Rolando López: Guggenheim Museum Aguascalientes
Curated by Edgar Alejandro Hernández the exhibition titled Guggenheim Museum Aguascalientes, by the Mexican artist Rolando López (b. 1978, Aguascalientes), criticizes the toxic legacy that the American industrialist Robert Solomon Guggenheim left behind in the city of Aguascalientes.
Guggenheim amassed part of his fortune through a contract that the Aguascalientes state government awarded him in 1894, which granted him several acres of land, tax-free, upon which he enjoyed exploitation of all natural resources. In this land, he established the Gran Fundición Central Mexicana mineral foundry in the state capital of Aguascalientes.
In the late 19th century, Guggenheim’s metallurgical company promised development and progress for Aguascalientes, but the expected economic boom never came. This did not prevent, however, indiscriminate resource extraction nor the over-exploitation of local workers. The foundry closed 30 years later and left behind nine acres of toxic industrial waste in an area known to this day as the hill of grease.
Today, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is one of the brands that has best succeeded in developing its trans-national, hegemonic model as a cultural enterprise. Yet the origins of the fortune that allowed Robert Solomon Guggenheim to create the collection and cultural industry associated with his name has always remained secret. Rolando López has developed a corpus of work that includes performance, installations, public interventions, sculptures, photographs and artistic actions connected to social problems in Aguascalientes related to Solomon R. Guggenheim’s company.
The show’s centerpiece, Guggenheim Museum Aguascalientes, portrays the entire cultural program Rolando López developed with local Aguascalientes artists, as well as the architectural design for a utopian US-brand museum to be built on the site where the toxic industrial waste the Gran Fundición Central Mexicana is concentrated. This is Guggenheim’s real legacy to Mexico.
Founding member of The Agency, civil association focused on education and artistic production, Rolando López held an undergraduate degree in graphic design and an MA in Social Sciences and Humanities. In 2013, López was awarded an artistic residency at Angouleme, France’s École Supérieure de l’Image Européenne. As an independent artist, López works on interdisciplinary projects using numerous theoretical, methodological and technical resources, including print, photography, sculpture, installation and video.
