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FEMSA Has Spent 50 Years Building a More Complete Record of Latin American Art

With the collection's anniversary exhibition traveling through Mexico and Colombia, its curators explain how a corporate holding built without a fixed museum home has organized itself around territory, history and support for living artists.

The FEMSA Collection has, since its founding in 1977, become a benchmark holding in Mexico and Latin America, providing visibility into an art scene that, until recently, remained largely underrepresented in international museum collections despite the global expansion of the Latin American diaspora. Behind it is FEMSA, a Latin American multinational conglomerate operating across retail, beverages, healthcare and digital financial services. Its businesses include OXXO, European retailer Valora, pharmacy operations, Spin by OXXO and Coca-Cola FEMSA, the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler by sales volume. The company employs more than 392,000 people in 18 countries and is included in several major sustainability and ESG indices and rankings, to which its art collection and related initiatives contribute significantly.

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On the occasion of its coming 50th anniversary, the FEMSA Collection is presenting a series of exhibitions at institutions across Mexico and Colombia, beginning with “Constellations and Drifts: Latin American Art from the FEMSA Collection.” The most comprehensive presentation of the collection in Mexico in its nearly five-decade history, the exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (on view through August 30) was curated by Eugenia Braniff, Paulina Bravo and Beto Díaz Suárez, curators of the FEMSA Collection, with independent curator Adriana Melchor.

Additional shows are planned at the Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico (September 26, 2026 through January 24, 2027), the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín in Colombia (March 18 – November 15, 2027) and the Museo Cabañas in Guadalajara, Mexico (October 16 – March 5, 2028. At each venue, the selection and presentation will be adapted and contextualized in relation to the institution and its collection, as well as the communities with which the exhibition will interact.

In July, FEMSA unveiled a newly commissioned work by Mexican artist Jaime Ruiz Martínez, created in collaboration with the Arts Initiative of the School of Architecture, Art and Design (EAAD), the Behavioral Research Lab and the Sports Medicine Department at Tecnológico de Monterrey. On the occasion of the unveiling, Observer spoke with Bravo, chief curator of the collection, and Braniff, associate curator and advisor, to discuss the collection’s history, evolution and current priorities as FEMSA continues its mission to expand the awareness of and deepen the appreciation for modern and contemporary Mexican and Latin American art and art history.

Braniff and Bravo described the FEMSA Collection as an institution that grew organically, eventually developing into a collection of nearly 1,400 works. Its origins lie in the donation of a painting by Dr. Atl from a relative of the founding........

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