An alleged dispute between a Mexican university and its union has forced the school to scuttle plans to open the Mexico City home of Leonora Carrington to the public as a museum, according to the Spanish publication El País.
The Surrealist artist’s house will not be off limits entirely. Per the El País report, Carrington’s home will now become a research center, though it will not be the tourist attraction it was initially meant to be.
Plans to turn Carrington’s home into a tourist site were first announced in 2021, when Mexico City’s Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM), the school that owns the house, said it would display 45 sculptures by her there. Four years earlier, the university had purchased the home for $500,000 from her son, Pablo Weisz Carrington, who stipulated that the structure had to become a museum.
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At the time that UAM revealed plans to realize that vision, Carrington excitement was reaching a fever pitch. Her writings lent the Surrealism-focused 2022 Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani, its name—a bona fide sign that Carrington, long marginalized alongside many of her female colleagues of the era, had officially achieved canonization.
In the years since, the British-born artist’s paintings of mysterious rituals and supernatural creatures have continued to reach an international audience. Her auction record, now standing at $28.5 million, was re-set earlier this year, and she is the subject forthcoming surveys at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum and Milan’s Palazzo Reale. Her art currently features in many blockbusters mounted this year to celebrate Surrealism’s 100th anniversary, including one at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; a famed self-portrait by her ranked highly on a recent ARTnews list of the greatest Surrealist artworks.
Yet it seems that UAM will no longer be able to capitalize on the momentum surrounding Carrington, who spent much of her career in Mexico City.
Initially, visitors were expected to be able to tour Carrington’s living room, kitchen, studio, and more, making the space similar to the famed Casa Azul, a Mexico City site that once acted as a home to Frida Kahlo and now acts as a museum devoted to her. That will no longer be the case.
Yissel Arce Padrón, the general coordinator of outreach at UAM, told El País that Carrington’s home would now become what she called a “documentation center, because the university’s interest is basically research.” She added that there was “no fixed model of a museum” because the focus would now be “teaching and research.”
Rodolfo Pérez, the former general secretary for the UAM workers’ union, claimed that the shift occurred after UAM declined to create more roles for staffers at the Carrington house. He accused the school of “violating the collective labor agreement.” Arce Padrón denied that there was a dispute between the university and its union.