Minerva Cuevas is an artist who lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico. It is the place where she was born, where she has cultural roots, and where she finds inspiration for her conceptual artwork. She studied at Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas. Growing up, she witnessed rich diversity and community between social classes and races. She constructs sculptural installations, produces paintings, and documents through photography to name a few of her diverse artistic pursuits. She approaches subject matter that is largely political, in which she often questions the Capitalist system. In addition, her work focuses on aspects of social justice and equality between people from all walks of life. However, Cuevas does not simply advocate for social and political changes in the world, she takes an active role to serve these movements.
“Art is totally connected to social change.”
-Minerva Cuevas
The Kurimanzutto art gallery in Mexico City represents local, as well as international, artists and their contemporary work in a relaxed, adaptable space. In 2015, Cuevas’s Feast and Famine exhibition was featured in the Kurimanzutto gallery. The pieces in Feast and Famine call into question the negative impact that the practices of capitalist economies can have on a global scale. Also, cacao is the central material used in every Feast and Famine piece. This medium came about while Cuevas was researching primitive currencies and discovered that cacao was exchanged as a form payment in pre-Hispanic Mexico.
In these sculptural works, capitalism becomes synonymous with cannibalism in the sense that enterprise leads to the consumption of resources which then become depleted and unavailable to others. In a figurative sense, it is cannibalistic behavior. A capitalist society may be well off having more food than it needs to go around, but it may well condemn another society to starvation. Essentially, one man’s feast becomes another man’s famine. Cuevas depicts the cannibal acts in a literal sense. She has dipped human bone structures into melted cacao and displayed them on a dining table. Also, the work pokes fun by turning the term cannibal back on those whose ancestors referred to indigenous groups as barbaric.
Minerva Cuevas cited this work as the most significant piece of the Feast and Famine exhibition. A mechanism was built and rigged to drop melted chocolate from the ceiling of Kurimanzutto roughly every three and a half seconds. The drops fell to the ground and continuously compiled to form the cacao sculpture above. Though, it should be noted that this sculpture constantly changed, becoming taller or more spread out or forming a new texture as time passed. She explains it best herself in the quotation below.
-Minerva Cuevas
“Every time the chocolate drips, one person dies of starvation in the world.”
The Mejor Vida Corporation (“Better Life” Corp.) is a non-profit organization that Minerva Cuevas founded in 1998. This is a corporation that aims to provide services and products internationally for free. Not only free from cost, but free from discrimination based on an individual’s gender, race, religion, or economic status. Some services that can be requested include recommendation letter-writing and cleaning of public or recreational spaces. Examples of products that are free by request are subway tickets, student ID cards, and altered barcode stickers for produce. Initially, her efforts for widespread freedom and equality began the organization, but her actions incidentally became what she considers her most important artwork.
LInk to Mejor Vida Corp. website
Her contributions undercut some of the barriers of a bureaucratic system by giving people “sabotages” to improve their condition even in small ways. People are given subway tickets for a free ride and they save money not having to purchase the ticket themselves. They’re given the student ID cards to receive student discounts on some of their purchases so that they have money left over for other expenses. By that same merit, people are given barcode stickers that have been tampered to ring up food cheaper than it originally cost for use in the supermarket.
