/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/CULTURE-MEXICO: In Search of Museum-Goers

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Pilar Franco

MEXICO CITY, Jun 11 2002 (IPS) - Mexico’s cultural authorities are working to foment interest in the country’s more than 900 museums, concerned that just 11 of 100 people visit even one such institution in a year.

The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its educational services this year, with the premise that a museum is not an attic for the forgotten nor a storehouse of old things, but a gallery revealing the nation’s past and present.

The National Museum of Anthropology and History launched its educational services in 1952 to attend to and expand the number of visitors, whether children, adults, the disabled, or members of Mexico’s many indigenous communities, INAH spokeswoman Alma Olguín, told IPS.

The INHA programme, “An inexhaustible experience” seeks to commemorate the five decades of these cultural centres, created to foment a museum culture, and to improve visitor services.

Workshops, exhibitions, concerts, poetry readings and theatre spectacles are among the activities scheduled in tribute to this “mode of communication that integrates the visitor with aesthetic, academic and recreational experiences,” explained Olguín.

In these 50 years the efforts of the educational advisers have become more polished. They present Mexican history using attention-getting methods in courses, workshops, conferences and in-school visits, with the aim of encouraging children and adolescents to visit the museum more frequently, she said.

But figures from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) indicate that an average of just 11 of 100 Mexicans visit a museum per year.

This rate contrasts sharply with that of Costa Rica, where 22.5 out of 100 people visit a museum in a year, and of Spain, with 73 in 100 per year.

Experts point out that museum visits in Mexico are usually family outings and are reserved for weekends, but are rarely given an educational orientation.

As such, specialists from the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), and from other educational centres, are discussing pedagogical and didactic strategies to improve academic efforts in museums.

The results of a study being conducted by the university institutions, which includes the viewpoints of students, artists, and museum educators, will be presented before the governmental National Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA).

Mexican history up to the 18th century is the mandate of the institutions run by INAH, and the distinctive traits of Mexico’s cultural and history past in the last two centuries are presented through institutions managed by CONACULTA.

The collections of documents and objects of cultural or scientific interest exhibited in more than 900 public and private museums and galleries offer a broad view of the country’s multi-ethnic mosaic.

The National Museum of Anthropology and the Fine Arts Palace in Mexico City are the country’s most emblematic institutions. The first is home to an extensive collection of pre-Hispanic pieces that have been gathered throughout centuries from the entire country.

Twenty-six galleries, each of which constitutes its own museum, bring to life the history of Mexico’s indigenous peoples.

The Fine Arts Palace was the first museum in the country dedicated exclusively to the plastic arts. Construction of the building, in the heart of the Mexican capital, began in 1904 under the direction of Italian architect Adamo Boari, who combined elements of French Art Nouveau with others of pre-Hispanic origin.

The Fine Arts Palace itself has the added attraction of the most representative works of Mexico’s three master muralists: David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera.

Furthermore, in the Coyoacán district a building that was a Catholic convent during the Spanish colony is the Museum of the Interventions, exhibiting objects related to the defence of Mexican territory.

This museum portrays the experiences of the country in the eras in which it was the target of armed incursion, which gave rise to the basic principles included in the Constitution: non-intervention and the right to self-determination.

Expert Felipe Lacouture explains that the institution of the museum is the first step towards research, paving the way for activities of gathering, classifying, documenting, preserving and restoring.

Once the internal workings are defined, the exhibits and the interpretive explanations – or public aspect of the museum – follows. The final stage is the social development of educational functions through dissemination, communication and public participation.

“Museums must have an intent to dialogue and to foment community participation,” stated Lacouture.

In Mexico, there is a need to intensify contact with the last phase, the communication with the public. “The museum does not just organise exhibitions. Its work never ends. It would be like establishing a dialogue in the desert,” he said.