Museo Anahuacalli
I thought I was done writing about Mexico City, and then we squoze in one more epic experience worth sharing.
Museo Anahuacalli is also known as the Diego Rivera Museum. Or one of them. That designation covers a number of CDMX institutions. The Anahuacalli had been highly recommended, and I loves me some Diego Rivera murals, so off we went. To an experience precisely nothing at all like I was expecting. First of all, this is not a museum of artworks created by Rivera. Rather, it’s a museum designed by Rivera to house his collection of pre-Columbian art. And both the design of the museum and the collection are mind-blowing.
The Grounds
The grounds of the museum are stunning in their own right. The museum sits within an almost 15 acre compound. A series of low buildings with a repeating motif of vertical slits house galleries, performance spaces, and a library. The central square in front of the museum acts like a zocalo, and is used to stage performances and events. The rest of the compound, about seven acres, is dedicated to an ecological reserve. The location was selected by Rivera in part because the land, which was created by a volcanic eruption 2,000 years ago, was rich in the lava he carved out to build the Museo. Regardless, he was intent that the extraction of the lava not damage the ecosystem, and created the reserve to assure that the landscape, native to the stark conditions of the volcanic flow, was preserved.
The Building
Because the Museo was built by literally carving lava building blocks out of the terrain, with exacting specifications to preserve the ecosystem, construction was long and expensive. In fact, Rivera never lived to see the Museo completed. Construction began in 1942 and concluded in 1963. Rivera died in 1957.
The design of the Museo showcases both Rivera’s respect for pre-Columbian culture and his willingness to follow his muse. While the building is obviously Mesoamerican, it’s not a slavish recreation of any particular style or era. Rivera himself referred to it as a mashup of Aztec, Mayan and Traditional Rivera styles. One can, apparently, be both reverent and irreverent simultaneously.
The motif of vertical slits found on the compound’s outbuildings is repeated on the Museo itself.
The structure has all kinds of nods to Mesoamerican cosmology. The four corners of the building feature sculptures of the Mexica gods representing Earth (Chicomecóatl), Wind (Ehécatl Quetzalcóatl), Fire (Huehuetéotl ), and Water (Maurice White*). The bottom floor of the museum is the Underworld, with dim lighting let in through thin, translucent sheets of onyx. The second floor is the Terrestrial World, and is flooded with natural light. The roof represents the Upper World, and is open to the sky.
* This joke is for Bruce
Dude thought of everything.
The Interior
The interior of the building feels like no other place I’ve ever been. It feels neither designed nor built. It feels… found. Not like it’s been excavated or restored. Like it’s existed forever, in precisely this condition, waiting for us to enter and appreciate it. Being inside is positively eerie.
The other sensation is one of discovery. The rooms veer off in odd directions, or drop a half level before ascending again. I actually lost Dorothy on the first floor, when she turned a corner I hadn’t noticed and found a whole other level of the gallery. The closest I can come is the old Tom Sawyer’s Island at Disneyland. A boat dropped you off and you just explored, stumbling across caves and forts and hideouts. The experience of the Anahuacalli was just as joyful and mysterious as my childhood explorations of Tom Sawyer’s Island.
The interior also has a huge second floor room that houses Rivera’s original working sketches for 16 of his murals, as well as original mosaic ceiling designs by Rivera, each one tied to the contents of its gallery.
The Collection
As fabulous, as amazing, as mind-blowing as the compound, the building, and the interiors are, they are nothing compared to the collection. By the time he died, Rivera had amassed a collection of almost 60,000 pieces. According to Frida, this is where almost all of his earnings as an artist went. The Museo only displays about 2,000 of those artifacts.
That’s a museum collection, for sure, and it’s housed in a thing called a Museo. But Rivera was neither an archaeologist nor a curator; he was an artist. So he didn’t care about typing his collection as Toltec this or Aztec that. He was interested in what the pieces said about the development of a distinctly Mexican artistic aesthetic. And if you stop and think about that for a moment, it’s obvious what a ridiculously unique perspective that is for both creating a collection and displaying it.
By definition, museum collections are assembled by curators, whose sole reason for existing is explaining. Your appreciation of their collections is fundamentally based on context, which is provided by placards in each gallery explaining what rubric was used for putting those pieces in this space, and museum cards that explain when each piece was made, by whom, for what reason, and with what materials.
Do you know what’s in the Anahuacalli’s galleries? Art. Just fucking art. Not a single word of explanation, either at the gallery or artifact level. What binds the pieces together, what unites a gallery into a coherent display? Diego Fucking Rivera. The eye of the artist who created the collection.
And OMG, what an eye that man had. It’s not just the obvious quality of the specimens; it’s that their significance is artistic, not archaeological. The pieces are joyous and playful and vibrant, and distinctions of time and space have been rendered completely meaningless. Does it matter that these two juxtaposed pieces are separated by hundreds of years and hundreds of miles? No. What matters is that two very silly dogs get to spend eternity in one another’s company, and we get to enjoy their dance.
I’ve never seen a museum exhibit curated by an Artist, and I will likely never see one again. But I am deeply enriched by the beauty and grace of the vision that Rivera had about the power of Mexican art, and the space in which he chose to share that vision. It’s worth the trip to Mexico City for the Anahuacalli alone.
Foundation Stone inscription
“I return to the people what I was able to rescue from the artistic heritage of their ancestors. Diego Rivera.”
Museo Jardín del Agua | Cárcamo de Dolores
The very next day after visiting Anahuacalli, we went to Chapultepec Park to the Museo Jardín del Agua. Mostly because we couldn’t imagine what a Water Garden Museum might be. Turns out, it’s another Diego Rivera installation. Of course it is. Diego Rivera is the gift that just keeps on giving in CDMX, much as Francisco Toledo’s fingerprints are all over Oaxaca.
There are two parts to the area. The Cárcamo de Dolores is a small building with a modest entrance fee. It was built as a functional hydraulic pumping station, part of the municipal system that brought water from the Lerma River into the city. Rivera collaborated with the architect on the design of the building, and designed and painted the mural inside, as well as designing the mosaic floor. Because of course he did.
The Cárcamo was closed for renovations when we were there, so we didn’t get to go inside, which was a major disappointment, as the murals and floor look amazing.
The Cárcamo was used as an active pumping station from 1951 to 1990, so the murals and floor were severely water damaged. Repairs were made, and it opened to the public as a museum in 2010.
As originally designed, the building was intended to amplify the sound of the water moving through it. When it reopened to the public, it was obviously waterless, so a Mexican artist built an installation to recreate that aural experience. It’s effectively a pipe organ that changes tone based on the flow of water through the nearby municipal pipes. We were super salty that we couldn’t get in, as it had all the earmarks of a peak experience.
I’m grateful to the Thought & Sight blog for the detailed historic information about the Cárcamo, the link to an NPR article from the time of the restoration, and the pictures. Since we couldn’t take any ourselves.
Water. What’s it good for? Uh! Absolutely everything? 
So much going on here. Read the Thought & Sight post for more detail, but this is basically Rivera showing the evolution of life from single celled organisms up through us. Was there nothing that man couldn’t do? 
This must have been a sight when water was rushing through it, but better, I think, to have the artwork visible and protected from water damage.
We couldn’t visit the Cárcamo, but the Museo Jardín del Agua was public and open. Thank goodness.
One part of the Jardín is a series of circular raised gardens with weird little towers in their center and snakes wrapping around their perimeter. They’re not running any longer, but they were originally part of the Lerma water system, like the Cárcamo. The towers are pumping stations, and the raised circular beds hide underground reservoirs. The snakes appear to have been purely decorative fountains, with water running all around the beds.
It’s not clear whether Rivera had his hand in the design of the reservoirs, but he was certainly responsible for the massive tiled sculpture of Tlaloc, the Aztec water god, sitting in a pool right in front of the Cárcamo.
According to Thought & Sight, this sculpture had been so seriously damaged that the current version is more recreated than restored. While I can’t judge the fidelity of that recreation, it certainly captures Rivera’s trademark playfulness and eye. It was also, as with the rest of the Cárcamo, a functional part of the Lerma water system. The sculpture and pool were originally the decorative entry point for water going into the Cárcamo. The water came through Tlaloc’s face, under his mouth, and into the Cárcamo behind it.
What a wonder the whole thing must have been when it was working. Leave it to Diego Rivera to conceive of something as mundane as a water pumping station as the jumping off point for art. Frida gets the press, but I’m a Diego guy, through and through.