Greater than three years after asserting the approaching opening of Leonora Carrington’s former house in Mexico Metropolis as a public museum, the college accountable for the mission has scrapped the concept, intending to make use of the home as a analysis centre as an alternative. In response to Carlos S. Maldonado of the Spanish newspaper El País, the museum might have been nixed as a consequence of a labour dispute on the Metropolitan Autonomous College (UAM), though the college denies this.
The impetus for turning the late Surrealist painter’s home right into a museum—à la Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul—got here from Carrington’s youthful son Pablo Weisz Carrington, who took on the mission after her loss of life in 2011. Weisz Carrington offered the home, together with a mortgage of 8,000 of the artist’s objects, to UAM in 2017 with the understanding that it could finally be opened to the general public as a museum. UAM invested roughly $600,000 into the museum, and teased its public opening in 2021.
UAM justifies its pivot on Carrington’s house from public museum to analysis centre by saying that it’s a logical step for a college. Union leaders at UAM are sceptical of this clarification. The union factors to the truth that, in accordance with its contract with the college, it had requested for 17 extra jobs to employees the brand new museum in 2021. These had been by no means created. Some additionally level to a perceived lack of curiosity from UAM’s management to proceed with the museum mission.
The cancellation of the museum is maybe ill-advised given Carrington’s current rise in recognition each within the artwork market and among the many common public. The artist has been entrance and centre on this 12 months’s celebrations of the one centesimal anniversary of Surrealism, and her portray Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) set a document for her work in Could when it offered at public sale for $28.5m.
