All the Must-See Fairs and Exhibitions at Mexico City Art Week 2025

This week, collectors, curators, and artists from around the world have descended on Mexico City for its annual art week, which includes homegrown art fairs—such as Zona Maco, the largest of the week, Material, and Salón Acme—a plethora of gallery and museum exhibition openings, and special events all around the city. The week is an annual reminder that Mexico is now a global art capital.

“I’m enthralled with the creativity and the excitement around the growing art scene here,” said Anne Pasternak, the head of the Brooklyn Museum, who’s in town for the festivities. She wore earrings she bought from the Mexican fashion designer Carla Fernandez while chatting with Fernandez herself at the designer’s buzzy booth in the design section of Zona Maco.

Julián Zugazagoitia, the head of the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, has long brought museum groups and collectors on cultural tours in Mexico City during art week. Zugazagoitia grew up in the city, and his family has been cultural and political leaders here for generations. “The art scene in Mexico has grown and diversified with regions outside the capital,” he explains. “Monterrey, Guadalajara, Tijuana, Oaxaca, and Mérida have all taken larger roles in the national and international art scenes.” Abaseh Mirvali, a curator and cultural strategist who’s lived in Mexico City for two decades, concurs. “The scene is more layered and inclusive of different media with varied price points thanks to the younger generations of artists and gallerists,” she says. “It’s exciting to share the vibrant creativity here with the world this season.”

Here, W’s guide to Mexico City’s Art Week 2025:

Fairs

Zona Maco is the largest art fair in Latin America; last year, on its 20th anniversary, it attracted more than 80,000 visitors. This week, 200 galleries from 29 countries across four continents are gathering at the modern convention center Centro Citibanamex. The main section of the fair is governed by a committee of local and international gallerists. The other sections are organized by appointed curators. The Sur (“South”) section focuses on site-specific works that challenge Eurocentric views, while the Modern art section spotlights pioneering Latin American artists of the 20th century. The Ejes (“Axis”) section offers emerging artists solo shows that explore “modern interpretations of freedom.” Diseño (“Design”) presents jewelry, clothing, and decorative pieces. There are also separate sections for antiques and photography.

This year, throughout the fair, textiles are especially strong. Standouts include Galeria La Cometa’s presentation of several Olga de Amaral tapestries from the 1980s and 1990s. (De Amaral, 92, is the subject of a current show at Fondation Cartier, in Paris). Meanwhile, Nunu Fine Art is exhibiting tapestries made by Peruvian artists Ana Teresa Barboza and Rafael Freyre that are loosely woven with dried Amazonian fruits.

The Material Art Fair takes place at Expo Reforma. The 11th edition has more than 72 exhibitors from 20 countries. More than half of the exhibitors are from Latin America, and many of those that aren’t are using the fair to spotlight artists with connections to Latin America. Worth seeking out are exhibitions from Parallel Oaxaca—the gallery is a small oasis for contemporary art in Oaxaca—and Proxyco, a gallery based in Manhattan’s Lower East Side that’s presenting work by Remedios Varo, Lucia Vidales and Adela Goldbard.

Salón Acme, the scrappiest fair, takes place in Proyecto Público Prim, in Mexico City’s Colonia Juárez. Once a 19th century mansion, it was revitalized into a multidisciplinary space for the arts. It still retains its old-fashioned, if dilapidated, charms: iron railings, skylights, overgrown plants everywhere. Salón Acme’s 12th edition has an ambitious program, with performances, food, and even art workshops for children. Nearly 80 artists are on view among the fair’s six sections. One of the sections, “State,” highlights a different Mexican region every year. This year’s edition focuses on Veracruz.

Museums

A must-see museum show opening during art week is Museo Jumex’s “Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional,” the internationally celebrated artist’s first museum exhibition in his native country in nearly 20 years. Up through August 3, the survey features 300 art objects dating back to the 1990s and takes over four of the museum’s floors, as well as its public plaza. With paintings, drawings, photos, installations, and sculptures, the exhibition showcases Orozco’s humor. His playfulness is part of his consistent challenge to the question “what art is?”—see the four-way ping pong table with a horticultural element at the center. There’s beauty too, including an easy-to-miss sculpture dangling aloft in one gallery. It looks like a flowering branch, but a closer inspection reveals it is bedecked in feathers.

Another highlight is Museo Anahuacalli, the year-round tourist attraction that Diego Rivera built to house his collection of more than 60,000 pre-Colonial objects. This year, the museum is debuting a double presentation of artworks by Mexican artist Paloma Contreras Lomas and Argentine artist Carolina Fusilier. The museum’s curator, Karla Niño de Rivera, and Sam Ozer, the artistic director of Tono Festival, asked the artists to respond to what Ozer calls “the phantasmagoric imagination” of the museum. Lomas and Fusilier have interspersed sculptures, paintings, videos, and sound installations throughout Rivera’s collections. It draws out the Mesoamerican futurism of Rivera’s work.

Galleries, Events, and Pop-Ups

During art week, many artists open their studios and many collectors open their homes, all by invitation only. Among private collections, a standout is Vicky and Marcos Micha Levy’s. The family collection has been built over five decades and includes works by seminal Mexican artists, including Rivera, Miguel Covarrubias, Lenora Carrington, and Pedro Friedeberg. They hang alongside works by European heavyweights: Picasso, Chagall, Duchamp. Their collection is the subject of a new bilingual book, which will be fêted at 1 p.m. on February 7 at Tamayo Museum.

MASA x Luhring Augustine Vol. 2 is the second iteration of an art and design pop-up that highlights works from two galleries, Luhring Augustine, which is based in New York, and MASA. The latter’s space in San Miguel Chapultepec is storied—it’s a 19th century private home that became a gathering spot for important cultural figures. On through March 29, it features work by Diego Singh, Pipilotti Rist, Alma Allen, Héctor Esrawe, and Eva LeWitt.

Galería de Arte Mexicano (GAM), the first contemporary art gallery in Mexico, is celebrating its 90th anniversary with a special show that features artists it’s brought to market since 1935, including Frida Kahlo, Rivera (who reportedly named the gallery), Miguel Covarrubias, and Rufino Tamayo. One room of the show is devoted to GAM’s own history, and to the sisters who founded and first led the gallery. A vitrine of mementos illustrates the role they played in bringing Latin American art to institutions in the U.S. and Europe, including much of MoMA’s early collection.

Kurimanzutto’s colossal gallery and interior courtyard was jammed with revelers at its February 4th opening of “Arcane Abstractions,” an exhibition of colorful, textured paper works and woven sculptures by the peripatetic artist Heague Yang.

At Sabino 336, in the industrial area of Atlampa, richly textured, color-saturated works from acclaimed Mexican artist Bosco Sodi are on view. The gallery is also displaying shiny mirror-like sculptures by Marsica Fossati (up though June 28), which she envisaged as celestial creations that have descended from space, and big black-and-white woodcuts by Sergio Suarez (up through April 13).

The funky local gallery Mooni has several presentations for art week. There’s a booth at Salón Acme with works by Venezuelan artist Stefano di Cristofaro, an exhibition at their Condesa gallery of figurative works by Mexican artist Victor Torres, and, at their Colima location, there’s an interdisciplinary exhibition called “Pájara.” The galleries remain stacked floor-to-ceiling as usual, with paintings, prints, photos, and ceramics of wildly varied price points made by artists Mooni shows on consignment. (A few doors down from Mooni’s Condesa gallery, there’s also a closet-size space for overflow—mostly prints—sandwiched between funky clothing boutiques Mooni’s owners opened.)

Finally, the second Annual Auction of El Castillo de Chapultepec is open for visits and bidding until 10 p.m. on February 8 in a warehouse-type space hung salon-style with work by more than 150 artists. The funds will go towards developing the site as a community and exhibition space for local artists. Mirvali says that “many of the artists who participate are pals of the same generation. It gives you a real sense of the young Mexican art scene.”