FEMSA Collection marks 50 years with major Latin American art exhibition at MARCO

Installation view.

MONTERREY, MEXICO.— The FEMSA Collection has opened a major anniversary exhibition at the Monterrey Museum of Contemporary Art, presenting a sweeping look at five decades of collecting, research, and dialogue around modern and contemporary Latin American art.

Titled “Constellations and Drifts: Art from Latin America in the FEMSA Collection,” the exhibition brings together 174 works by more than 100 Latin American artists, making it the most comprehensive presentation of the collection to date in Mexico. The show, which opened March 20 and continues through August 9, 2026, marks the beginning of the FEMSA Collection’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

Rather than following a traditional chronological structure, the exhibition is organized around five curatorial “constellations,” allowing works from different periods, regions, and generations to speak to one another. The approach highlights the idea that Latin American art cannot be reduced to a single narrative, but is instead shaped by shifting histories, geographies, identities, and formal experiments.

“The constellation model allows us to understand that there isn’t just one single history of Latin American art,” said Beto Díaz Suárez, curator of the FEMSA Collection. “Rather, it’s a network of connections that can be continually reconfigured, generating new interpretations among artists working from different contexts and moments.”

Curated by Eugenia Braniff, Paulina Bravo, and Beto Díaz Suárez, curators of the FEMSA Collection, together with independent curator Adriana Melchor, the exhibition is structured around five themes: Territories: The Symbolic Limits of Geography; Architectures of Colonization: Between Language and Bodies; Debating Abstraction: Geometry and Form in Latin America; Alchemy: Transformation, Transmutation, and Change; and Identities: Identities on the (Im)Possibility of a Chorus.

The exhibition features major figures in Latin American art, including Jesús Rafael Soto, Rufino Tamayo, María Izquierdo, Diego Rivera, Joaquín Torres-García, Fanny Sanín, Helen Escobedo, and Gego, alongside recent acquisitions and works by contemporary artists whose practices expand the collection’s current direction.

For Paulina Bravo, chief curator of the FEMSA Collection, the exhibition offers a way to revisit the collection through the questions of the present. Instead of treating the collection as a fixed historical archive, the show places modern works in conversation with contemporary artistic practices, opening new pathways for interpretation.

The presentation carries particular significance because it is being held at MARCO, in Monterrey, the city where the FEMSA Collection first took shape. The relationship between the museum and the collection is deeply rooted in the development of contemporary art in northern Mexico, and the anniversary exhibition returns the collection to its place of origin while pointing toward its future.

Taiyana Pimentel, director of MARCO, described the FEMSA Collection and the museum as central institutions in Monterrey’s contemporary visual arts scene. She noted that the exhibition brings a new reading of the collection to MARCO, one in which modernism and contemporary art converge through a critical and youthful lens.