Museo Amparo celebrates 22 years sharing culture and inaugurates the first phase of its renovation project

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Museo Amparo
2 Sur 708
Centro Histórico
Puebla, Puebla

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Donation: $35 General Public, $25 Students and Teachers

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In celebration of its 22nd year sharing culture, Puebla's Museo Amparo presents to the public the first phase of its renovation project with exhibitions of works by renowned Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide and artist Melanie Smith in collaboration with Frida Mateos.

The Museum's project was designed by Mexican architect Enrique Norten; its main feature is the incorporation of contemporary elements respecting the historic buildings housing the institution. This first phase the project evolved around the intervention made in the 1980s by architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez.

The spaces included in the first stage are: the lobby, three temporary exhibition galleries, a terrace overlooking Puebla's city landscape, cafeteria, auditorium, library, and storage facilities.

The lobby, a central element for the connection and distribution of the different areas, including the Colonial and Nineteenth Century Art galleries, located in the historic building of a former viceregal house, existed in the same space and with the same dimensions, but has now been transformed into a light box that rises to and is crowned by a translucent glass ceiling, through which the magnificent Puebla sky can be seen.

The project was conceived in three phases: the first phase culminated in this inauguration, last February 24th. Phase 2 involves work on the temporary exhibition galleries, which will have a total space of 1,848 square meters. Phase 3 will consist of an updating of the permanent Precolumbian Art exhibition galleries and museographic discourse, to be housed in a 1,285-square meter area. These two phases are slated for conclusion during the second half of 2013; with these, the Museum's public spaces, exhibition areas, and storage facilities will have expanded to around approximately 3,000 square meters.

In this way, Museo Amparo reasserts its position as a reference point among cultural centers in our country, due to the importance of its permanent collection and its temporary projects, its facilities, and the program of activities it offers to the community.

For the opening of Galleries PB and 1, the Museum has programmed an exhibition of works by an emblematic artist in contemporary photography, Graciela Iturbide, with a bravura journey through the last fifteen years of her career shown in 117 images. The selection of works from Iturbide's personal archives is the result of a collaboration between the artist and Miguel Cervantes. Iturbide's characteristic black-and-white aesthetic reveals a faithful preference for traditional silver gelatin prints at a key point in the artist's creative development that still focus on tone and texture as the essential expressive element in her oeuvre.

Gallery 2 houses Irretratabilidad / ilegibilidad / inestabilidad by Melanie Smith in collaboration with Frida Mateos. In the course of this exhibition more than 3,000 fake, plastic tepalcates (fragments of traditional pottery), made from real molds that have been intentionally shattered to pieces, are reclassified in an ongoing performance action, simulating a continued and destabilized reclassification of artifacts. The unending character of the action is reconfigured to create singularities that question archaeology's and conservation's dominant beliefs as reductive constructions of myths, stories, and meanings.

Finally, Domus Fidelis: La devoción en la casa poblana is on display in the Colonial and Nineteenth Century Art galleries, sharing the space with Museo Amparo's permanent Colonial Art collection. This exhibition presents a selection of works that illustrate the home as a sacred space, in a variety of iconographies and formats that attest to the continuity and relevance of this deeply rooted custom.