Milenio, new inhabitant of the MAM Sculpture Garden

Merry MacMasters

La Jornada Newspaper
Thursday June 27, 2024, p. 3

The Sculptural Garden of the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) has a new inhabitant. Is about Millennium, sculpture by Federico Silva (1923-2022), installed in December of last year. According to Brenda Caro, chief curator of the MAM, the piece received on loan directly from the artist’s family was one of the great missing parts of the museum’s collection. That is to say, We did not have any of the master’s works in the collection, no sculpture, no painting, no kinetic art, nothing.. This, despite the fact that Silva exhibited there on several occasions starting in the 1970s.

Carved in stone from Tlalmimilolpan, Tlaxcala, place of Silva’s workshop, Millennium It is part of an exploration of his work based on pre-Hispanic symbology. Since it was produced at the dawn of the new millennium, the work mixes the past, present and future. For Caro, it draws attention the geometric play and the contrast of the solidity of the stone. The fact that one of its shapes points upward gives a sensation of movement.

At the time of the artist’s death, on November 30, 2022, the MAM Sculpture Garden was undergoing rehabilitation. The Secretary of Culture herself said that they wanted a sculpture of her for the garden. She wanted to choose a very good work. I like the fact that it is possible to see it from Paseo de la Reformapoints out María Esther González Tovar, the artist’s widow.

Millennium consists of three pieces. It is a direct size whose measurements are 3.30 by 2.76 by 1.44 meters. The first time that Silva showed his work done in this way, and linked to the nahuals, a favorite theme in his production, was at the MAM, in 1986, indicates González Tovar. The exhibition was called Continuity, a ritual actwhich included the sculpture they named Exorcismus in Satanamwhich is a phrase taken from a book that Alicia Urreta had about black masses.

For his first exhibition at the MAM, in 1970, Silva exhibited the result of his foray into kinetic art, a discipline belonging to an almost virgin or untouched terrain in Mexico, as Luis Cardoza y Aragón wrote at the time.

The sculpture Millennium has a kind of sisterby name The university snake, which is the centerpiece of the exhibition that was opened on April 2 at the UNAM Hoy museum, located at Moneda 2, Centro Histérico, within the celebrations for the artist’s birth centenary. Graduated Federico Silva: For a university artthe exhibition focuses on his time at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, first as a student and then as a researcher starting in the 1970s.

In recent times the sculpture From corn It was placed in front of the Cencalli Museum, House of corn and food culture, in the Los Pinos Cultural Complex.

Meanwhile, the Federico Silva Contemporary Sculpture Museum, founded in 2003 in the capital of San Luis Potosí, also organized an exhibition last year to mark the 100th birthday of its benefactor. Now it has its respective catalog: Federico Silva, a combative creator.

Next July 15 the monumental sculpture Bird, 21 meters high, will be inaugurated in the center of Guadalajara. It is a project that was born 15 years ago, according to González Tovar.