Moments from Museo de Arte Moderno

Mexico City's Museum of Modern Art opened in 1964 inside Bosque de Chapultepec, the same sprawling park that also holds the National Museum of Anthropology and the Castillo de Chapultepec, and it built its reputation on a genuinely strong holding of twentieth-century Mexican art, including major Surrealist-adjacent work by Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, two European-born painters who found in Mexico City the creative freedom and community that Europe's wartime chaos had denied them. The museum's collection sits alongside, and in useful dialogue with, the more single-artist-focused Mexico City institutions dedicated to Kahlo, Tamayo, and Rivera.

If you're spending a day working through Chapultepec's cluster of museums, this is a strong counterpoint to the anthropology museum's ancient civilizations focus, tracing instead how Mexican artists processed the twentieth century's upheavals, revolution, surrealism, modernism, on their own terms rather than importing a European framework wholesale. Varo and Carrington in particular are worth seeking out specifically if you already know Kahlo's work and want to see the wider circle of women artists working in the same Mexico City milieu.