Magali Lara
Poema Urbano (Urban Poem)
A visual artist, curator, and teacher, she has been working since the 1970s on art related to the body and emotions, creating visual essays that explore identity, femininity, otherness, and the connection between the inner and the outer self. She studied at the National Art School at UNAM. In 1977, she held her first solo exhibition there, titled Scissors. She worked with Grupo Março and collaborated with No-Grupo in the 1970s and has exhibited widely in Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, the United States, France, and Cuba. In 1981, she co-curated, with Emma Cecilia García and Gilda Castillo, the first exhibition of contemporary Mexican women artists, which traveled to Künstlerhaus Bethanien in West Berlin, and later organized artist book exhibitions in the United States and Brazil. During the 1980s, she published visual poetry in various specialized magazines and began painting and printmaking, shifting away from collective practice toward a more personal investigation. With more than forty years as an artist and twenty as a teacher, she has held numerous solo exhibitions in national and international museums, and her work is included in important collections in Mexico and abroad. In 2019, she participated in Radical Women, focused on women artists from 1970 to 1985, presented at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. In 2025, she had a solo exhibition at MUAC in Mexico titled Five Decades in a Spiral, and at ISLAA in New York, a survey of her work titled Stitch to the Body. (Mónica Mayer)
"My interventions with Grupo Março, a collective formed in 1979 by Alejandro Olmedo, Gilda Castillo, Manuel Marín, Mauricio Guerrero, Sebastián and myself, always attempted to touch the sentimental life of the city—its secrets and phrases spoken in hushed voices. For me, the city constructed messages for each of us. Poema Urbano (Urban Poem), one of our performances, involved the participation of passersby in the creation of collective poems and the dialogue these created."
courtesy Magila Lara
Format
Performance
Document media
Photographs
Issue date
1981
To be seen in
re.act.feminism #4 - Archival Chain Reactions, MSUM, Ljubljana, 2026
Relations
#4 LAR 1/P