Forget the shot heard ’round the world — on Sunday, the beep heard ’round Mexico City was a mobile message alert: “I Survived Jumex.” The reference was not to a natural disaster or factory explosion involving the juice company Jumex, one of the country’s largest corporate empires, but to the weekend-long opening ceremonies of Mexico’s first truly world-class art museum, Museo Jumex. The museum, conceived eight years ago by Jumex heir and longtime collector Eugenio López as a home for his foundation’s art holdings, officially opened on Saturday in a David Chipperfield-designed travertine palace in the city’s Polanco district.
The Museo features traveling exhibitions, a dedicated research department with a publishing wing and a top-notch, 2,700-piece permanent collection that mixes international stars like Damien Hirst, Maurizio Cattelan, and Donald Judd with strong holdings of Latin Americans like Damien Ortega, Teresa Margolles, and, naturally, Gabriel Orozco. (Orozco and López came up together as the great contemporary Mexican artist and patron.) As anyone you spoke with at the weekend’s ceremonies agreed — and nearly everyone from the Mexican and international art worlds seemed to be there — it’s an institution without rivals in its own country.
Not surprisingly, the weekend’s events were as bombastic and glamorous as the new museum itself. López hosted more than 2,000 of his closest friends over two nights of soirees, including collectors, curators, artists and journalists trekking in from New York, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, São Paolo, Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, Beirut, Chile, Cuba, New Zealand, China, and the Middle East — as well as Monterrey, Guadalajara, and the Districto Federal. On Friday evening 650 guests gathered at Casa de la Bola, a storied mansion of Haversham-esque proportions, including Eva Longoria, Will Ferrell, Staffan Ahrenberg, Nathalie de Gunzburg, Jeffrey Deitch, Anne Pasternak, Adam McEwen, Michael Chow, Vita Schnabel, Simon de Pury and countless others.
The Friday party raged until midnight, which was tame in comparison to the next night’s festivities, where the three checkpoints and hour-long drop-off queue said it all. The fete’s location — the Deportivo Estado Mayor Presidencial, the Mexican army’s horse-training grounds — was kept secret until a few hours before. A large tent erected there was decorated with Aztecan motifs — four temple staircases in gold leaf, a dance floor illuminated with calendar symbols, and an orchestra outfitted in “Day of the Dead” regalia playing symphonic renditions of Mexico’s national songs. Tequila and Jumex juice (as well as champagne) fueled the evening, with guests dancing wedding-style to the tunes of Mark Ronson and Le Baron’s Greg Boust. Among the 2,000 partiers were David Chipperfield, Isabel Alonso and Don Eugenio López Sr. (Eugenio’s parents), Gabriel Orozco, Stavros Niarchos, Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld, Jose Parla, Alex Logsdail, Tony Shafrazi, Amanda Sharp, Dominique Levy, Klaus Biesenbach, Dakis Joannou, Diana Widmaier-Picasso and even Maria Baibakova. The evening didn’t even end until 6 a.m. — though apparently the swirling lights continued to flash until 7. When Lopez descended to the dance floor, around 3 a.m., he was swarmed like a celebrity, with hands reaching out from every angle to touch the juice king who’d brought together the international art community. Perhaps it was he who started the texting thread?
