from the archive - minerva cuevas

This past winter, kurimanzutto, New York, hosted its inaugural group show TODOS JUNTOS (All Together) at the gallery’s new Chelsea location. Mexico City-based artist Minerva Cuevas (b. 1975) exhibited Dodgem BP (2002). A lime green bumper car sat in the gallery imprinted with the starburst logo of the multinational oil and gas company BP.

The work was part of Cuevas’s first solo project with kurimanzutto, DODGEM, which took place in the spring of 2002, back when the gallery’s program centered on nomadic exhibitions in non-traditional spaces. For a ride at a local funfair in the Mixcoac neighborhood of Mexico City, the artist branded several bumper cars—or dodgems—with the logos of leading petroleum companies. The seemingly playful yet symbolically violent act of bumping another rider with an electric car mimicked the battle between oil companies as they fought to control international markets. DODGEM marked Cuevas’s first artistic engagement with energy geopolitics.

Two decades later, the same starburst logo hovers over the landscape in Cuevas’s new site-specific mural The Trust (2023) currently on view in the artist’s solo show In Gods We Trust at kurimanzutto, New York. On the occasion of the exhibition, the gallery takes the opportunity to look back at twenty years of Cuevas's artistic practice that tackles the global economization of natural resources as one of her primary subjects of investigation. kurimanzutto is pleased to share these projects with you for the third iteration of From the Archive.

Causa y efecto and the other works on view in La venganza del elefante were the result of field research Cuevas conducted in Campeche along the Gulf of Mexico in search of chapopoteras—pits where chapopote, a hydrocarbon similar to tar, is naturally extruded. Serie hidrocarburos (Hydrocarbon series) (2007­–present) is a body of work where the artist dips objects in chapopote. The practice references the pre-Hispanic custom of painting ceremonial and utilitarian sculptures and vessels with the viscous substance.

Objects related to marine exploration and materials dipped in tar fill a table akin to an archeological display. Alongside these objects rest newspaper clippings documenting an accident on nearby oil rigs that were on fire for two months, photographs taken by oil rig workers, and postcards of international oil ships and marine wildlife. One image captures a penguin marred by chapopote. Ten years later, Cuevas still works with chapopote, as seen in the ceramic polar bear whose mobility is inhibited by tar and left with Nowhere to roam.

In La venganza del elefante, Cuevas also exhibited her first chapopote painting from a found canvas depicting the Popocatépetl volcano in Puebla, Mexico. Semi-hardened drips flow from the bottom of a landscape that has since been scraped of its natural resources. The work references the orographic research conducted by the geologist Ezequiel Ordónez, who located the first commercial production well to be drilled in Mexico in the early twentieth century.

Another work in Serie hidrocarburos forms a tall column of found vintage metal oil barrels branded with the Esso logo, a trading name for ExxonMobile that branded one of the bumper cars still running in Mixcoac. Esso along with Roshfrans and Quaker State mark a trio of chapopote-dipped vintage oil cans whose brand colors resemble national flags. An actual Mexican flag hung from the ceiling nearby. Yet the green and white sections of the flag are completely obscured by chapopote.

Cuevas continues to work with chapopote, whether the substance covers a ceramic animal figurine, a found seascape, or her motor oil vases. The vases are filled with an array of artificial flowers whose ability to imitate nature is made possible by hydrocarbons.

Cuevas’s second solo exhibition Feast and Famine was at kurimanzutto’s current gallery space in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood. The exhibition explored another natural and economic resource: cacao. Prior to the oil boom, cacao was not only a valuable export from Mexico, but the seeds were also used as currency in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican cultures. In the installation Feast (2015), similar to the table display in Serie hidrocarburos, Cuevas presented objects such as replicas of bones dipped in chocolate and a series of documents that illustrate the Mesoamerican origins of cacao. Wooden figurines of two monkeys stood on the table. Monkeys were associated with cacao in pre-Hispanic mythology since they fertilized the earth by eating the fruits of the cacao tree and excreting the seeds.

The large-scale mural painting Bittersweet – Hershey’s (2015) depicts a Hershey’s chocolate bar with its familiar wrapping ripped at the center to expose an illustration of European cannibalism. The role of the cannibal is reversed recalling the Colombian scholar Carlos Jáuregui’s theory that cannibalism has been more historically prevalent in Europe than in the Americas. In the mural, Cuevas reveals the colonialism present in the dynamics of global trade, speciifically the capitalist exploitation of cacao that began with cannibalistic impulses initiated by colonialization. 

Cuevas employs irony and humor in her work to analyze the power structures that underlie social and economic ties. In Pleasure Island (2015), a shelf holds a plastic figurine of the mouse Jerry from the American franchise Tom and Jerry. Jerry is nestled inside a plastic replica of a human intestine that leads to a framed black-and-white advertisement for a type of Whitman’s chocolates called “Pleasure Island.” The advertisement illustrates Spaniards defeating a native population with an accompanying text that implies that the chocolates were pillaged and brought back to Spain for European consumption. Cuevas ties European claims of indigenous savagery to their own cultural cannibalism by highlighting the extraction of local resources from other regions and the glorification of the violence associated with the conquest.   

During her research, Cuevas discovered that North America relies mainly on the importation of African cacao, while the majority of Mexican cacao is exported to Europe. For Feast and Famine, the artist produced 500 chocolate ears made from the native cacao of Grano Real Xoconusco, cultivated in the state of Chiapas. The ears reference the pre-Hispanic practice of using the body as a unit of measurement, as well as early anthropological efforts to compare races and cultures by measuring and documenting the human body. In linking a severed human ear to Mexican cacao, Cuevas draws consumers' attention to the social cannibalism in exploitative labor.

In Cuevas’s most recent works, she continues her commitment to the panoramic large-scale landscape. Instead of painting directly onto the wall, the artist paints Styrofoam with industrial white paint to create a relief. The first project of this nature, The Enterprise (2021), was produced for at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. The work comprises 48 panels that together depict corporate logos from the world of finance and pre-Hispanic symbolic representations of Mesoamerican deities to form an archaeological scene of both the past and present.

A cacao tree, similar to the one in Bittersweet – Hershey’s, is depicted on the right of the landscape along with a monkey from the Ecuadorian Jama-Coaque culture who eats the fruits the tree bears. Above the monkey is pyramid shaped logo of Commerzbank, the German private bank. With arrows directed up at the scene, a narrative arc is drawn from early economic activities in pre-Hispanic communities and the contemporary banking industry.

The Trust, Cuevas’s most recent large-scale mural on view in In Gods We Trust at kurimanzutto, New York, forms a landscape out of fragments of advertising logos from various oil companies and banks, particularly those that are relevant in New York. Loose histories of relationships between these companies are subtly drawn, such as Citigroup's acquisition of Banamex to form Citibanamex.

Entangled within the corporate logos are representations of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican deities and indigenous flora and fauna. In the left-hand panels, Chalchiuhtlicue, the Aztec goddess of water and fertility, stands within the stream composed of Marathon Oil’s undulated waves, with the bald eagle from First Republic Bank soaring above. On the right, Quetzalcóatl, the Aztec deity capable of moving through earth and sky, slithers down the mural. Quetzalcóatl bites Pegasus of Mobile who leaps over a reiteration of Bank of America’s American flag that here reads as a field adjacent to the palm tree from Saudi Arabia’s national emblem.

Cuevas’s compositions present a parallel between the imagery of natural and mythical motifs that once sustained values of power in Mesoamerican cultures to the imagery that now sustains global trade. Her scenes here and elsewhere blur geographic and temporal boundaries to explore how people have, for centuries, both used and abused land for economic gain. In the repeated illustration of familiar cultural symbols within different contexts, Cuevas encourages audiences to discover their own, perhaps invisible, relationships with and responsibility to the visible ecosystems they inhabit.