Patricia Martín Méndez (

Mexico City Mexico City is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Mexico, largest city of Mexico, as well as the List of North American cities by population, most populous city in North America. It is one of the most important cultural and finan ...

) is a curator and art writer. She has conceptualized and directed three of the most relevant contemporary art foundations in Latin America:

Colección Jumex Colección Jumex is a private art collection owned by Eugenio López Alonso. The collection is housed at Museo Jumex, the main outpost of Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, located in the Polanco neighborhood in Mexico City. The museum opened ...

, Fundación Alumnos 47
Fundación Casa Wabi
In addition to creating the infrastructure to operate these institutions, she also served as chief curator, director of acquisitions; and she developed and promoted their educational, sponsorship and scholarship programs. She was in charge of the Colección AXA México (2009-2015), as well as the ''Residencias Cruzadas'' program at Casa de Francia, México (2011-2014). She has also independently curated multiple exhibitions. As a teacher she has taught conferences, courses and seminars in Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Argentina, Spain and the United States. She has published essays, reviews, articles, and edited several art catalogs. From 2013 to 2018, she published a weekly column focused on contemporary art and its connection with the local and global sociopolitical reality in the Mexican newspape
El Financiero

Current projects

In 2017, she create
Andamiaje
a digital platform that rethinks the way the art market operates, encouraging unprecedented interaction between collectors, consolidated and emerging artists, in order to support the work of the latter.

Casa Wabi Foundation

In 2014, Martín conceived the program under whic
Fundación Casa Wabi
operates. An interdisciplinary project whose objective was to create an exchange of ideas between national and international artists of various disciplines and the communities surrounding the project, located in the Costa Chica of Oaxaca in the southern Mexican Pacific. During her tenure a residency program, a sculpture garden and a robust community cultural exchange were created. During the first year of operation and in absolute record time Martín achieved: * 53 national and international artists residencies, among them: Antonio Bravo, Lawrance Carroll, Marilá Dardot, Carla Fernández, Simon Fujiwara, Gabriela Galván, Koo Jeong A, Gonzalo Lebrija, Kelly Loudenberg, Diego Quemada-Diez, Calixto Ramírez, Santiago Sierra, Noemí Vulpian, Richard Wentworth, Héctor Zamora. * 52 workshops. * 134 sessions with the communities, with the participation of more than 869 locals. From their management, the communities acquired the confidence to interact with the foundation in a proactive and natural way, driven by programs according to their needs. Martín supervised the exhibitio
Two Rhythms For A Frieze
by

Daniel Buren Daniel Buren (born 25 March 1938, in Boulogne-Billancourt) is a French conceptual artist, painter, and sculptor. He has won numerous awards including the Golden Lion for best pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1986), the International Award for ...

(2014) and cured the exhibition o
Tierra Vaga
by

Michel François Joseph-Michel François (; 1957 – 2017) was a colonel in the Haitian army. As Haiti Chief of National Police he participated in the 1991 Haitian coup d'état, which overthrew Haiti's elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Former Haitian Pre ...

and

Harold Ancart Harold Ancart (born 1980) is a Belgian painter and sculptor. He currently lives and works in New York City. Education Harold Ancart studied at La Cambre in Brussels, Belgium where he received a M.F.A in 2007. Major works "Untitled (the great n ...

(2016). She directed Fundación Casa Wabi until the beginning of 2016.

Fundación Alumnos 47

Between 2006 and 2010, Martín collaborated with Moisés Cosío establishing the bases to create Fundación Alumnos 47: a non-profit organization with a mission to stimulate the creation, consideration and promotion of national and international contemporary art, through an autonomous body which worked as a laboratory for artistic analysis, research, training and production.

Yvon Lambert Gallery

In 2005, upon leaving

, Martín moved to New York to direct the program at

Yvon Lambert Gallery Yvon Lambert Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in Paris founded by Yvon Lambert in 1966. History In 1966, Yvon Lambert opened his first gallery on the rue de L'Échaudé in Paris, France where he began to exhibit American artists. He showed f ...

. She remained there until 2007 and develop the internal restructuring project of the organization. Thus positioning the gallery within the American art panorama, while supporting and promoting the work of its represented artists. Under her direction, the gallery showed individual exhibitions by artists such as

Joan Jonas Joan Jonas (born July 13, 1936) is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, "a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s".Mircea Cantor, Charles Sandison, and Sislej Xhafa.

La Colección Jumex

In 1997 Martín began to imagine what was three years later known as ''La Colección Jumex:'' one of the most influential and visionary contemporary art programs in Latin America. From 1997 to 2005 she served as director and chief curator. Under her supervision an exhibition hall, artwork protection warehouses and a public library of contemporary art were built inside the most important juice factory in Mexico, where seminars, workshops and several educational programs were held. Martín's work inside the foundation was crucial for the dissemination of Mexican contemporary art on the global scene, as well as for the insertion of international art on the Mexican scene. In the words of Eugenio López Alonso, president of the foundation, Martín's work at

was key to the construction of Fundación Jumex: "When we started the foundation, I met Patricia, who was the first curator of the collection, and together we planned a different project, an adventure that has not stopped growing since then." Within Colección Jumex she promoted multilevel and multimodal dialogues around contemporary art, through collaboration agreements with artists, curators, researchers and public institutions. In the eight years Martin was in charge of the evolution and growth of the art collection, she acquired more than 1,200 works. Since the late 1990s, she included important work by contemporary artists such as

Tacita Dean Tacita Charlotte Dean CBE, RA (born 1965) is a British visual artist who works primarily in film. She was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998, won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2006, and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008. She lives ...

Thomas Demand Thomas Cyrill Demand (born 1964) is a German sculptor and photographer. He currently lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles, and teaches at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. He makes photographs of three-dimensional models that look like ...

Rineke Dijkstra Rineke Dijkstra Royal Photographic Society#Distinctions and qualifications, HonFRPS (born 2 June 1959) is a Dutch photographer. She lives and works in Amsterdam.Olafur Eliasson Olafur Eliasson (; born 5 February 1967) is an Icelandic–Danish artist known for sculptured and large-scaled installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer's experience. In 1995, ...

, Fischli & Weiss,

Ceal Floyer Ceal Floyer (born 1968) is a Pakistani-born British visual artist. She is based in Berlin, Germany. Biography Floyer was born in 1968 in Karachi, Pakistan. Floyer received a BFA degree from Goldsmiths College, in 1994.Dan Graham Daniel Graham (March 31, 1942 – February 19, 2022) was an American visual artist, writer, and curator in the writer-artist tradition. In addition to his visual works, he published a large array of critical and speculative writing that spanned ...

Jenny Holzer Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950) is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. Her work focuses on the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projectio ...

Bas Jan Ader Bastiaan Johan Christiaan "Bas Jan" Ader (19 April 1942 – disappeared 1975) was a Dutch conceptual and performance artist, and photographer. His work was in many instances presented as photographs and film of his performances. He made perf ...

Donald Judd Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, 1928February 12, 1994) was an American artist associated with minimalism.Tate Modern websit"Tate Modern Past Exhibitions Donald Judd" Retrieved on February 19, 2009. In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for ...

Sarah Lucas Sarah Lucas (born 1962) is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged in 1988. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour by incorporating photography, sculpture, collage and found object ...

On Kawara was a Japanese conceptual artist who lived in SoHo, New York City, from 1965 until his death. He took part in many solo and group Art exhibition, exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1976. Early life Kawara was born in Kariya, Japan on ...

Rivane Neuenschwander Rivane Neuenschwander (born 1967) is a Brazilian artist. She is known for work that explores language, nature, geography, the passing of time and social interactions. At times her works are interactive, involving viewers in spontaneous and partici ...

and

Robert Smithson Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938 – July 20, 1973) was an American artist known for sculpture and land art who often used drawing and photography in relation to the spatial arts. His work has been internationally exhibited in galleries and mu ...

, among many others. Martín's greatest contribution was her vision to gather and show––together with the aforementioned consolidated artists––the work of emerging Mexican contemporary artists such as

Francis Alÿs Francis Alÿs (born 1959, Antwerp) is a Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist. His work emerges in the interdisciplinary space of art, architecture, and social practice. In 1986, Alÿs left behind his as an architect and relocated to Mexico City, ...

, Daniel Guzmán,

Teresa Margolles Teresa Margolles (born 1963 in Culiacán) is a Mexican conceptual artist, photographer, videographer, and performance artist. As an artist she researches the social causes and consequences of death.Prince Claus Fund (June 2012''Report from the 20 ...

Gabriel Orozco Gabriel Orozco (born April 27, 1962) is a Mexican artist. He gained his reputation in the early 1990s for his exploration of drawing, photography, sculpture and installation. In 1998, Francesco Bonami called Orozco "one of the most influentia ...

, Damián Ortega, Fernando Ortega, Ale de la Puente,

Santiago Sierra Santiago Sierra (born 1966) is a Spanish artist, known for performance art and installation art. Much of his work deals with the topic of social inequities. He lives in Madrid. Career Sierra's most well-known works involve hiring laborers to co ...

, Melanie Smith and Pablo Vargas Lugo, among many others (who are today renowned and have global successful artistic trajectories). In this way, Martín created a process where Mexican artistic production gradually began to be intertwined with the international art scene.

Family and early career

Martín is the daughter of a Spanish Civil War refugee in Mexico and a Yucatecan woman who from an early age became the breadwinner of her family. She began her professional career as an art director for film productions; She worked on more than 40 projects related to advertising, music videos and movies, in Mexico and abroad. To continue her work from new and different sources, she moved to the United Kingdom in 1994. According to

Juan Villoro Juan Antonio Villoro Ruiz (born 24 September 1956, in Mexico City) is a Mexican writer and journalist and the son of philosopher Luis Villoro. He has been well known among intellectual circles in Mexico, Latin America and Spain for years, but his ...

: "We are facing a drop-out of unwavering determination that at age 19 decided to put into practice the Beatles song 'She's Leaving Home'". She enrolled in the Post-war and Contemporary Art master's program at the University of Manchester, earned her degree in 1997. Between 1995 and 1997 she also directed the research for

Lisson Gallery Lisson Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with locations in London and New York, founded by Nicholas Logsdail in 1967. The gallery represents over 50 artists such as Art & Language, Ryan Gander, Carmen Herrera, Richard Long, John Latham, S ...

30th Anniversary in London. Villoro continues: "When Patricia boarded the plane back in 1997 she asked herself in the clouds: 'What the hell am I going to do in Mexico?' In absolute confusion she had an epiphany: 'I will make a private collection of contemporary art.' I only knew that: I wanted to gather art without official support." Patricia Martín is married with two children.

Exhibitions

Shows curated by Martín at La Colección Jumex: *

Rodney Graham William Rodney Graham (January 16, 1949 – October 22, 2022) was a Canadian visual artist and musician. He was closely associated with the Vancouver School. Early life Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, on January 16, 1949. ...

, Ecatepec, Edo. de México, México, 2005.
Los usos de la imagen, fotografía filme y video en La Colección Jumex
(co-curada con Carlos Basualdo), MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 2004.
Eden

Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso Colegio de San Ildefonso, currently is a museum and cultural center in Mexico City, considered to be the birthplace of the Mexican muralism movement. San Ildefonso began as a prestigious Jesuit boarding school, and after the Reform War it gaine ...

, Ciudad de México, México, 2003. Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, Colombia, 2004.
Thisplay
Ecatepec, Edo. de México, México, 2002.
Exposición Inaugural de la Colección Jumex
Ecatepec, Edo. de México, México, 2001. * 33 piezas, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Ciudad de México, México, 1999. During her tenure at Colección Jumex, Martín created and managed a curatorial program where she welcomed national and international curators to do critical readings on the collection, such as:
On Kawara, Conciencia, Meditación, Observador en las colinas
Jonathan Watkins, 2005.
La Colmena
Guillermo Santamarina, 2004.
Killing Time and Listening Between the Lines
Philippe Vergne & Douglas Fogle, 2003.
The Theory of Leisure

Dan Cameron Dan Cameron (born February 12, 1956, in Utica, New York) is an American contemporary art curator. He has served as senior curator for Next Wave Visual Art at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), an annual exhibition of emerging Brooklyn-based artists ...

, 2002.

Independent exhibitions

In addition to her extensive work with organizations and institutions, Martín is a prolific independent curator. She has been organizing exhibitions since 1999, including:
Tierra Vaga

, Oaxaca, 2016.
Naturaleza Humana

Ugo Rondinone Ugo Rondinone (born November 30, 1964) is a Swiss-born contemporary artist. Rondinone is known for his temporary, large-scale land art sculpture, '' Seven Magic Mountains'' (2016–2021), with its seven fluorescently-painted totems of large ...

, Museo Anahuacalli, Ciudad de México, México, 2014. * Fischli & Weiss, Museo Tamayo, Ciudad de México, México, 2004. * ''Strawberry Fields,'' Julie Becker, Mónica Espinosa, Freiderich Kunath, Henri Michaux, OPA, Guadalajara y CANAIA, Ciudad de México, 2004.
Sunday Afternoon
303 Gallery, Nueva York., Estados Unidos, 2002. * ''Proyecto 4X:'' Francis Alÿs, Jonathan Hernández, Pedro Reyes & Laureana Toledo, Museo de las Artes de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, México, 2001. * ''Aprendiendo menos,'' Gabriel Orozco, Fischli & Weiss, y Richard Wentworth, Centro de la Imagen, Ciudad de México, México. Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, Colombia, 2001. * ''6 Young British Artists in LA International,'' Chac Mool Gallery, Los Ángeles, Estados Unidos, 1999.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Martin, Patricia Living people Art curators Mexican curators Alumni of the University of Manchester Year of birth missing (living people) Mexican women curators 21st-century Mexican women