| Minerva Cuevas | |
| Birth Place: | Mexico City |
| Known For: | conceptual art |
Minerva Cuevas (born 1975) is a Mexican conceptual artist known for site-specific interventions guided by social and political research and social change ideals.[1] Her production includes installation, video works and photographic works as well as contextual interventions in specific locations. She lives and works in the neighborhood of el Centro Histórico in Mexico City, often directing her artistic and social efforts towards questioning the capitalist system.[2] She is a member of Irational.org and the founder of the Mejor Vida Corp. (1998) and International Understanding Foundation (2016).
Cuevas studied at the National School of Plastic Arts, UNAM from 1993 to 1997.
Cuevas also worked with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of their Public Knowledge curatorial initiative. She engaged with local San Franciscans about the city's changing ecology as explored through the theme of fire.[3]
She was cited in Rubén Gallo's book New Tendencies of Mexican Art. In this 2004 book, Gallo recognizes how Cuevas’s connection to the streets of Mexico City and the struggles of working people guides her multimedia, often web-based artwork and social activism.
In 1998, Cuevas founded a project titled Mejor Vida Corp (MVC or Better Life Corporation). A non-profit organization. MVC provides free products and services, the project distributes “international ID cards, subway tickets, and barcodes for grocery stores”—all examples of what art historian Pamela M. Lee describes as “movement as a movement,”[4] incremental disruptions of neo-liberalist policy through social welfare endeavors. Cuevas is the sole proprietor of the Mejor Vida Corporation, working as the owner, CEO, CFO, public relations officer, fundraiser, and more. The program addresses social and economic issues, in what becomes a complex and sophisticated critique of a traditional institution, the capitalist corporation.[5] Professor of Latin American Studies Scott Baugh analyzes this, concluding that, through the satire and parodying of an official business website, Cuevas embodies the “traditions of the film avant-garde and of the Latina/Latino cultural expression…[which] tend to resist, by definition and pragmatically, the conventionality of the mainstream.”[6]
According to Baugh, the digitized radio transmissions of Cuevas's MVC introduce an accessible voice that bypasses the Eurocentric conventions of corporate media and establishes a new mode of active communication with the Mexican working class.[7]
As detailed by art critic Jean Fisher, Cuevas's written accompaniment to the performance piece, Drunker (1995), presents substance abuse "as a means to 'obliterate’ the anguish of trauma, where the sufferer is caught between the compulsion to bear witness to the catastrophe and the impossibility of articulating it."[8]
Cuevas’s solo exhibitions engage a variety of artistic forms, culminating in multisensory installations that, while operating in high art institutions, advocate public interventionism. Many of these contain specific visual and auditory allusions that generate social commentary. In particular, Cuevas’s Social Entomology, exhibited at the Van Abbemuseum in 2007, employs projected cellular and animal imagery, overlaid with a metaphorical orchestral soundtrack entitled Insect Concert, to remark on human societal structure and its exploitative relationship with the natural world. Critic Francis McKee explains the technological nature of Social Entomology as Cuevas’s evidence for modern humanity’s commodification of animals and the natural world.[9]
In a text entitled “Corporatocracy, Democracy and Social Change (in Mexico and Beyond),” Cuevas co-authors a discourse on the contemporary dissonance between humanity and the natural world. Her remarks affirm her opposition to the anthropocentric attitude driving industrialization, which has historically occurred at the expense of, not only animals and the natural world, but also indigenous and agrarian peoples.[10] Moreover, initially explored in her Information/Misinformation billboard series, Cuevas's thoughts on the communicative importance of “national rumor” in a modern age find footing in the written record of the Lier En Boog philosophy and art symposium, Ljubljana: Information Strategies, in which she participated in 2002.[11]
Cuevas was awarded the DAAD grant in Berlin (2005), reinvited in 2019 for a solo show at the daadgalerie in Berlín, Germany, was part of the Delfina Studios residency program in London (2001).
Cuevas' work is held in many permanent collections including: the Tate,[13] Centre Georges Pompidou, Guggenheim,[14] MUAC, UNAM, Mexico City, Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.