Andrea Karnes

Andrea Karnes, curator of México Inside Out: Themes in Art Since 1990

Modern curator Andrea Karnes, who has brought some of the Museum’s most challenging and engaging exhibitions to Modern audiences—including Hubbard/Birchler: No Room to Answer in 2009, Pretty Baby in 2007, and Pierre Huyghe: One Million + Kingdoms in 2005, as well as all of the FOCUS series exhibitions to date—is now credited with curating and organizing the Museum’s current exhibition, the highly ambitious and poignant México Inside Out: Themes in Art Since 1990.

In her catalogue essay “Outside In,” Karnes states, “The artists included in México Inside Out: Themes in Art Since 1990 shed light on sociopolitical aspects of life through their works. Although they are on individual paths, they share an association with Mexico and have formal and conceptual similarities, such as the near abandonment of painting (with a few exceptions of those who incorporate it, but not as a sole medium) in favor of sculpture, found objects, installation, performance, video, photography, drawing, and collage. They are also connected through intense explorations of daily life, from the ordinary to the complex, which are discussed in this essay as a way of introducing these artists and their works in three overarching themes: building contemporary monuments, interrogating power structures, and magnifying the everyday. While these themes are often mined through topics local to Mexico, more times than not they also extend outward into a global arena.”

For this special Tuesday Evenings presentation, “On the Daily,” Karnes sets the stage for experiencing the exhibition by discussing its highlights and themes, revealing what is both unified and divergent about the artists whose work she selected for Inside Out.