My 5 Favorite Works of Art in Mexico City

Art & Design|My 5 Favorite Works of Art in Mexico City

Whenever I’m rattling through the many museums of Chapultepec Park, or jogging past the modernist towers along the boulevards of Reforma, I’m struck again by how many different eras Mexico City allows you to visit in one day.

The city is the largest metropolis in North America, and has been stratified with seven centuries of cultural history: Indigenous sculpture, colonial monuments, modernist marvels and, most recently, some of the world’s best contemporary art and architecture. The art and architecture of Mexico City can take your breath away, and not only because you are 7,350 feet above sea level; let me point you to five sites, some landmark-famous and some fairly obscure, that begin to map this city’s inexhaustible cultural prosperity.

Find these five and discover more art on our Google map of Mexico City.

Most of the city’s major museums are in the historic downtown core or the huge Chapultepec Park, but Mexico City’s artists and intellectuals of the 20th century gravitated to the southern extremes of the capital. Down here in Coyoacán, in the years after World War II, the muralist Diego Rivera devoted himself to the construction of a pseudo-Indigenous fortress: an “odd sort of ranch,” as he called it, that would house his large collection of Olmec, Nahua and Toltec masks and effigies.

The Museo Anahaucalli, a concrete bunker covered in volcanic stone, rises like a black tomb from a bare central plaza. Inside, the labels are minimal, the shadows theatrical. Mosaics by the great Juan O’Gorman intermingle Mesoamerican and Communist motifs.