MINERVA CUEVAS’S MURALS AND MICRO-SABOTAGES

Minerva Cuevas has never been tied to a single medium, but lately she has been making murals. They tend toward high-relief figures and symbols, realized in gallery-wall white. Her 2023 exhibition, In Gods We Trust, at kurimanzutto’s New York location, featured a wall of deities from preconquest Mexican cultures and iconography from the petrochemical industry. For the 2025 Aichi Triennale in Japan, she worked on a large-scale vertical installation that draws unexpected connections between the city of Seto and the postrevolutionary artistic environment in Mexico. Cuevas isn’t bound to the wall, however — she began her career in Mexico City in the 90s, focusing on interventions in public spaces, outside the purview of institutions. In 1998, she founded Mejor Vida Corp, which carried out acts of micro-sabotage, including changing labels in supermarkets to reduce food prices and passing out free metro tickets. She doesn’t separate her work in the streets from her studio practice, although she admits they may look distinct at first glance. “Museums and cultural spaces serve a special purpose, as people go expecting to see or experience something concrete. For me, pieces in a museum are just as valuable as those that happen in the street.” Cuevas continues to combine intensive archival research with boots-on-the-ground explorations, using her long-term inquiry into value and extraction in the cacao and oil industries in Campeche to create disembodied extremities carved from chocolate and readymades covered in tar. “What connects them is an interest in the social and a reflection of their environment.”