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Mexico City, Mexico
Tequila takeoff, Tecate landing
I have been fortunate enough to have visited a lot of countries but definitely have not come even remotely close to visiting all of them. One glaring blind spot all this time has been Mexico. I’ve been close, real close, as close as just looking across the Rio Grande from southern Texas, or seeing it from the ground and then the plane in San Diego. It’s not that I had anything against Mexico as a place or country, it’s just that for whatever reason it just seemed to not be on my radar (I’ve never been a beach person so I never had that obligatory Cancun trip or cruise that everyone I know seems to have taken). So when I found myself with an opportunity to visit Mexico City, I found myself really looking forward to it, really looking forward to being somewhere new, at least for me. And right from my very first view, right from my A-line window seat on a United 737 as it crossed over the endless lights of North America’s largest city, it only confirmed that I was headed to the right place after all this time.
After landing at night, I stayed at the airport hotel before transferring early the next morning to a downtown one, only a short but terrifying Uber ride away. And when I say terrifying, I mean that the roads were a free for all that (if I lived there) I would simultaneously love and despise. Kind of like driving in Los Angeles or back home in New Jersey, only more intense.
From the hotel, it was a short walk through Alameda Park to here, the Palace of Fine Arts, the very first place I wanted to see in the city. The outside of the Palace of Fine Arts is like a colorfully domed Paris Opera House, but I was really there to see what was inside.
Before we head inside, one last look at those colorful domes. This aerial view is actually from the eighth floor balcony cafe at the Sears (they still have Sears in Mexico City), where my total lack of Spanish still allowed me to order a very tasty iced chocolate coffee while enjoying this absolutely killer view.
Inside the Palace of Fine Arts forgets all about that colorful Paris Opera House thing going on outside and instead goes full throttle art deco. All that art deco decoration compliments a program that includes a theater, an architecture museum and, most significantly, a large central atrium that doubles as a mural museum. And if you’re in Mexico City and there are murals, chances are pretty good you’ll find at least a few from Diego Rivera.
My very favorite Diego Rivera mural is one that does not exist. Rivera was commissioned to create the mural in the lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York, but when the Rockefellers saw Karl Marx on their lobby wall, they changed direction and had Rivera’s mural destroyed. Before that, he took pictures and created a second version of it on the wall here at the Palace of Fine Arts. Man, Controller of the Universe is epic, and seeing it in person was a pilgrimage and reason enough alone to travel to Mexico City.
Even though this is the first time I saw Man, Controller of the Universe in person, it’s not the first time I saw it. In March 2020, the Whitney Museum of Art showed a full size, high quality reproduction of Man, Controller of the Universe in New York, along with sketches and studies as part of their Vida Americana exhibit. I went to see it on a rather memorable day- it was both the opening day of The Edge observation deck at Hudson Yards and, more importantly, the very start of the pandemic. Subway trains were half empty, streets were quiet, people were using a lot of hand sanitizer (which was still available) but no one was wearing masks and everything was open. Two days later everything was closed. Looking at Man, Controller of the Universe in a half empty gallery at the Whitney as the world felt like it was coming to an end is something that’s hard to forget, just as it’s not all that hard to find added meaning in Man, Controller of the Universe when you think about the through the lens of those pandemic end times.
You might not be able to have a mural museum in Mexico City without Diego Rivera, but that doesn’t mean that everything is Diego Rivera all the time. The Palace of Fine Arts walls all had murals (as well as other exhibits in separate galleries) and plenty of other artists contributed, even though if we’re really being honest with each other, you’re never going to do better than Man, Controller of the Universe.
There are a lot of museums in Mexico City, and there are a lot of murals in Mexico City, and there are a lot of Diego Rivera murals in Mexico City, but there’s only one Diego Rivera Mural Museum in Mexico City. It’s a small museum that features one big mural, which was created in 1946 in a different building, but moved here after a 1985 earthquake made its initial home unsafe. This one feels like Rivera’s very own A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which is reinforced by his title of Dream of a Sunday Afternoon at Alameda Central Park. Alameda Central Park is only steps away, and while it was busy on that sunny Thursday afternoon, it was not nearly as busy as this mural may suggest.
There are a lot of museums in Mexico City, either 150 or 175 or 225 or some other number in between according to the internet. It would take more time than I had to see them all, so I instead focused on just a few of them in my time there. One of the highlights was the Museum of Popular Art, featuring Mexican folk art which was just as colorful and fun as you might think it is.
