Guadalajara Art Week fills former funeral home with 150 works

Guadalajara, Mexico's third-largest city, closed its fifth Art Week on 27 September after four days of exhibitions, open studios and independent projects.

The annual event ran from 24 to 27 September and spread across the city rather than sitting in one hall. Open studios, where artists invite the public into their working spaces, ran alongside gallery shows and artist-led projects. The mix is deliberate. Visitors move between established venues and much smaller rooms.

At the centre is Estación Material, the boutique fair built around the week. Boutique here means small and selective, with a tight list of exhibitors rather than hundreds of booths. It was launched by Brett Shultz of Feria Material in Mexico City, and it focuses on contemporary art production in Mexico, according to Feria Material.

This year the fair brought together 18 galleries and independent project spaces from Mexico City and Guadalajara, as reported by The Art Newspaper. The fifth edition featured more than 150 works from those 18 galleries and projects, according to an announcement on Feria Material's Facebook page. That is a lot of work in a compact footprint, which keeps walking times short and conversations longer.

The venue added to the character. The fair was staged at Plataforma in Guadalajara, a non-profit art space housed in a former funeral home. Its first two editions were held at Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, the ceramics facility run by artist José Noé Suro. The shift from a working ceramics site to a converted civic building tracks how the week has grown outwards across the city.

Organisers placed local collectors at the front of this edition. A new hosting committee brought collectors into the planning, alongside what is described as Mexico's first institutional acquisitions committee. An acquisitions committee is a pooled fund that helps museums buy directly from a fair. The Fundación Museo Reina Sofía in Spain and the Saint Louis Art Museum in Missouri in the United States both took part in the buying programme.

Traffic now flows both ways between Guadalajara and the capital. The September week draws visitors and galleries down from Mexico City, and Guadalajara also holds a gallery weekend before Mexico City's February art week. The September programme continues to grow and to attract greater engagement from local collectors, while keeping a sense of intimacy.

What makes this stand out for a newcomer is how close everything feels. You can see a museum acquisition, step into an artist's studio and catch an independent project in one afternoon. For a citywide event, it still reads as a neighbourhood circuit rather than a marathon.