Oaxaca Ingobernable: Aesthetics, Politics, and Art from Below

Co-curators: Gustavo García and Natalia M. Toscano

Oaxaca Ingobernable: Aesthetics, Politics, and Art from Below, explores subversive representations of embodied resistance by Indigenous and Black Oaxacan communities in Mexico and the United States through collaborative artmaking practices and largescale relief prints, on view in the Hibben Center and Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.

On display in the Hibben Center is an array of work by Colectivo Subterráneos, and next door at the Maxwel Museum of Anthropology is a site-specific installation by Colectivo Subterráneos and Pavel Acevedo. These artists critically interrogate historical and contemporary impacts of colonialism and capitalism on marginalized Oaxacan communities. Their striking, often larger than life works depict how these communities—of which they are part—struggle to retain Indigenous knowledges, lands, languages, and collective practices in the face of indigenismo, antiblackness, xenophobia, and dehumanization. Through a shared history of rebellious politics, communal solidarity, and visually bold tactics, these artists embody the spirit of ungovernability, and strive to incite positive social change in Oaxaca and beyond.

Colectivo Subterráneos (Underground Collective) is a multi-generational group of Oaxacan artists, primarily composed of young people, who create relief prints and murals to illuminate social issues. The collective formally started in 2021 with just six members and has since grown to over thirty members. They maintain a multipurpose space in the center of Oaxaca where they make, show, and sell art and run a free arts school called Escuela de Arte para el Pueblo (Art School for the People). Their artistic and political traditions have been shaped by social movements in Oaxaca and beyond. Inspired by internationalist leftist artists, their name purposefully aligns them with working class, exploited, and oppressed communities who occupy spaces below the upper-class and outside of top-down politics and social hierarchies.

The collective's main goal is to create art that is politically representative of and accessible to local communities. By creating unsanctioned public art and activating the streets as their primary canvas, Subterráneos reclaim spaces slowly being seized by external global capital and return these spaces to the community. Through their workshops, they create more spaces for community members where they can learn artistic practices that not only allow them to share their stories but also make a living from producing art.

Artist Pavel Acevedo was born in Oaxaca, Mexico and currently resides in Riverside, California. His experiences in Oaxacan protests, including the 2006 popular uprising in Oaxaca City and movements in California, shape the focus of his creative work. He uses linoleum printing and muralism to engage with the deep and often overwhelming tensions he and countless other Oaxacans experience around migration, borders, and nation states. His practice of collaborative printmaking encourages collective meaning making. Acevedo draws on Zapotec storytelling and contemporary Oaxacan migrant experiences to blend the (super)natural world with rebellious and life-affirming visions of Oaxacan being.

Together, these artists offer visually compelling stories of Indigenous and Black Oaxacan communities and their struggles across time and place to remember tradition, culture, collective practices and resistance to systemic oppression and erasure. Through their work, they continue to enact an ungovernable politic that has been present in Indigenous and Afro-Oaxacan communities for centuries. This exhibit is generously supported by the Department of Chicana/o Studies, El Centro de la Raza, Center for Regional Studies, the Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies, and the Latin American & Iberian Institute.

Relief Printing Workshops: Please join us September 30 to October 5, 2024 for hands-on linoleum printing workshops with Pavel Acevedo. Stay tuned for more information. 

Contact: For questions or more information, please contact the Maxwell Museum’s Curator of Public Programs Julián Antonio Carrillo (jac123@unm.edu) and exhibition co--curator Gustavo Garcia (garciagustavo1@unm.edu). 

Bilingual (in Spanish and English) Exhibition Press Kit is available here.