It is revealing that many of us first learned about the upcoming Yucatán Biennial not through an official announcement, but from an Instagram post by Kurimanzutto, which, in…
It is revealing that many of us first learned about the upcoming Yucatán Biennial not through an official announcement, but from an Instagram post by Kurimanzutto, which, in late 2025, unveiled the project—in English and from Miami. From that moment, questions began to accumulate. What will be the curatorial premise of this event? Has the list of participants already been decided? How is the event being funded? Four months after its official presentation, we now have more answers, yet an anxious sense of anticipation lingers. What relationship will the biennial establish with the territory it inhabits? What forms of collaboration and participation have been envisioned with Maya peoples and communities? How does one take part? Is Yoko Ono coming?
It is worth recalling that the Peninsula has hosted biennials before. The first Yucatán Visual Arts Biennial took place in 1985, and the last in 2015. Organized and funded by successive state governments, these initiatives followed a model of open calls, juries, and prize competitions inherited from the previous century. Awards reached up to 130,000 Mexican pesos for hegemonic disciplines such as painting and sculpture, while a wide range of contemporary and interdisciplinary practices—including performance, textile art, conceptual art, relational art, and other proposals that exceed conventional categories—remained outside their scope of recognition. Through the format of the open call, these competitions supposedly offered democracy; yet what they failed to articulate was a pedagogical and argumentative intention, with a conceptual and narrative arc.
The Yucatán Biennial being proposed today, the result of a collaboration between the private sector and the State, does not break with previous logics of legitimation; rather, it updates them through a curatorial apparatus aligned with the demands of the international art circuit and its mechanisms of validation. However, the responses from various cultural agents in Mérida have made clear that the mission of this type of event is not entirely self-evident: on the one hand, young artists are asking, what is a biennial?; on the other, established artists are asking, why wasn’t I invited? What is evident is that some of these questions have to do with the way the initiative has been communicated, while also reflecting the fact that the project remains under construction and that we will not know much more until it takes place. Nevertheless, we can begin to identify certain directions by looking at its main actors.
The Biennial’s foundational myth begins with Catherine Petitgas, a collector, patron, editor, philanthropist, and former Wall Street financier who has proclaimed herself the “ambassador of Latin American art.” Petitgas, who is primarily based in London, arrived in Yucatán with her former husband, Franck Petitgas, a financial advisor to numerous international banks and later an economic advisor to the United Kingdom’s right-wing Conservative Party. For Petitgas, collecting can generate value for the community and “facilitate” the process through which an artist gains visibility. Once in Yucatán, they purchased a second home—a historic mansion in the city center—to house their collection, which includes works by Idalid Castillo, Lorena Ancona, Patricia Martín Briceño, Gerda Gruber, among many others.
Through Petitgas’s gaze—shaped by the highest echelons of the international contemporary art world—“not much was happening” in Yucatán’s art field, and there was “not really a scene.” Thus, in 2023, she concluded that there was a need to support and professionalize a young generation in order to introduce them to national and international markets. This is where Proyecto Y was born, together with artists and cultural producers Fritzia Irizar and Óscar García, as a platform for support and professionalization that unofficially assumed representational functions for promising students recently graduated from the Universidad Nacional de Artes de Yucatán. The project operates as a nonprofit gallery, organizes exhibitions, builds networks, and offers professionalization workshops according to the institutional standards of Mexico City’s art scene. The majority of local artists selected to participate in this Biennial already have a relationship with Proyecto Y.
Finally, through the Fundación Peninsular de Arte Contemporáneo A.C., Petitgas has committed to financing one-third of the next three editions of the Biennial. In doing so, one of the main platforms for artistic professionalization has come to operate under her stewardship.
To determine whether this is truly Yucatán’s Biennial, we would first have to ask in what ways it actually belongs to Yucatán. To be clear, although it is called the Yucatán Biennial, this does not mean it is a biennial about Yucatán. Rather, it is an “international” biennial taking place in Yucatán. This ambition is celebrated through the somewhat suspicious slogan, “Mexico’s First International Biennial,” which brings together sixty-five artists, including several from elsewhere in Mexico, the majority from abroad, and fifteen local artists based in Yucatán.
Artist Abraham Cruzvillegas was selected as the Biennial’s Artistic Director under the theme of “language and idiom.” Cruzvillegas had previously been present in Mérida through Proyecto Y, and is now invited on account of his recognition within the international art circuit, the pedagogical emphasis of his practice, and his support of local artists. However, at a moment when the field increasingly advocates for more collaborative and situated curatorial models, the project missed an opportunity to share its curatorial leadership with a local agent.
The extensive list of participants—many already familiar faces on the biennial circuit, friends of Cruzvillegas, or artists from Kurimanzutto’s roster—lays bare the ambition to position this project within the global art system. The attitude seems to be: the bigger, the better—a statement designed to impress, generate media attention, and resonate. What remains unclear, however, is how this selection of participants stems from a rigorous curatorial research process, and which responsibilities are sidestepped under the title of “Artistic Director,” as opposed to those assumed by a curator.
Among the local artists and collectives—some recently graduated and without institutional representation—there is a palpable sense of gratitude, optimism, and nervousness. There is a certain excitement about sharing space with canonical artists such as Cecilia Vicuña, Yoko Ono, and Mónica Mayer. At the same time, a sense of camaraderie has emerged among those of the same generation. Participants will receive artist fees of 17,000 Mexican pesos, in addition to a production budget and support for the development of their works. On their shoulders rests the responsibility of representing the local art scene, without the endorsement of many of Mérida’s established artists.
The tension between the local and the global has permeated art criticism for the past thirty years, while economic inequalities within the art world have reinforced a cosmopolitan logic of international reach in which communities are reduced to sites rather than places. This debate inspired critic Lucy Lippard to describe globalization’s tendency to produce non-places: the city as site becomes an itinerary; the city as place is inhabited. A site is exhibited; a place is lived. Along similar lines, writer Jenny Wu asks, “Why Can’t Art Biennials Be Small?” to underscore the need to preserve local rituals within an increasingly standardized global circuit. This leaves us with a series of questions: How is the Biennial’s relationship to Yucatán articulated beyond presenting a hospitable landscape as its backdrop? What will distinguish it, philosophically and structurally, from other events of a similar scale? How does it envision the Biennial’s circulation beyond Mérida?
Since the emergence of canonical events such as the Venice Biennale, these exhibitions have functioned as tools for presenting the host city as modern, international, and sophisticated. Paco Barragán has described this as a form of “neoliberal soft power”: a public relations strategy that serves the logic of the market. It is a mode of international projection aimed at generating tourism and financial returns. For Petitgas, success will be measured quite explicitly by attracting between sixty and seventy thousand visitors over the three months of the Biennial. Tying this metric of success to Mérida’s tourism infrastructure, she argues that the city has the hospitality capacity to host an event of this kind.
The infrastructure she refers to includes 6,600 Airbnb listings and numerous boutique hotels. Together with real estate speculation, low wages, environmental crises, and political models that favor gentrification, this configuration has made Mérida one of the most expensive cities in Mexico in which to live—a reality that profoundly affects the lives of local artists.
The city may have a tourism infrastructure, but beyond that, what conditions does it offer those who actually live there? Everyday life is marked by flooding, potholes, sidewalks that are impossible to navigate, water shortages, inadequate public transportation, a lack of urban planning that reduces cycling to a Sunday pastime while prioritizing real estate development, and recurring power outages caused by insufficient energy infrastructure. How can investment in contemporary art events generate structural change that benefits the broader community rather than only a single sector?
Rather than continuing to reproduce campaigns that market Mérida as Mexico’s only safe paradise and a prime destination for real estate investment, it is urgent to bring greater visibility to Yucatán’s structural shortcomings. Two of the issues most widely discussed across the country today are gentrification and the overexploitation of natural resources for the benefit of a few. Staging an international biennial in this context entails a far greater challenge—and responsibility—than it may initially appear: namely, creating an event that is genuinely rooted in the territory, rather than merely producing an image of a “safe” and “beautiful” Mérida. What is needed is a model of responsible tourism that engages meaningfully with local culture, even when that culture is uncomfortable.
Beyond their public programs and pedagogical agendas, biennials also serve, quite explicitly, to consolidate new art markets. They function as cultural festivals where collectors, gallerists, buyers, and art dealers circulate in order to keep abreast of the aesthetic and thematic tendencies shaping both local and global art scenes. They provide opportunities for emerging artists to interact with intermediaries and the agents of market legitimation, creating the possibility of securing future representation and sales.
For example, Material Art Fair is already promoting a trip to Yucatán that offers exclusive access to artists’ studios, workshops, and events through the cultural experience the region has to offer. In peripheral art scenes such as Yucatán’s, this function of the biennial as a platform for circulation and economic legitimation raises expectations, expands possibilities, and fuels the hope of one day making a living from art and building a professional career through the market. As Barragán reminds us, biennials—beyond their curatorial proposals and theoretical narratives, with conceptual arcs amenable to neoliberalism—exist to establish economic relationships between cultural actors and markets.
The next editions of the Biennial already have, perhaps prematurely, their curatorial direction in place: identity for 2028 and ecology for 2030. What begins this year will resonate for many years to come and, together with initiatives such as Week of Art Yucatán, is shaping a new chapter of local cultural management and international projection for our art scene.
Yet as long as Yucatán continues to offer no undergraduate or graduate programs, nor diploma courses, in curatorial practice, cultural journalism, museography, or art history, the discursive power to describe and shape our scene will remain in the hands of thinkers and artistic logics external to the local context. The Biennial could become an opportunity to train cultural journalists, strengthen curatorial practice, and propose new cultural policies, allowing the local art scene to undergo structural changes capable of improving the quality of life and political agency of emerging artists and local communities.
As artists, we do not have the financial autonomy to refuse participation in a biennial. The promise of the art world entails an implicit and unquestioned commitment to its structures. There is institutional pressure: an invitation to a biennial—anywhere in the world, regardless of who funds it or its impact on the local scene—will always open professional and economic opportunities, though never with any guarantees. As writer Sandra Sánchez reminds us, “The site of circulation is not an accessory added to artistic experience; it is its condition of possibility.” We hope for the day when artists have greater power to decide where, and under what conditions, to show their work.
From within these contradictions, we ask: What kind of economic and political structure makes it possible for a single individual to partially finance six years of an event of this scale? How might we build alternative infrastructures of hospitality for cultural events that do not perpetuate gentrification and real estate speculation? In what ways should an art circuit respond to the problems faced by the scenes in which it operates? How can the celebration of art become a space for civic gathering?
It is still too early to know whether the Yucatán Biennial will contribute ideas and structures capable of improving our living conditions. Its promise resembles that of the FIFA World Cup: a largely media-driven event that celebrates spectacle, brings together the world’s best teams, attracts tourists, generates economic spillover, builds new stadiums, and excites talent scouts. Yet just as one can hate FIFA and love football, one can also remain critical and suspicious of events like this. It is possible to enjoy the art, support the home team, and still ask what economic relations it conceals, what kind of world it constructs, and whose interests it ultimately serves. We are living through a moment in the history of art in which, if art does not position itself against real estate speculation, low wages, environmental crises, and gentrification, it will inevitably be found perpetuating them. It is not only about scoring goals; it is about creating horizontal platforms where everyone can play. That is only possible if we build art scenes that resist the logics of dispossession and neoliberal extraction.
It is revealing that many of us first learned about the upcoming Yucatán Biennial not through an official announcement, but from an Instagram post by Kurimanzutto, which, in late 2025, unveiled the project—in English and from Miami. From that moment, questions began to accumulate. What will be the curatorial premise of this event? Has the list of participants already been decided? How is the event being funded? Four months after its official presentation, we now have more answers, yet an anxious sense of anticipation lingers. What relationship will the biennial establish with the territory it inhabits? What forms of collaboration and participation have been envisioned with Maya peoples and communities? How does one take part? Is Yoko Ono coming?
It is worth recalling that the Peninsula has hosted biennials before. The first Yucatán Visual Arts Biennial took place in 1985, and the last in 2015. Organized and funded by successive state governments, these initiatives followed a model of open calls, juries, and prize competitions inherited from the previous century. Awards reached up to 130,000 Mexican pesos for hegemonic disciplines such as painting and sculpture, while a wide range of contemporary and interdisciplinary practices—including performance, textile art, conceptual art, relational art, and other proposals that exceed conventional categories—remained outside their scope of recognition. Through the format of the open call, these competitions supposedly offered democracy; yet what they failed to articulate was a pedagogical and argumentative intention, with a conceptual and narrative arc.
The Yucatán Biennial being proposed today, the result of a collaboration between the private sector and the State, does not break with previous logics of legitimation; rather, it updates them through a curatorial apparatus aligned with the demands of the international art circuit and its mechanisms of validation. However, the responses from various cultural agents in Mérida have made clear that the mission of this type of event is not entirely self-evident: on the one hand, young artists are asking, what is a biennial?; on the other, established artists are asking, why wasn’t I invited? What is evident is that some of these questions have to do with the way the initiative has been communicated, while also reflecting the fact that the project remains under construction and that we will not know much more until it takes place. Nevertheless, we can begin to identify certain directions by looking at its main actors.
The Biennial’s foundational myth begins with Catherine Petitgas, a collector, patron, editor, philanthropist, and former Wall Street financier who has proclaimed herself the “ambassador of Latin American art.” Petitgas, who is primarily based in London, arrived in Yucatán with her former husband, Franck Petitgas, a financial advisor to numerous international banks and later an economic advisor to the United Kingdom’s right-wing Conservative Party. For Petitgas, collecting can generate value for the community and “facilitate” the process through which an artist gains visibility. Once in Yucatán, they purchased a second home—a historic mansion in the city center—to house their collection, which includes works by Idalid Castillo, Lorena Ancona, Patricia Martín Briceño, Gerda Gruber, among many others.
Through Petitgas’s gaze—shaped by the highest echelons of the international contemporary art world—“not much was happening” in Yucatán’s art field, and there was “not really a scene.” Thus, in 2023, she concluded that there was a need to support and professionalize a young generation in order to introduce them to national and international markets. This is where Proyecto Y was born, together with artists and cultural producers Fritzia Irizar and Óscar García, as a platform for support and professionalization that unofficially assumed representational functions for promising students recently graduated from the Universidad Nacional de Artes de Yucatán. The project operates as a nonprofit gallery, organizes exhibitions, builds networks, and offers professionalization workshops according to the institutional standards of Mexico City’s art scene. The majority of local artists selected to participate in this Biennial already have a relationship with Proyecto Y.
Finally, through the Fundación Peninsular de Arte Contemporáneo A.C., Petitgas has committed to financing one-third of the next three editions of the Biennial. In doing so, one of the main platforms for artistic professionalization has come to operate under her stewardship.
To determine whether this is truly Yucatán’s Biennial, we would first have to ask in what ways it actually belongs to Yucatán. To be clear, although it is called the Yucatán Biennial, this does not mean it is a biennial about Yucatán. Rather, it is an “international” biennial taking place in Yucatán. This ambition is celebrated through the somewhat suspicious slogan, “Mexico’s First International Biennial,” which brings together sixty-five artists, including several from elsewhere in Mexico, the majority from abroad, and fifteen local artists based in Yucatán.
Artist Abraham Cruzvillegas was selected as the Biennial’s Artistic Director under the theme of “language and idiom.” Cruzvillegas had previously been present in Mérida through Proyecto Y, and is now invited on account of his recognition within the international art circuit, the pedagogical emphasis of his practice, and his support of local artists. However, at a moment when the field increasingly advocates for more collaborative and situated curatorial models, the project missed an opportunity to share its curatorial leadership with a local agent.
The extensive list of participants—many already familiar faces on the biennial circuit, friends of Cruzvillegas, or artists from Kurimanzutto’s roster—lays bare the ambition to position this project within the global art system. The attitude seems to be: the bigger, the better—a statement designed to impress, generate media attention, and resonate. What remains unclear, however, is how this selection of participants stems from a rigorous curatorial research process, and which responsibilities are sidestepped under the title of “Artistic Director,” as opposed to those assumed by a curator.
Among the local artists and collectives—some recently graduated and without institutional representation—there is a palpable sense of gratitude, optimism, and nervousness. There is a certain excitement about sharing space with canonical artists such as Cecilia Vicuña, Yoko Ono, and Mónica Mayer. At the same time, a sense of camaraderie has emerged among those of the same generation. Participants will receive artist fees of 17,000 Mexican pesos, in addition to a production budget and support for the development of their works. On their shoulders rests the responsibility of representing the local art scene, without the endorsement of many of Mérida’s established artists.
The tension between the local and the global has permeated art criticism for the past thirty years, while economic inequalities within the art world have reinforced a cosmopolitan logic of international reach in which communities are reduced to sites rather than places. This debate inspired critic Lucy Lippard to describe globalization’s tendency to produce non-places: the city as site becomes an itinerary; the city as place is inhabited. A site is exhibited; a place is lived. Along similar lines, writer Jenny Wu asks, “Why Can’t Art Biennials Be Small?” to underscore the need to preserve local rituals within an increasingly standardized global circuit. This leaves us with a series of questions: How is the Biennial’s relationship to Yucatán articulated beyond presenting a hospitable landscape as its backdrop? What will distinguish it, philosophically and structurally, from other events of a similar scale? How does it envision the Biennial’s circulation beyond Mérida?
Since the emergence of canonical events such as the Venice Biennale, these exhibitions have functioned as tools for presenting the host city as modern, international, and sophisticated. Paco Barragán has described this as a form of “neoliberal soft power”: a public relations strategy that serves the logic of the market. It is a mode of international projection aimed at generating tourism and financial returns. For Petitgas, success will be measured quite explicitly by attracting between sixty and seventy thousand visitors over the three months of the Biennial. Tying this metric of success to Mérida’s tourism infrastructure, she argues that the city has the hospitality capacity to host an event of this kind.
The infrastructure she refers to includes 6,600 Airbnb listings and numerous boutique hotels. Together with real estate speculation, low wages, environmental crises, and political models that favor gentrification, this configuration has made Mérida one of the most expensive cities in Mexico in which to live—a reality that profoundly affects the lives of local artists.
The city may have a tourism infrastructure, but beyond that, what conditions does it offer those who actually live there? Everyday life is marked by flooding, potholes, sidewalks that are impossible to navigate, water shortages, inadequate public transportation, a lack of urban planning that reduces cycling to a Sunday pastime while prioritizing real estate development, and recurring power outages caused by insufficient energy infrastructure. How can investment in contemporary art events generate structural change that benefits the broader community rather than only a single sector?
Rather than continuing to reproduce campaigns that market Mérida as Mexico’s only safe paradise and a prime destination for real estate investment, it is urgent to bring greater visibility to Yucatán’s structural shortcomings. Two of the issues most widely discussed across the country today are gentrification and the overexploitation of natural resources for the benefit of a few. Staging an international biennial in this context entails a far greater challenge—and responsibility—than it may initially appear: namely, creating an event that is genuinely rooted in the territory, rather than merely producing an image of a “safe” and “beautiful” Mérida. What is needed is a model of responsible tourism that engages meaningfully with local culture, even when that culture is uncomfortable.
Beyond their public programs and pedagogical agendas, biennials also serve, quite explicitly, to consolidate new art markets. They function as cultural festivals where collectors, gallerists, buyers, and art dealers circulate in order to keep abreast of the aesthetic and thematic tendencies shaping both local and global art scenes. They provide opportunities for emerging artists to interact with intermediaries and the agents of market legitimation, creating the possibility of securing future representation and sales.
For example, Material Art Fair is already promoting a trip to Yucatán that offers exclusive access to artists’ studios, workshops, and events through the cultural experience the region has to offer. In peripheral art scenes such as Yucatán’s, this function of the biennial as a platform for circulation and economic legitimation raises expectations, expands possibilities, and fuels the hope of one day making a living from art and building a professional career through the market. As Barragán reminds us, biennials—beyond their curatorial proposals and theoretical narratives, with conceptual arcs amenable to neoliberalism—exist to establish economic relationships between cultural actors and markets.
The next editions of the Biennial already have, perhaps prematurely, their curatorial direction in place: identity for 2028 and ecology for 2030. What begins this year will resonate for many years to come and, together with initiatives such as Week of Art Yucatán, is shaping a new chapter of local cultural management and international projection for our art scene.
Yet as long as Yucatán continues to offer no undergraduate or graduate programs, nor diploma courses, in curatorial practice, cultural journalism, museography, or art history, the discursive power to describe and shape our scene will remain in the hands of thinkers and artistic logics external to the local context. The Biennial could become an opportunity to train cultural journalists, strengthen curatorial practice, and propose new cultural policies, allowing the local art scene to undergo structural changes capable of improving the quality of life and political agency of emerging artists and local communities.
As artists, we do not have the financial autonomy to refuse participation in a biennial. The promise of the art world entails an implicit and unquestioned commitment to its structures. There is institutional pressure: an invitation to a biennial—anywhere in the world, regardless of who funds it or its impact on the local scene—will always open professional and economic opportunities, though never with any guarantees. As writer Sandra Sánchez reminds us, “The site of circulation is not an accessory added to artistic experience; it is its condition of possibility.” We hope for the day when artists have greater power to decide where, and under what conditions, to show their work.
From within these contradictions, we ask: What kind of economic and political structure makes it possible for a single individual to partially finance six years of an event of this scale? How might we build alternative infrastructures of hospitality for cultural events that do not perpetuate gentrification and real estate speculation? In what ways should an art circuit respond to the problems faced by the scenes in which it operates? How can the celebration of art become a space for civic gathering?
It is still too early to know whether the Yucatán Biennial will contribute ideas and structures capable of improving our living conditions. Its promise resembles that of the FIFA World Cup: a largely media-driven event that celebrates spectacle, brings together the world’s best teams, attracts tourists, generates economic spillover, builds new stadiums, and excites talent scouts. Yet just as one can hate FIFA and love football, one can also remain critical and suspicious of events like this. It is possible to enjoy the art, support the home team, and still ask what economic relations it conceals, what kind of world it constructs, and whose interests it ultimately serves. We are living through a moment in the history of art in which, if art does not position itself against real estate speculation, low wages, environmental crises, and gentrification, it will inevitably be found perpetuating them. It is not only about scoring goals; it is about creating horizontal platforms where everyone can play. That is only possible if we build art scenes that resist the logics of dispossession and neoliberal extraction.
