KATES-FERRI PROJECTS

KATES-FERRI PROJECTS and Galería MUY are proud to announce,
El Encuentro / The Encounter an exhibition that brings together a group of artists from Chiapas Mexico collectively curated with the Espacio Artístico MUY. The exhibition will take place in the Lower East Side of New York City, at Kates-Ferri projects from February 27 to March 29, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 1st at 563 Grand St, New York from 6-8 pm.

On view, five varied and uniformly insightful, uniquely dexterous, Mayan artists from the southern state of Chiapas, in Mexico; they treat themes of their daily lives, their ancestral belief system, changing gender roles and a cri de guerre against ecological abuse, all with forthright decolonial self-affirmation. This show of 10 unique works from artists: Cecy Gómez, PH Joel, Antún Kojtom, Kayum Ma’ax, and Maruch Méndez ranging from painting, textile, mixed media, to sculpture, is a joint initiative at Kates-Ferri Projects and with the Espacio Artístico MUY.

Artists from the Maya and Zoque (M/Z) peoples, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, will present an exhibition of recent work, collectively curated with the Espacio Artístico MUY, A.C., exploring and creating new webs of meaning and cultural geographies among those dwelling on ancestral lands and those in globalized movement. Works made by creatives of Maya/Zoque cultures – both those in Chiapas and those outside – will tour in Mexico and the United States with a program of exhibitions, workshops, and conferences. The crisscross of dialogues will include Indigenous-to-Indigenous conversations as well as Latinx-to-Latinx and of course this project also will appeal to and engage the wider contemporary artworld.

Chiapanec Indigenous contemporary art – both street and easel – is in ready dialogue with popular, as well as museum-style, cultural life in Mexico and the US, valuing the ancestral while affirming universal contemporality. M/Z creatives are celebrated for their pastiche of self-taught and art-schooled styles referencing Classic Maya, traditional handicraft, emoticons and globalized visual culture, adept in all traditional and contemporary media, and dealing especially with identity, ecology, Indigenous resilience, and defense of territories.

About MUY:

MUY – the phoneme is the Mayan equivalent of the joy in enjoyment – is a cultural center and Indigenous artist-run space in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas.

Espacio MUY (aka Galería MUY) is a Mexican independent artist-driven initiative dedicated to the production, exhibition, dissemination, and investigation of art and its role in evolving citizen participation, education, and personal development.

The MUY, a non-governmental (501c3 equivalent) organization based in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico has, in its permanent space, an artists’ workshop, exhibition galleries, a collection on permanent loan, archives for students of Indigenous art, and a residency program. The organization is sustained through donations, volunteer activism, and sales revenues (strictly to offset costs). Co-directors Martha Alejandro and John Burstein (of Mexican and dual citizenship, respectively) coordinate a team of three persons and serve a collective of over 13 artists all of whom speak Maya or Zoque languages.

Since opening in late 2014, MUY has curated over 30 exhibitions of Native artists working in the array of media: painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation, and performance, as well as literary and film production. Committed to art by, for and with their communities, the “reading” or reception by M/Z audiences is part and parcel of what MUY does, with workshops and public art (murals, etc.) in artists’ home pueblos in Chiapas. Needless to also say, art is fundamentally an intercultural experience and MUY has facilitated Maya and Zoque artists being included in major national and international exhibitions, including Mexico’s Bellas Artes and El Chopo, the Sao Paulo Museum of Art (Brazil) and the Kode Bergen Art Museum (Norway).

KATES-FERRI PROJECT