The National Museum of Mexican Art announced Tuesday it will reopen in Pilsen July 1, welcoming back visitors for the first time since closing for the COVID-19 pandemic in March more than a year ago.
Both the museum and its popular gift shop, Tienda Tzintzuntzán (“Place of the Hummingbird”), will resume regular hours and the museum’s customary free admission.
It’s not the first Chicago museum reopening, just the best, says the energetic founder and museum president Carlos Tortolero. He says he’s looking forward to welcoming back the museum’s diversity of visitors.
“Our number one in attendance is from our own community, which is great,” he said. The National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA) cited more than 150,000 annual visitors in its 2019 annual report. “But second is everyone else.”
Along with Chicago’s Mexican community, the museum attracts white Chicagoans, suburbanites, out-of-towners from around America and the world, he said, “and that’s really unusual, very few get the attendance we get.”
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The July reopening will include three new exhibitions:
“Spotlight on artworks by Chaz Bojórquez and Enrique Alférez (1901-1999)” features the Museum’s newest acquisition, Bojórquez’s “We the People,” as well as Alférez’s “La Soldadera,” a bronze sculpture that pays homage to the female soldiers in the Mexican Revolution.
“Adláteres and the Unexpected Journey: Works by Carmen Chami” will be in the Xicágo Gallery through Jan. 16. It is curated by Dolores Mercado and informed by the artist’s “extensive understanding of Mexican Baroque painting and figurative style,” according to the announcement.
“Yollocalli Arts Reach” will be displayed in the Courtyard Gallery with work produced in 2019 by teens and young adults in the NMMA’s arts outreach initiative.
Additionally, the exhibition “Nuestras Historias” is ongoing, with stories of Mexican identity from the NMMA’s permanent collection and curated by Cesáreo Moreno.
The museum was mostly empty during the shutdown, Tortolero said, with the exception of staff looking after the collections and climate control systems, as well as regular, live-streamed tours and performances through its “At-Home with NMMA” series.
The museum’s longtime free admission policy means it wasn’t as affected by the COVID shutdown as others, Tortolero said. “It turned out to be a good financial model. Our box office wasn’t shut down, because we don’t have a box office. That didn’t cost us anything.”
That said, cash donations from visitors do make a difference, as do sales from the NMMA’s gift shop, which continued online last year, he said, “but it wasn’t the same.” The shop carries Mexican folk art, jewelry, work by Chicago artists and other items. Two most popular sellers: Anything having to do with Day of the Dead, and anything having to do with Frida Kahlo.
To help with its financial support, the museum won a major grant from the Ford Foundation last October as part of the New York-based foundation’s “America’s Cultural Treasures” program. The grant, $3.5 million in unrestricted money awarded over four years, was the largest in the history of the museum, the Tribune reported at the time.
Also upcoming at the NMMA:
The annual Día de Muertos exhibition, a huge draw for the NMMA, will open Sept. 10, curated by Moreno.
The museum will hold a ribbon-cutting at a date to be announced this summer for its new parking lot, Tortolero said, which will be a long-overdue paid lot both for the museum and surrounding Pilsen area. “We asked visitors, what’s the biggest need for the museum? The answer was always parking,” he said. “We had to change the question to biggest need besides parking.”
Dubbed the Ray Castro Plaza and Parking Lot, named after the first Mexican American ward committeeman in Chicago, the space next door to the museum will also be used for live performances.
Finally, two Frida Kahlo exhibitions are planned for April 2022: “Surrounding Kahlo: Works from the Permanent Collection” and “Frida Kahlo, Her Photos,” coming from the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City.
Tortolero gave credit for the reopening to his staff.
“We have a super hard-working staff,” he said. “I tell them, ‘You should know two things working here: that I understand (I) work in a great place. And that I also understand that what I do is part of it.'”
The National Museum of Mexican Art is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 1852 W 19th St.; free admission, more information at 312-738-1503 and www.nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org