames the project as a look back at a period when artists were rethinking national identity amid social and political crisis, including economic instability and the devastating 1985 earthquake.
The exhibition’s title points to a method as well as a historical frame. The museum describes the archaeological approach as a metaphor for examining the relationship between material culture, mythology and the social constructions underlying that period’s historical layers. Rather than presenting the 1980s as a fixed chapter, the exhibition aims to create resonances between times, formats and artistic gestures, and to invite a reconsideration of works that, in some cases, are being shown in Mexico for the first time.
The curator is Maco Sánchez Blanco and Andrea Torreblanca. The exhibition includes artists such as Abraham Cruzvillegas, Adolfo Patiño, Adolfo Riestra, Ángela Gurría, Antonio Turok, Boris Viskin, Carla Rippey, Claudio Fernández, Damián Ortega, Eduardo Abaroa, Francis Alÿs, Helen Escobedo, Jimmie Durham, José Bedia, Juan Francisco Elso, Laureana Toledo, Lourdes Grobet, Magali Lara, Manuel Rocha, Melanie Smith, Mariana Yampolsky, Mario Rangel Faz, Néstor Quiñones, Roberto Turnbull, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Rufino Tamayo, Sarah Minter, Silvia Gruner, Thomas Glassford, Ulf Rollof, Yolanda Andrade and Yolanda Gutiérrez, among others listed by the museum.
Museo Tamayo links the exhibition to its own 45th anniversary and to the institution’s origins in the early 1980s. The curatorial text also returns to Rufino Tamayo’s idea of a dialogue between the vernacular and the universal, and between the ancestral and the modern, as a point of reference for the exhibition’s historical frame. In the museum’s account, the show is not only about the period’s art but about how those works helped resignify what counted as national culture at the time.
The museum’s website lists the exhibition as part of its current program alongside other projects, and notes that the museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. 'Ante el eclipse: Arqueologías del arte en México' opens on June 10, 2026, and continues through October 18, 2026.
