A spiral turn

Museo Amparo houses a collection spanning diverse eras and mediums: Pre-Columbian, viceregal, nineteenth-century, modern, and contemporary. This exhibition takes the spiral as its point of departure—a form historically associated with the structure of the cosmos, cycles of life and death, and the nexus between the earth, the sky, and the underworld. From this conceptual core, he exhibition constructs an overlapping, non-linear interpretation of the institution’s memory and the evolution of its holdings.

A spiral turn traces the museum’s origins as the family home where the Collection first began in Puebla. It brings into focus works and objects that remained in storage for extended periods—often due to their folk or craft-based nature, their anonymity, or their position on the margins of canonical narratives. These pieces enter into a dialogue with cornerstone works from the Collection and three new commissions by artists Alejandra Venegas, Dulce Chacón, and Tahanny Lee Betancourt. Their contributions, in turn, reference the Permanent Collection through a iceregal technique, an objet insolite, or imagery from distant territories, respectively.

The gallery path is also structured as a spiral. It begins with a display case representing the institution’s “inner workings,” moves through various explorations of intimacy via the body and the home, and expands toward nature and far-off lands, before returning to a gallery featuring audiovisual material from the institutional archive. Adopting an archaeological lens, the displayed works, objects, and documents reveal the richness of a Collection that bears witness to shifting paradigms, evolving lifestyles, belief systems, technical advancements, and changing representations of the territory it inhabits.