Mexico City’s Museo Jumex to Stage ‘Football & Art’ Exhibition During World Cup

The Museo Jumex, a private museum in Mexico City established by top collector Eugenio López Alonso in 2013, hopes to score a golazo with one of its exhibitions next year, timed to the upcoming FIFA World Cup.

“Fútbol y Arte. Esa misma emoción”(Football & Art. A Shared Emotion) will open at the museum’s David Chipperfield–designed building in the city’s Polanco neighborhood on March 28 and run through July 26, the week after the World Cup Final in New York. Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca will host five matches, including the opening one on June 11.

Organized by Mexican art critic and independent curator Guillermo Santamarina, “Fútbol y Arte” will bring together some 100 works by 60 artists from around the world. Architect Mauricio Rocha, known for his addition to the Museo Anahuacalli in 2021 and designing the studio of his mother, photographer Graciela Iturbide, will create the exhibition design that will see the museum transformed into various elements symbolic of the World’s Game.

The exhibition will be divided into different sections focused on “gender, community, identity, and universality, exploring both the playful power of the game and its critical and political dimensions,” according to a release.

The works on view will range from Marta Minujín’s 1977 painting of a colossal blonde woman in bikini laying over a soccer stadium to a 2007 black-and-white photograph by Graciela Iturbide of a torn-up football net on a beach in Italy. More recent works include photograph documentation of an intervention by Melanie Smith and Rafael Ortega in which visitors held up dozens of posters to form an image of a pre-Columbian artifact at Estadio Azteca.

The Museo Jumex has also commissioned Diego Berruecos, Iñaki Bonillas, and Sofía Echeverri to make new work for the exhibition, while Mexico City–based artist Clotilde Jiménez has created the exhibition’s visual identity. In the museum’s outdoor plaza, Mexican artist collective Tercerunquinto will present Tribunas (Stands), a sculptural installation of bleachers made from recycled seats from Estadio Azteca.

The Museo Jumex isn’t the only museum to look at the link between art and sports. Last year, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a 200-plus work exhibition titled “Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture,” which is currently on view at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, and will travel to the Pérez Art Museum Miami next year. This fall, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, opened “Personal Best,” an exhibition showcasing the work of six local artist-athletes.

In a statement about “Fútbol y Arte,” Santamarina said, “Categorically, modern visual culture finds its most resplendent peak in the network of representations and social rituals related to the game of soccer. Soccer is a system of imagination and information that lives and breathes the complex reality of the human species in the 21st century, and indeed, the incalculable emotions around it.”