Museum sights in Mexico City
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Museo de la Caricatura
Mexico boasts a rich tradition of cartooning. Save for an eight-year period during the Porfirio Díaz regime when the dictator banned their publication, Mexican political cartoons have targeted the country’s leaders since the early 19th century. And as a glance at many daily newspapers shows, the art of scathingly political caricatures is very much alive and well. Housed in an 18th-century building that was originally an annex to the Jesuit college of San Ildefonso, the Museum of Cartooning displays the works of Mexico’s most prominent cartoonists from a collection of some 1500 original panels. These date from 1826, when Italian Claudio Linati published the country’s first…
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Ex-Convento de Churubusco
Scene of a historic military defeat, the 17th-century former Monastery of Churubusco, now a museum, stands within peaceful wooded grounds, 1.5km northeast of Plaza Hidalgo. On August 20, 1847, Mexican troops defended the monastery against US forces in a dispute over the US annexation of Texas. The Mexicans fought until they ran out of ammunition and were beaten only after hand-to-hand fighting. The US invasion was but one example in a long history of foreign intervention, as compellingly demonstrated by the National Interventions Museum inside the former convento. Displays include an American map showing operations in 1847, and material on the French occupation of the 186…
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Museo Frida Kahlo
Iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was born, lived and died in the ‘Blue House, ’ six blocks north of Plaza Hidalgo. Almost every visitor to Mexico City makes a pilgrimage here to gain a deeper understanding of the painter (and maybe to pick up a Frida handbag). Built by her father Guillermo three years before Frida’s birth, the house is littered with mementos and personal belongings that evoke her long, often tempestuous relationship with husband Diego Rivera and the leftist intellectual circle they often entertained here. Kitchen implements, jewelry, outfits, books and other objects from the artist’s everyday life are interspersed with art, photos and letters, as well as…
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Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño
Possibly the most important Diego Rivera collection of all belongs to the Olmedo Patiño museum, ensconced in a peaceful 17th-century hacienda 2km west of central Xochimilco.
Dolores Olmedo Patiño, who resided here until her death in 2002, was a socialite and a patron of Rivera. The museum's 144 Rivera works - including oils, watercolors and lithographs from various periods - are displayed alongside pre-Hispanic figurines and folk art. Another room is reserved for Frida Kahlo's paintings, including an especially anguished self-portrait depicting her spine as a stone column broken in several places. Outside the exhibit halls, you'll see xoloitzcuintles, a pre-Hispanic hai…
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Museo Nacional de Antropología
The National Museum of Anthropology, among the finest of its kind, stands in an extension of the Bosque de Chapultepec. The vast museum offers more than most people can absorb in a single visit. Concentrate on the regions you plan to visit or have visited, with a quick look at some of the other eye-catching exhibits. Everything is superbly displayed, with much explanatory text translated into English. Audio-guide devices, in English, are available at the entrance. The complex is the work of Mexican architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez. Its long, rectangular courtyard is surrounded on three sides by two-story display halls. An immense umbrellalike stone fountain rises up from t…
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Museo Nacional de Historia
A visible reminder of Mexico’s bygone aristocracy, the ‘castle’ that stands atop Chapultepec Hill was begun in 1785 but not completed until after independence, when it became the national military academy. When Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota arrived in 1864, they refurbished it as their residence. It then sheltered Mexico’s presidents until 1939 when President Lázaro Cárdenas converted it into the Museo Nacional de Historia. Historical exhibits chronicle the period from the rise of colonial Nueva España to the Mexican Revolution. In addition to displaying such iconic objects as the sword wielded by José María Morelos in the Siege of Cuautla and the Virgi…
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Museo Sala De Arte Público David Alfaro Siqueiros
One of the Big Three of Mexican muralism along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros is recalled as much for his fiercely radical political views as for his larger-than-life paintings. An avowed anarchist, he notoriously organized an (unsuccessful) assassination attempt on the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
Shortly before his death in 1974, Siqueiros donated his Polanco residence and studio to the government for use as a museum. Fans of the iconoclastic painter will find plenty of illuminating material about his life and work here, including sketches for his mural projects, and some of his paintings, notably an unfinished homage to Vietn…
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Museo Léon Trotsky
Having come second to Stalin in the power struggle in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was expelled in 1929 and condemned to death in absentia. In 1937 he found refuge in Mexico. At first Trotsky and his wife, Natalia, lived in Frida Kahlo’s Blue House, but after falling out with Kahlo and Rivera they moved a few streets northeast, to Viena 45. The Trotsky home remains much as it was on the day when a Stalin agent, a Catalan named Ramón Mercader, finally caught up with the revolutionary and smashed an ice pick into his skull. Memorabilia and biographical notes are displayed in buildings off the patio, where a tomb engraved with a hammer and sickle contains the Trotskys’ ashes. T…
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Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera Y Frida Kahlo
If you saw the movie Frida, you’ll recognize the Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Studio Museum, 1km northwest of Plaza San Jacinto. Designed by their friend, the architect and painter Juan O’Gorman, the innovative abode was the home of the artistic couple from 1934 to 1940, with a separate house for each of them. Frida lived there for five years until she decided to divorce Diego for supposedly having an affair with her sister, and took her things over to the Casa Azul in Coyoacán. (They remarried soon afterward.) Rivera’s house preserves his upstairs studio, including Rivera’s collection of Judas effigies. Frida’s (the blue one) contains changing exhibits from the memorabilia…
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Museo de la Ciudad de México
For a good overview of the megalopolis, visit the Museum of Mexico City. The innovative permanent exhibit, ‘It All Fits in a Basin, ’ presents a concise history of the city with models and maps; one room is devoted to the Zócalo and its role as a stage for social movements. Upstairs is the former studio of Joaquín Clausell, considered Mexico’s foremost impressionist. He used the four walls of the windowless room as a sketchbook during the three decades he worked there until his death in 1935. The result is an insanely detailed mural consisting of hundreds of small canvasses, full of people, animals, bucolic landscapes, religious motifs – whatever was on his mind.…
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Museo del Caracol
A short distance down the road from the Castillo, this ‘gallery of history’ traces the origins of Mexico’s present-day institutions, identity and values through a series of audio-enhanced dioramas re-enacting key moments in the country’s struggle for liberty. The museum is shaped like a snail shell, with its 12 exhibit halls spiraling downward. Along the way you’ll see the cry for independence at Dolores Hidalgo, the May 5 battle of Puebla, the execution of Maximillian, and the triumphant entrance of Madero into Mexico City. The tour ends at a circular hall which contains only one item – a replica of the 1917 Constitution of Mexico.
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Museo Franz Mayer
On the opposite side of the Plaza de Santa Veracruz, the Museo Franz Mayer is housed in the old hospice of the San Juan de Dios order, which under the brief reign of Maximilian became a halfway house for prostitutes. The museum is the fruit of the efforts of Franz Mayer, born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1882. Prospering as a financier in his adopted Mexico, Mayer amassed the collection of Mexican silver, textiles, ceramics and furniture now on display. The exhibit halls open onto a sumptuous colonial patio, where you can grab a bite at the excellent Cloister Café.
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Museo de la Luz
The ‘museum of light’ occupies the former monastery of San Pedro and San Pablo, one of the Centro’s most ancient structures. Kids will enjoy the array of interactive exhibits here, including optical illusions, one-way mirrors and kaleidoscopes, designed to demonstrate various optical principles (though only readers of Spanish will be illuminated by the accompanying explanations). At the rear of the museum are all kinds of devices to test your eyesight, and an optometrist performs eye exams for just M$25.
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Museo Universitario del Chopo
Santa María’s most impressive structure, with its two prominent spires, is the Museo Universitario del Chopo, four blocks south of the Alameda. Forged of iron in Dusseldorf around the turn of the 20th century, the building was brought over in pieces and assembled in Mexico City to serve as a pavilion for trade fairs. UNAM took over the historic building in 1975 and made it into a center for on-the-fringe artistic currents. At the time of research, the museum was closed for renovations.
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Casa de la Bola
The Casa de la Bola, on Parque Lira’s east side, was occupied by Mexican gentry from the 1600s until the 1940s, when its last resident, Don Antonio Haghenbeck, chose to restore it as a museum. Each of the interconnected upper-floor rooms is a showcase for Mexican aristocratic tastes, with beautiful painted ceilings, ebony-inlay furniture, alabaster vases, European tapestries and so on. The idyllic rear gardens are interlaced with paths through tropical foliage.
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Museo Soumaya
Property of multibillionaire businessman Carlos Slim and named after his late wife, the Soumaya museum houses one of the world’s three major collections (70 pieces) of the sculpture of Frenchman Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). Located inside the Plaza Loreto shopping mall, it also possesses work by Rodin’s contemporaries Degas, Matisse, Renoir and Daumier, collections of Mexican portraiture and colonial art, and murals by Rufino Tamayo, besides staging major temporary exhibitions.
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Casa Luis Barragán
Just south of the Bosque across Av Constituyentes, the Casa Luis Barragán was the home of internationally prominent Mexican architect Luis Barragán from 1948 until his death 40 years later. With its purposely circuitous passageways, seamless integration of outdoor and indoor spaces and bold swathes of Mexican folk tones, the building was designated a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2004 ‘as a masterpiece of human creative genius.’
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Museo del Estanquillo
Housed in a gorgeous neoclassical building two blocks from the Zócalo, the Museo del Estanquillo contains the vast pop-culture collection amassed over the decades by DF essayist and pack rat Carlos Monsivais. The recently inaugurated museum illustrates various phases in the capital’s development by means of the numerous photos, paintings, movie posters, comic strips and so on from the collection.
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Palacio de Minería
Opposite the National Art Museum is the Palacio de Minería, where mining engineers were trained in the 19th century. Today it houses a branch of the national university’s engineering department. A neoclassical masterpiece, the palace was designed by Tolsá and built between 1797 and 1813. Visits are by guided tour only. The palace contains a small museum on Tolsá’s life and work.
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Museo Nacional de las Intervenciones
The US invasion was but one example in a long history of foreign intervention, as compellingly demonstrated by the Museo Nacional de las Intervenciones, inside the former convento. Displays include an American map showing operations in 1847, material on the French occupation of the 1860s and the plot by US ambassador Henry Lane Wilson to bring down the Madero government in 1913.
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Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil
The Carrillo Gil Art Museum has a permanent collection of works by such Mexican luminaries as Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco (including some of Orozco’s grotesque, satirical early drawings and watercolors). The museum also includes engravings and prints by Klee, Rouault, Braque and Kandinsky, plus often excellent temporary exhibits. In the basement is a pleasant bookstore and café.
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Tamayo Museum
A multilevel concrete-and-glass structure east of the Museo Nacional de Antropología, the Tamayo Museum was built to house international modern art donated by Oaxaca-born Rufino Tamayo and his wife, Olga, to the people of Mexico. Exhibitions of cutting-edge modern art from around the globe alternate with thematically arranged shows that are from the Tamayo collection.
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Museo Interactivo de Economía
One block east of the Plaza Tolsá, the former hospital of the Bethlehemites (the only religious order to be established in the Americas) has since 2006 been the home of the Museo Interactivo de Economía. A slew of hands-on exhibits are aimed at breaking down economic concepts. For coin connoisseurs, the highlight is the Banco de México’s numismatic collection.
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Casa Del Poeta Ramón López Velarde
Composer of the lyrical paean to the nation La Suave Pátria, the beloved poet Ramón López Velarde resided in this building until his death in 1921. From his humble studio, you go through an armoire to embark on a journey through López Velarde's imagination. Fragments of the poet's verses are scattered around surreal sculptures, toys and dioramas.
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Museo Nacional de San Carlos
The museum hosts a formidable collection of European art from the 16th century to the early 20th century, including works by Rubens, Van Dyck and Goya. This former mansion of the Conde de Buenavista later became home to Alamo victor Santa Anna, and subsequently served as a cigar factory, a lottery headquarters and a school before being reborn as a museum in 1968.
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