In the span of three months this year, three mid-sized US galleries — Morán Morán (Los Angeles), Deli (formerly based in New York and now permanently closed), and Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles), have closed their doors in Mexico City. All but two of those galleries had not lasted in the city for more than three years, an illustration of the difficulties of making art businesses work in one of the world’s emerging art capitals.
The closures underscore the challenges faced by US galleries when trying to adopt their own footing in Mexico City. Soaring shipping prices, customs problems and a thin local market have combined to create a conditions in which maintaining programming has become unsustainable. Even with the robust art scene Mexico City boasts — hundreds of museums, festivals, independent spaces, residencies and galleries — the market itself is comparatively modest. Industry experts say there are fewer than 20 serious collectors and that the secondary market has only a few hundred buyers. To compound matters, most of the city’s museums are state-owned and stopped collecting decades ago, so galleries lack institutional clients to lean on. These and other cultural and logistical hurdles have made it difficult for American galleries to plug into the local ecosystem.
“It’s not unusual that they shut down. It’s weird that they even opened at all,” said Issa Benítez, the director of the art space Proyecto Paralelo and the vice president of GAMA, Mexico’s art gallery association. Benítez blames the closures on a misguided perception of the city’s market potential. “It’s the confidence that’s surprising, their belief that Mexico is a robust market,” she continued.
Founded in 2020, GAMA is made up of 26 member galleries, and has plans for initiatives including the annual GAMA Week to support the local scene. But he said the shuttered galleries’ directors never interacted with the association. “They didn’t call us, we don’t know them,” she said. It has a lot to do with the cultural nuances of operating in Mexico City as well. American gallerists tend to meet skepticism, said Chris Sharp, founder of the now-defunct Lulu gallery, which spent 11 years in the city. “Mexico has a naturally hostile relationship to imperial powers. If that is where you come from, you have to work so much harder at integrating,” Sharp said.
American galleries are nevertheless drawn to Mexico City despite the challenges. The dollar’s strength helps keep the cost of operations low, while the city’s stature as an art hub draws attention from around the globe. “There’s not a great need to move a lot of product to remain operating,” Sharp continued. Morán Morán’s director in Mexico City, Aurélie Vandewynckele, agreed, reporting that artists in general were excited to exhibit in Mexico.
For Commonwealth and Council, the move to Mexico City was never driven mostly by the potential for financial gain. “It was a platform for our artists and a way of meeting collectors,” said Kibum Kim, a co-director. But logistical complications, like managing exhibitions throughout two cities and taking part in fairs, were stressful.
In 2023, Morán Morán also encountered increasing operational obstacles. Vandewynckele cited stricter customs regulations and election-inflated shipping costs as significant hurdles. “Customs got stricter, requesting documents they hadn’t required before. Combined with shipping prices after the pandemic, it became untenable,” she said.
These setbacks notwithstanding, Benítez remains unfazed. “The art market in Mexico is very precarious, but it has always been like that,” she said. Local gallerists have been known to work around such obstacles, which are part of their unpredictable world. But Benítez took issue with the absence of integration from the American galleries, saying, “Landed like a UFO, with no Mexican artists on the roster, now that’s very complicated.”
Originally Published in Artnews; Feature Image- Representational, generated by Dall.I
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