In October 2024, following public outcry and an organized protest, two pieces by the Argentinian feminist artist Ana Gallardo were taken down from her retrospective exhibition at the renowned University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) in Mexico City. The first piece, Extract from a Failed Project, is a mural-sized text carved with a knife directly onto a wall at the museum, a harrowing and brutally honest stream-of-consciousness account of the artist’s failed attempts to work with residents at the Casa Xochiquetzal, a Mexico City institution that provides shelter, medication, and meals to elderly former sex workers. In it, Gallardo recalls being asked to care for one of the residents: “una vieja puta y enferma... sucia e inmóvil no podía hacer nada sola solo llorar... le tengo que dar de comer la comida que se le escapa por los agujeros de los dientes de la boca casi vomito la puta madre no soy capaz de cuidar a esta mujer...” The second piece, Untitled, is a black-and-white video of the artist’s hand carefully massaging the resident’s old and inert one.
Both pieces were first produced in 2011 and had been shown for over ten years without raising any eyebrows. But just two months after they had been put up at the MUAC in 2024, a controversy erupted after Casa Xochiquetzal posted a Facebook message critiquing the pieces and accusing Gallardo—and by extension the museum and the Mexican state—of defaming, abusing, and harming sex workers.
Much had changed between the moment when Gallardo first produced the pieces and when they were displayed by the MUAC, including the massive growth of Mexico’s feminist movement. Not only has the movement’s following grown exponentially in recent years, but it has become much more diverse. While the movement centers around and draws attention to the ever-increasing crisis of gender-based violence in Mexico, it also raises awareness about countless other issues related to racism, trans rights, and sex work, issues that sometimes divide feminists. Gallardo’s controversy at the MUAC is in many ways exemplary of both the power and growth of the movement and also of the tensions and rifts that accompany the diversification of political identities within it.
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Following the launch of the so-called “war on drug-trafficking” by former President Felipe Calderón in 2006, the number of women murdered has been on the rise: the rate increased from two women murdered per 100,000 people in 2007 to 5.7 in 2022.[1] Historically, most women experienced violence in their homes, but in recent years public spaces have become more dangerous.[2] Recent studies show that close to 50% of women and girls over the age of 15 have faced at least one incidence of sexual violence in their life (INEGI 2025). The number of women that have been forcibly disappeared has also been rising steadily, with 18 disappearances daily between 2008 and 2023 (Quintana 2024). While there is a higher prevalence of disappearances among men than women, the trend is reversed for minors: for every two missing boys there are three missing girls (2024).[3] Women are also particularly vulnerable to the country’s crisis of forced internal displacement (Glockner et al 2023).
As these different forms of gender-based violence have grown, so have the efforts to enunciate and denounce them. Important achievements at the institutional level include the decriminalization of abortion, the enactment of the General Law on Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence—which clarified that violence comes in different shapes and forms and need not produce physical injuries—and a constitutional reform that established a principle that requires that there must be 50% women and 50% men in all decision-making positions, an important formal mechanism whose purpose is to generate a more egalitarian representational democracy.
These formal changes have not necessarily translated into better living conditions for women. Feminists have continued to organize, and the once-fringe movement has grown into a true mass movement. With its growth, the movement has also experienced a significant demographic shift. Younger women from across social classes, sexual orientations, and racial profiles have begun organizing and identifying as feminists.[4] Novel coalitions across different institutional arenas and between different feminist groups, including non-governmental organizations, labor unions, political parties, grassroots political groups, and individuals are also springing up (Barrancos 2020).
But perhaps the most notably visible change that the movement has undergone in the last ten years is the way it has come to occupy public space. While feminists continue to engage in traditional marches and strikes, they also use tactics that are more direct and confrontational, including large-scale performances, graffiti, escraches, and other displays of public complaint. The number of protests against gender-based violence has increased from a handful a year in the early 2000s to over 500 per year in the third decade of the new millennium, with over 200,000 participants in the International Women’s Day protest held on March 8. The turn to the streets has not meant abandoning other spaces of activism; rather, it has created a diverse and complex scenario in which the feminist movement has amplified its reach, including in the digital world.
Feminist art and aesthetics have become an important part of these tactics in at least two important ways. First, feminists are increasingly appropriating and reconfiguring public space, using it to collectively articulate, document, and denounce different forms of gender-based violence and abuse. Mainly through the use of performance, they are literally occupying public spaces with their bodies. They are also using all kinds of visual interventions ranging from murals and graffiti on public walls and monuments to the creation and placement of antimonumentas, installations that seek to publicly memorialize injustices, which are usually erected without the permission of the state (Domínguez, López, Mejía 2023). Although some of the tactics currently deployed draw from those used by the feminist movement in the 1970s in Mexico and across Latin America, they are now being carried out much more frequently, with many more participants, and are combined with digital technologies, to amplify their impact.
Second, feminist artists are helping to shape the movement by “forming communities and networks of care and support” (Werth, Zien 2024). As art historians and cultural critics have repeatedly argued, a recurrent trait of much feminist art is the centering of collaborative methods and collective work. For decades, feminist ideas have shaped the ways in which art is produced, thereby helping to broaden the parameters that determine what art is and who can be deemed an artist and an art public. Process-based art, also known as socially-engaged art or social art practice, is a paradigmatic example of the influence of feminism in art. Drawing on a wide range of activities such as workshops, meetings, performances, and exhibitions, it weaves together strategies from art and activism with the goal of transforming people’s immediate environments, such as workplaces, schools, and families.[5] These processes often entail forms of labor that, while rarely publicly visible, are key to making change, including, for instance, finding ways to bring people together to talk and listen to each other share their experiences of violence under patriarchy thereby helping them gain “semantic authority” over these experiences (Felman 2002). Work of this nature usually extends over several months or years, and the focus is on the processes that give rise to them rather than on the final product.
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Ana Gallardo’s work is in many ways exemplary of the kind of feminist art described above. Gallardo spends days, weeks, and even months getting to know, listening to, and learning from the women who partake in her projects with whom she often develops close relationships and friendships (Gilardi 2023). She has written that “it is in the moments of intimacy and trust that what I call ‘work’ is produced” (Gallardo 2015). Her work usually consists of a series of videos of the actions and performances that she carries out in collaboration with elderly women. These performances are based on activities like dancing danzón or karaoke singing, which these women have learned to do in their old age. Many of them would have wanted to do these things in their youth but were unable to because they had to work and take care of domestic chores, but also because of the gender-based prejudices that kept women from performing certain activities simply because they were women. In Gallardo’s art, these women enact their frustrated dreams.
While feminists and women-identified artists in museums and other art spaces are not yet equally represented in the art world, they have gained ground in recent years. As museums and art galleries make room for feminists and women-identified artists, curators, and art administrations, themes like motherhood, domestic work, and sexual harassment, which had rarely been the focus of art exhibitions in official and mainstream art spaces, are finally being addressed. Gallardo’s exhibit at the MUAC, the most prestigious contemporary art museum in the country, was a testament to this transformation.
But while many of Gallardo’s pieces are the product of meaningful collaboration with her interlocutors, this was not the case with the two pieces about Casa Xochiquetzal. The title of the first, Extract from a Failed Project, indicates her recognition of this failure and the frustration and pain that she felt in response to such failure. But the organization saw it differently, explaining in their Facebook post that the work should never have been produced or shown in the first place. They alleged that the artist had lied about her process: Gallardo maintained that she had spent two months working at the shelter and only stopped going because the resident she was caring for passed away. Casa Xochiquetzal claimed that she only visited the shelter once and that the resident never consented to being recorded for Untitled, perhaps because, following a stroke, she did not have the mental faculties to do so. Gallardo was also faulted for revictimizing the shelter’s residents by using language like “whore” rather than “sex worker” when referring to the shelter’s residents.
The Facebook post set off responses that ranged from support for the Center’s work to virulent xenophobic attacks on Gallardo. There were calls for the removal of her work, warning about the potential damage done to the reputation of a small institution that depends on donations that are already meager. The MUAC issued a public statement that it would stand up for freedom of expression and, rather than removing the pieces, would seek out dialogue with the affected parties. But instead it was met with a protest a few days later led by organizations who work with sex workers and LGBTQ+ populations living in the streets. The MUAC’s white and gray walls were covered with colorful graffiti that read “Total respect for sex work” and “Violence is not art.” Others accused Gallardo of being a white privileged woman (“Blankkka privilegiada”) and demanded that she “get out of [her] bubble.”
In response to the protest, the museum (with Gallardo’s consent) removed the two pieces from the show, issued a formal apology to Casa Xochiquetzal, and invited its residents to speak at the museum. There, Minerva Valenzuela, a spokesperson of Casa Xochiquetzal, argued that inviting sex workers was the least the museum could do but that in no way was it a restitution for the damage allegedly already done. She hoped that “artists will think twice before speaking about issues which they do not know much about and which, more importantly, might affect others” (N22 Digital 2024). Meanwhile, in the art world a heated debate ensued in response to the whole affair, with several prominent voices in the field decrying the removal of the pieces as an act of censorship.[6] The MUAC’s former head curator, Cuauhtémoc Medina, suggested that the complaints issued by the protesters were punitive and reactionary and maintained that “the historical novelty [since 2011, when Gallardo first produced the pieces] is that social movements that appear opposed to the idea of repression are now proposing that the appropriate surgical procedure for works of art that disturb them or do not conform to their values should be their amputation.”[7]
The comment is telling, but perhaps not in the way Medina intends. On its surface, this is just boilerplate criticism of anyone who dares critique artists. But it actually speaks to the profound ways that feminism and feminist art have reshaped large parts of the Mexican public sphere. Even as Mexico is wracked by violence and anti-democratic trends that have undermined freedom of the press and limited citizens’ freedom of speech (Aguilar, Cornejo, Monsiváis-Carrillo 2025), segments of its public sphere remain robust and responsive to mass movements. The country’s feminist movement has not only galvanized mass participation, but changed both the scope of institutions that take feminist issues seriously and the forms of debate, discourse, and protest around those issues. That a feminist artist can show pieces about sex work at the country’s most respected art museum, spur online and physical protests of her work, bring sex work advocates to talk about their work into a museum, and that feminists can then be accused of being censorious reactionaries by art world stalwarts defending feminist art all, taken together, shows how loud the voices of women have become. In a country like Mexico where gender violence is ubiquitous, particularly against lower class and racialized women, it is precisely their voices that need to be heard both in the streets and in museums.