The Amparo Museum exhibits pieces by Helen Escobedo that live in the present

Puebla, Pue., The Amparo Museum is the fourth and last venue of the traveling exhibition Helen Escobedo: Total environments, which exhibits the work of this artist not as an exercise in presenting finished ideas, but as an example of the processes of thinking, of how certain pieces are investigated and recreated.

Helen Escobedo (1934-2010), a hybrid artist who went from one place to another and had a great sense of humor, had a deep desire: not to see things from her perspective. She is considered a pioneer of installation art in Mexico, although not enough, since there are not enough studies on her work.

The exhibition takes Escobedo’s installation work as its starting point, above all Kite fashion (2001, 2010) y The wet ones (2005, 2010).

It seemed important to me to look at Helen’s work, but not with the questions surrounding her well-known work, which is Cartesian geometry, of inhabited public spaces, but backwards: how this artist, in her later years, became interested in social issues, in migration, in what to do with the chaotic city of the 80s and 90s. What caused this woman to make these abstract, rational, clean works?said curator Lucía Sanromán.

From the start, the curator pointed out that at the Amparo Museum the exhibition has a different way of inhabiting, not only because of its previous installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey and its rooms with lots of space personalityat the Laboratorio Arte Alameda (LAA), which, with its 16th century basilica-shaped cross-shaped room, represents a challenge at each exhibition, as well as at the Cabañas Museum, but because the Puebla exhibition focuses on the objects that are live in the presentwhich are still current.

Helen Escobedo: Total environments It is divided into three rooms of the museum located in the Historic Center of Puebla: in the first, Inhabiting Geometry, drawings and collages to place the person at the centre of the artistic experience that is accompanied by Vertical Landscapes, which presents a selection of small-scale sculptural models that delve into her curiosity about verticality; in the second room, which shows the artist’s movement towards the urban, the human, the informality of economies, cities and the ways in which the body not only inhabits space, but gives it meaning, and the last floor, where her most humanistic work is, the installation The wet ones.

Sanromán explained that this installation was created during the artist’s stay in Tijuana, Baja California. In it, 11 wire figures covered by white plastic windbreaks are arranged like walkers in the room barely lit by two lamps, in a dark, uncertain and timeless environment, on a red tezontle floor and against the wind generated by two fans.

“When Helen begins to work with immigration, it coincides with her visit to Tijuana, where she begins to work more consistently, because her great friend Marta Palau returns to that city and because Insite, a binational art project, invited her in 1994 to make some barges on the beaches of Tijuana. She began to think about migration and what it means for thousands of people to cross into the United States.”

The people in transit, the curator noted, were given the name wet, “derogatory term to describe those who crossed the Rio Grande and came out wet; it is also used to describe, within Mexico, those who leave and return: ‘you are wet’they tell you.”

In the case of Kite fashion, Lucía Sanromán, director of the LAA, mentioned that it is an installation made between 2000 and 2001 for an exhibition at the Muca-Roma, and then in 2010 as part of her retrospective of installation art. In it, the artist makes a critique of consumerism, which is now called the fast fashion.

“Installation art has certain characteristics and Helen describes them: it is ephemeral, it only lasts as long as it is installed (…); it is a critique, within the system of artistic production, of permanent monuments, with materials that end up running out; it is a consideration of space to which the artist reacts: it is no longer a cubic space, but the grey line that is in space,” explained the curator, for whom, alongside Paloma Gómez, it was important to remake Escobedo’s last installation work.

The exhibition, organized by the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL) through the LAA, is an inter-institutional collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey, the Helen Escobedo Artistic Fund, the Cabañas Museum and the Amparo Museum, where more than 100 pieces are exhibited, including installations, paintings, sculptures, graphic works, documents and photographs, which show the evolution of the artist’s formal and social interests, derived in the installation, a medium that helped her outline the trajectory of a diverse and increasingly politically committed practice.

Helen Escobedo: Total environments The exhibition will be open to the public until January 20, 2025 at the Amparo Museum (2 Sur 708, Historic Center of Puebla). At the same time, a public program of conferences and other activities will be held.