A wonderful collective exhibition from Canada showing at the Instituto Cultural Cabañas under the umbrella of the Festival Cultural de Mayo has a remarkable complement in an excellent, large collection of 20th century photography by Manuel Alvarez Bravo on exhibit across the patio.
Both show for much of the spring and summer and employ air conditioning or fans to lend relief from the heat. A Black Coffee branch inside the institution sells many cool drinks.
The 240 beautifully displayed black-and-white photos of Alvarez Bravo are not connected to the May Festival, but are from a collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in Mexico City. MAM began the project in 1973, which was slightly after Alvarez Bravo’s professional peak (though he lived until 2002, a century after his birth in 1902). The nudes, landscapes, portraits, documentaries, street scenes and abstracts make up this huge body of work (in five rooms, each with provocative titles such as “El Rio Nunca es el Mismo”) that defines the national character of Mexico.
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