While the aisles of Zona Maco demonstrate a sophisticated engagement with European modernism and Latin American abstraction, Black and Afro-Mexican narratives remain largely peripheral at the Mexico City art fair.
“I know there’s an Afro-Mexican history,” said Jeffrey Swinton, a Walker Art Center trustee traveling with the U.S.-based museum group, standing near the fair’s entrance at Centro Citibanamex. “But we haven’t seen it yet. I’m guessing we won’t see it here.”
At Zona Maco, Blackness is present but not foregrounded. It appears episodically, often mediated through international galleries rather than local institutions, and framed less as a regional dialogue than as a global import.
However, beyond the pristine booths, polished abstraction, and the low hum of commerce conducted in murmurs happening at the annual fair, there are people like Sean Kelly — founder of the eponymous gallery in New York — working to highlight Black artists in the Mexico City market and beyond.
Sean Kelly Gallery has steadily introduced African American artists to the annual art fair, not as a trend-driven gesture, but as part of a sustained international program.
“We’ve been coming to Zona Maco for about 10 years,” Kelly said, gesturing toward his booth. “We’ve gradually been building up that market for the artists here.”
This year’s presentation included works by Anthony Akinbola and Kehinde Wiley — artists whose practices are rooted in diaspora, materiality, and transnational identity.
“The market down here is becoming more familiar with the artists and more educated about what their practice is,” he added. “That consistency really matters.”
That emphasis on continuity resonates strongly with Natalie Kates-Ferri, founder of Kates-Ferri Projects, a New York gallery now in its third year at Zona Maco. For her, the fair represents an alternative ecosystem — one that resists speculation and rewards depth.
“Coming from New York City, it’s refreshing,” she said. “We’re meeting collectors from Central and South America who are really interested in learning who they’re collecting and why they’re collecting.”
Unlike the fast-moving, hype-driven market that dominates many U.S. fairs, she has encountered few flippers in Mexico City.
“In three years, I’ve not encountered speculators,” she said. “We’re selling to generational collectors — kids or grandkids of collections that started 80 years ago.”
Those collectors, she explained, are drawn to work that feels temporally elastic — art that could have been made in the 1930s or the 1950s as easily as today. That sensibility helps explain the fair’s enduring affinity for geometric abstraction and conceptualism.
“These works live well across generations,” Kates-Ferri said. “They’re not trendy. They’re building a lineage.”
Pushing Toward More Black Representation
Kelly is pragmatic about regional preferences. Latin American fairs, he noted, naturally prioritize their own artists.
“If you’re in Germany, you sell German artists more easily,” he said. “That’s just how markets work.”
Still, he has seen growing traction for Black artists over time — not through spectacle, but through repetition and trust.
“That’s just how markets work.” But, he added, what matters is persistence. “The market down here is becoming more familiar with the artists and more educated about what their practice is. That only happens if you keep coming back.”
At this year’s fair, the Colombian artist Magola Moreno offered a quieter counterpoint about representation. Moreno is not herself of African diasporic heritage, but her work is deeply shaped by geography and proximity. She lives and works in a remote enclave in northern Colombia, where Black and Brown communities form the social and cultural majority.
The result is a world populated almost entirely by Black and Brown subjects — figures rendered with intimacy rather than declaration and presence as opposed to explanation.
At Zona Maco, her work subtly complicated the fair’s racial geography. Blackness appeared not as an imported identity from the United States, nor as a formally articulated Afro-Latin discourse, but as an unexceptional fact of daily life. Moreno’s paintings suggested that Black presence in Latin America does not always announce itself as a category or claim; sometimes it simply exists, embedded in the rhythms of place.
For Swinton, there is hope about furthering Black artwork on a global scale, particularly as American fairs expand into cities like Houston. As collectors outside the traditional coastal centers assert themselves, new circuits are forming — between Mexico City, the U.S. South, and the broader Black diaspora, progress Swinton sees as essential.
“The coast has its ecosystem,” Swinton said. “Everywhere else is trying to find their place. The more fairs move outside the usual centers, the better it’s going to be, especially for us.”
Nonetheless, the current lack of Black representation is clear — from the artwork to attendees.
“When you came up to talk to us,” Swinton told The Informer with a wry laugh, “I knew why. We’re the only Black people here.”