America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States.
This institution, like others of its kind, engages and elevates our collective voice. That has been part of Carlos [Tortolero]’s vision, that we need to be telling our own story. He said, “We need to be here. Somehow, we need to be telling our story.”
Diana Palomar, Trustee, National Museum of Mexican Art
It may be surprising to learn that one of the largest Latino cultural organizations in the United States is located in the nation’s Midwest. The National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA) originated and still resides in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, where the Mexican-American community began to grow in the 1960s as more Mexican contract workers migrated north to work in factories in the city. President emeritus and founder Carlos Tortolero, making a more ambitious claim, calls the NMMA the “largest Mexican cultural organization outside of Mexico.” And it exists over 1,000 miles from the US-Mexico border.
The museum opened its doors in 1987 with the mission, as Tortolero articulates it, “to present, collect, and conserve the culture of Mexico [through] exhibitions and performing arts for both sides of the border from ancient times to the present.” Among the unique programs it has developed since are Radio Arte 90.5 FM, at one point “the country’s only youth-driven bilingual radio station” (it was sold in 2012), and the Yollocalli Arts Reach, an afterschool and summer arts program, that has provided approximately 3,000 teenagers and young adults with visual arts, digital media, and community arts programming for 28 years.
NMMA’s Visual Arts Director and Chief Curator Cesáreo Moreno, who started out as an artist and has been with the museum for 33 years, operates with a core focus on the Mexican-American community when shaping and mounting exhibitions. He ignores stereotypical narratives and caricatured representations to “really try to connect with, communicate to, and focus on our community. That’s my target audience. When I’m looking for exhibits, curating, visiting artist studios or museum collections in Mexico or across the US, I’m always thinking, first and foremost, of my community,” Moreno explains. “If I hit that target well, everything else falls into place.”
For Moreno, visitors from other backgrounds are also a key audience for the museum. “I want to educate people who are not Mexican about the beautiful richness of our culture and our history and our contributions to the Americas, and to the United States, and to Chicago, and the Midwest,” he says.
As Moreno testifies, one of the NMMA’s chief concerns is to teach the nuanced history of the place also known as Mēxihco, the Nahuatl term for the heartland of the Aztec Empire, the Mesoamerican culture that thrived from 1300 to 1521 before the beginning of European colonization. This locale is a linchpin in the world’s history as a cradle of civilization, providing evidence of human existence from 8,000 BCE. This Mesoamerican region housed several interrelated civilizations, including the Olmec people, and is the ancestral homeland of Indigenous groups in present-day Mexico, including Maya, Purepecha, and Zapotec peoples. By teaching this art history and ensuring Indigenous artists are celebrated at the museum, Moreno explains, “We will be reminded of our ancestry, of our history, of our rich roots, and that will help the next generation.”
Through education, the museum provides this next generation with the tools for self-determination — which also acts as an antidote to the introjection of received stereotypes and tropes that proliferate in mainstream culture. “We define ourselves, not the government, not the media, and not corporate America. We define ourselves. That’s important,” Tortolero says. From NMMA’s vantage point, the experiences of Mexicans on both sides of the border become more layered and complex than any stereotype can hold.
Barbara Engelskirchen, the museum’s chief development officer and head of communications, talks about the complexity of her own story by discussing her mother, Dolores Gonzalez, a daughter of Mexican immigrants and a bilingual teacher, school principal, and eventually a subdistrict superintendent.
“When she began teaching in the ’70s, there wasn’t a lot of bilingual education happening, there wasn’t a lot of materials for them to use, so she developed her own and was very focused, like Carlos, on making sure that the children she worked with knew about their heritage,” Engelskirchen says, “and because of that my sister and I knew about our heritage, being half Mexican and half German and Norwegian.”
Engelskirchen was also a bilingual teacher for a short time while living in Mexico, but chose the profession of marketing within a corporate environment as her vocation. After 20 years, she decided to return to the nonprofit realm to work in a museum because she found the storytelling of these institutions more meaningful. For her, stories are crucial, but the content and the vantage point matter.
“The story has to be told by the right person or from the right perspective, which is why this museum is so important. We tell stories related to Mexican art from the Mexican perspective, and that Mexican perspective is […] a diverse perspective,” she explains. “It’s a multifaceted perspective because you’ve got the voice of a recent immigrant who might be living in Little Village and just arrived a year ago or less, or you’ve got my experience, which is [third] generation.”
The NMMA was started by teachers who were convinced that these stories had to be told from their particular standpoints as educators and those of artists who are steeped in the broad spectrum of Mexican culture. Tortolero, along with five cofounders of the museum, were teaching in the Chicago Public School system in the late 1970s and early ’80s when they found among their Latino students a marked lack of self-esteem and self-confidence that seemed correlated with a lack of knowledge about their cultural history. According to Rebecca Meyers, who began working at the museum 35 years ago and is now the Permanent Collection curator, the educators recognized that there was a deficit of Mexican history in school curricula and sought to address it through art events and exhibitions.
“A group of Chicago public school teachers saw a lot of kids of Mexican descent who were slipping through the system. They didn’t know anything about where they came from, their roots,” she says. “They didn’t see artwork made by people of their descent, and so, a group of teachers came together with — I want to say — it was just a few hundred dollars, and they started to approach other institutions to find out if they could host an exhibit of Mexican and Mexican-American art.”
The year was 1982. The six educators had $900, which they used to create what was initially named the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. For the first five years of the center’s existence, it mounted temporary exhibitions at various sites around the city. In 1986, the founders acquired and refurbished a former bath house and boat craft shop in Pilsen situated on a small public park, and the National Museum of Mexican Art officially opened its doors in March of 1987. According to Tortolero, this locale was chosen for two main reasons. The first is that a city statute designated a portion of the monies earned from property taxes for institutions located on park property. This arrangement continues to provide a steady income stream for the organization that sustains it in providing free admission to all visitors. The second reason is that it was crucial to the founders that the museum remain in a majority-Mexican neighborhood and thus present few barriers to attendance by local residents.
Tortolero reflects on the importance of both free admissions and ensuring the museum is embedded in the community it aims to serve. “When we first created the museum, I would say 95% of the art world said, ‘You cannot do a museum in a working-class neighborhood; you cannot do an art museum in a working-class neighborhood; and you can’t be free.’ Well, guess what, we’re free,” he says. “It’s not like we wanted to go downtown and the powers that be said, ‘No, you’ve got to be [there].’ Nope, we wanted to be here.”
Visitors to the museum will encounter a central example of the institution’s commitment to its community: the show of work by more than 150 artists, Nuestras Historias (“Our Histories”), in the Permanent Collection gallery. Curated by Moreno, Nuestras Historias is a survey of art originating from both sides of the US-Mexico border, including contemporary and modern painting and sculpture, craft art pieces such as decorative and ceremonial ceramics, and religious figures and symbols. These galleries also contain Mesoamerican and colonial artifacts — all of which together demonstrate the myriad ways Mexican culture has developed aesthetically.
Traveling to the other side of the building, in the west wing space, depending on the day of the week and the time of year, a visitor might encounter a commercial fair, a performance of folkloric or contemporary dance, an artist talk or opening, or a workshop being directed by a local teaching artist. Particularly through its use of the flex space to welcome in the surrounding community, the NMMA diverges from the historical model of the public art museum.
The exclusive nature of public art museums has been analyzed, discussed, and debated at length, yet many continue to uphold policies that dissuade working-class and poor people from feeling welcome, including prohibitively high entry fees. Current engagement studies tend to bear this out. Against this historical grain, the founders established a museum that is free for everyone, every day. Moreno explains that this, among other aspects, makes this institution different from a traditional museum: “Although we are the ‘National Museum,’ we are more of a community-based organization that is in the disguise of a museum.” This orientation can be clearly seen in the programs that NMMA has created by, with, and for local residents.
Vanessa Sanchez, who grew up in the adjacent district of Little Village and is deeply familiar with the ways in which the museum cares for its community, is the director of Education and the Yollocalli Arts Reach program. The name Yollocalli originates in the Aztec language of Nahuatl: yolotl, meaning “heart,” and kalli, meaning “house.” Sanchez started work at the museum as an intern in 2001, became a full-time program coordinator in 2005, and has been employed there ever since. She manages the variety of programs that integrate the institution with its community.
Gallery Education, for one, is a docent-led program that offers tours, visual descriptions for visually impaired visitors, and tactile objects. The docents are trained to analyze and break down the artwork for any and all visitors, though they tend to work mostly with students. Nuestras Historias offers teachers in the Chicago Public School system arts-integrated lesson plans that include collaborations with teaching artists. Through this program, educators create a lesson that aligns with what they’re teaching during the school day and also learn an art skill by working with the artists. Community Arts Sustaining Academics (CASA) provides in-school or after-school residencies that run for eight, 10, or 20 weeks for students and parents alike. In-house programming includes Summer Camp, Studio Saturdays, and Viva la Vida, which is meant for those who are 55 years and older. Arte Ambulante offers one-day workshops or lectures that essentially bring the museum to the classroom. As Sanchez sees it, these programs are what set NMMA apart.
“So many other institutions are trying to understand how they become more community-focused, how they get the community to them, and our museum has always had that from its roots,” she reflects. “It was built for a community that was out of a need for more arts focused on Mexican and Mexican-American identity, and that came from teachers in the neighborhood who were like, ‘I need a space for my young people to know more about their culture.’”
Yollocalli, created in 1997, is likely the program the museum is most known for in Chicago. It works with teaching artists who develop programs for attendees between 13 and 25 years of age. The students acquire skills in visual art, community arts such as performance and craft, and digital media based on their own interests. These workshops include making murals, or in the journalism and radio program, learning how to edit audio, interview, and apply journalistic ethics and standards to their work. There have also been classes on gardening, architecture, and art entrepreneurship, which taught people how to sell their art at markets and fairs. The program has given thousands of Mexican youth tools that can be mobilized in the job market and, in many cases, their first exposure to art as a professional endeavor. And at the most basic level, though, Yollocalli provides a place for students to feel safe after school and during the summer months, where management has taken down the real-life pay wall.
“It’s something that the community has brought up in quality-of-life plans and just in conversation — how not only do youth want a space to hang out, but so do the community members,” she says. “They just want a place to sit and feel welcome and not have to pay for anything.”
By pairing skilled makers with students who are genuinely interested in learning, Yollocalli also develops the next generation of artists, arts administrators, curators, and professionals who will continue to make the museum relevant to visitors and patrons. Moreno often finds himself in meetings in Chicago or elsewhere with professionals who are alumni of the program.
“They will look directly at me and say, ‘I am from Yollocalli,’ and they say it with such pride. Yollocalli’s been around for 25 years or more, so some of the earlier cohorts, they’re adults, out there in the world, working. And the fact that they attribute a lot of where they’re at in their education to Yollocalli is a sign of the success of that place,” Moreno says.
”Sometimes it’s emotional to see,” he adds. “It’s like seeing your kids standing up and doing something in a place you couldn’t imagine they would be.”
The museum’s commitment to welcoming any and all who identify as Mexican becomes even more visible still through its performing arts program. Jorge Valdivia, who is now the executive director for the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance, was previously the Performing Arts director for the NMMA. In that role, he organized the programming that included both contemporary and folkloric dance, music performance, theater productions, film screenings, and literary events. He also developed the Queer Prom in 2003 — an annual event for LGBTQ+ high schoolers and allies which is hosted by the museum. Approximately 150 to 200 youth attend this show with performances by drag queens, live DJ sets, and the crowning of a Prom King, Queen, and Queer.
Valdivia talks about the breadth and depth of communities that are served by NMMA’s performing arts arm. “Here, at the museum, they use the term ‘Mexican’ as all encompassing, so the programming always reflected artists from both sides of the border, but beyond that, taking a moment to look at the diversity in the faces that represent what Mexican is to ensure that Indigenous and Afro-Mexican people were always part of what we presented but also transgender women through the festival, [and] gender nonconforming people,” he says. “All of that has always been a lens I have embraced and that has informed my work.”
Again, the emphasis here is on providing underserved and marginalized people a place to experience the full flower of their being.
Additionally, several special events look to nurture Mexican cultural celebrations and the connections they kindle with other communities. The most important of these is the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration, which includes art activities, a variety of ofrendas (altars with offerings for loved ones who have passed) created by community members, live musical performances, and a large, illuminated ofrenda projected onto the facade of the museum. It attracts the NMMA’s largest crowds every year, with about 10,000 people attending. It is an event that allows everyone to remember and memorialize loved ones.
“We like to show the similarities with other cultures. We try to bring those together, and we do it best with our Day of the Dead Exhibition, where everyone, all cultures, experience death or life,” says Eimy Guzman, the museum’s business director. “Through our artwork and exhibitions, people come and they say, ‘Well, we have that in common.’”
Engelskirchen echoes this, reflecting, “We understand that we are a multifaceted group and it’s important to offer things to a variety of people, and even people who aren’t Mexican or of Mexican heritage because we all live together.” Diana Palomar, a museum trustee since 2006, goes further: “If you have an interest in art, in culture, in tradition, something different and you want to learn, if you have even a little bit of an interest in other people, you’re our community.”
It’s this curiosity, the desire to learn and to know, that the National Museum of Mexican Art cultivates and celebrates. Many other museums and cultural organizations do so, as well. But few are in working-class neighborhoods, very few offer daily free admission, and an even smaller number don’t rely on revenue through the monetization of spaces for social interaction. Rebecca Meyers reminds, “I think a good mission of ours is we don’t have a café, so when people come to Pilsen it becomes a destination.” Visitors come to the museum despite it not being downtown, a reflection of the staff’s commitment to never be far from the center of their mission and make itself visible, welcoming, and palpable in Pilsen, making the Mexican community visible as well. The National Museum of Mexican Art shows us that it’s not enough to be seen by visitors and patrons; it’s crucial to see them in return, and to let them know they are why the institution exists here.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.