Amanda de la Garza appointed Director General of Visual Arts at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC)
Amanda de la Garza has been named the Director General of Visual Arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and head of its University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC). As the university’s top cultural executive, de la Garza will also oversee the operations of both the Museo Experimental El Eco, which was designed by German artist Mathias Goeritz in 1953 and acquired by the university in 2004, and the University Museum of Science and Art (MUCA-Roma), a research and exhibition space centered around design, architecture, and contemporary art.
“It is our greatest desire to continue to act as a bridge between ideas, artistic production, and the public, with the trust of artists, museum professionals, civil society, and the Patronage Fund of Contemporary Art [Patronato Fondo de Arte Contemporáneo, A.C.],” de la Garza said in a statement. “We will work diligently to see to it that this network of institutions and projects becomes increasingly connected, so that it will have an optimal impact in this day and age.”
In her new role, de la Garza is planning to refocus the MUAC’s curatorial program and will organize more exhibitions, research projects, and commissions of works that address feminist, gender-related, and aesthetic-political issues. She will also strive to expand on her predecessor Graciela de la Torre’s work toward strengthening MUAC’s reputation as an invaluable university resource and bolstering the programs of El Eco and the MUCA-Roma.
Born in Monclova in 1981, de la Garza has a BA in sociology and postgraduate degrees in anthropological science and art history with a focus in curatorial studies. She first joined MUAC—Mexico’s first museum dedicated solely to contemporary art—as an adjunct curator in 2012. Previously, she served as curator of “Readings of a Fractured Terrain” (2017) at Museo Amparo in Pueblo City and the Seventeenth Biennial of Photography (2016) at the Center of Images in Mexico City.
Over the course of her career, de la Garza has worked on projects with local and international artists such as María José Argenzio, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Oscar Santillán, and the Tlakolulokos collective and has cocurated a number of exhibitions with MUAC’s chief curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, including shows of work by Jeremy Deller, Harun Farocki, Leandro Katz, Vicente Rojo, and Hito Steyerl.
