A conversation with Guadalupe Garcia, Founder of the ANT project

Guadalupe’s work has been shaped by the vision of creating a space where individual voices are listened to as co-creators of reality. As an art historian, she held positions as curator and assistant director at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, and exhibition director at the Museo Nacional de Arte, both in Mexico City. In Miami, where she currently resides, she served as consultant curator at the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami.

Alexandra: Why did you start The Ant Project?

Guadalupe: The Ant Project started as a vision. My professional background was as chief curator and sub-director of very big national museums in Mexico City: the Palace of Fine Arts and the National Museum of Art. I had a lot of experience with big exhibitions with top artists. I always felt that there was something behind the scenes making decisions about who would get to these so important venues. I saw a lot of talent in Mexico, artists with so much talent that never made it to these places. And I saw artists who I didn’t understand why they were there.

Many years later, I enrolled at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York. I was studying the art market, art finance, art law. The first day they asked everybody to say where they were from and why they were there. I said, “Well, I’m a curator and I want to meet the enemy behind the scenes.”

“I don’t feel I’m idealistic, I just see things how they are.”
- Guadalupe Garcia

The more I learned, the more I understood what is happening in the art scene. Not just in the art market, but in the art scene in general—museums and institutions. I began to understand that after the 2008 mortgage crisis in the U.S, financial companies thought it would be a good idea to make art an asset for investment, and to open the loans to buy art. This completely changed the market of collectors because it became a market of investors who are looking for profit and returns. This was shocking to me, to see this firsthand in the art market in New York.

I could compare myself at that time with a painting from Frida Kahlo: “The Bride That is Scared to See Life Open.” I have loved it since I was very young. It’s a still life that shows these open watermelons and very juicy, fleshy, bananas and coconuts. Underneath the watermelon, there’s a little bride dressed in white. I felt I was that bride, so white and innocent. And all of a sudden, everything was open there, so big and so juicy. I understood why the bride was scared!

When I was at Sotheby’s, I woke up the first morning and was making my bed and I saw ants crawling in the bed. And I was like, “Oh, wow, there’s an ant in the bed.” And I started opening the sheets, and I saw my pillow full of ants. I called the landlord who said she would call the exterminator. I came home late night, and the landlord said, “We couldn’t find the exterminator, sorry,” And I was like, “Okay, I’ll sleep with ants.” But they never showed up again. There weren’t ants any other night.

The next day we went to the Guggenheim. I was descending the spiral in the museum and a friend of mine yelled from the top of the museum, “Guadalupe, have you seen the ants?” An artist [Anicka Yi] had built an ant colony with infinite mirrors on ceiling, floor and walls. I got to watch how the ant colony works. I was impressed that they have a cemetery for their dead ants, they put them in this hall, and they honor their deceased companions. I was thinking, “Why did I sleep with ants, and now am looking at ants the same day?” I started researching ants. The common topic was unity, the strength of unity. 

One day we visited a gallery on the Lower East Side. The gallerist was saying that they were about to close their gallery because of the prices of the real estate and having to be in five fairs a year just to exist. As I walked out of this gallery with my peers I had an out of body experience. I saw all of us in these rivers of people walking in the streets and I understood — we are the ants. Whoever needs to unite is us, it’s not an abstraction, it’s us. 

At that moment I knew I had to do The Ant Project. We did everything by the book. It took four years to start operating and we started doing workshops online during the pandemic. 

A: Tell me a bit about your booth at Untitled in 2021. At art fairs, I often feel like nobody can actually receive the appreciation that they’re getting because the energy of the fair is all about looking for appreciation, looking to sell, looking to make it to the next step. I felt a very different energy at The Ant Project booth. You created such a welcoming environment.

G: We were invited to participate at Untitled Art Fair in Miami in 2021 in collaboration with the Mexican consulate, so we needed to address a topic related to both sides of the border. We invited Ana Tereza Fernandez, Ronald Rael and Arleen Correa Valencia. 

The content of our booth was like a bomb because the topics were very controversial for some people. For others it was like, “Yes, absolutely. We’re people and the families in one side of the wall are the same families on the other side of the wall.”

We never thought about selling the work, even though we were in a commercial fair. We had a scale of availability so that people could become part of the project. There were more expensive works, but we had t-shirts, $65, and we had handmade vases for $150. I had people coming to the booth thanking me, because this was the first time they could buy something at a fair. 

Our booth was packed always. And we were always giving explanations, being with the people. A lot of people broke into tears in our booth. Many of them immigrants, some of them shared their stories with us. And the result at the end is that we sold almost everything. We were even tagged as one of the 10 highlights of the whole Art Basel Week.

We never, never aimed for anything but to give the message. That is very important because it reverses the process. And I hear gallerists say, “What do I need to do to sell?” That’s absolutely wrong. You don’t want to sell, you want people to be in touch with the content of the art. 

A: What do you say when people say, “Yeah, that’s wonderful, that’s very idealistic, but we live in capitalism, we need money to survive.”

G: We need money to survive and we have it now! When you generate abundance, abundance comes to you. But abundance doesn’t mean just money. It means love, it means content. We really need to inverse this pattern of trying to get what we need from the outside.

A: Let’s talk about the inversion and how you’re creating it with The Ant Project. 

G: The foundation of The Ant Project is unconditional love. This is the foundation of everything I’m doing. It came spontaneously. That could happen because of my personal process in the spiritual tradition of the Kashmiri Shaivism, going inward. For the last 15 years, I’ve been going through a massacre of my ego, again and again. 

It’s an ongoing process of emptying your body, emptying your emotional accumulation of layers of emotions, memories, beliefs. I was given the image of a closet which is full of old stuff: lamps that don’t work, old clothes, old furniture. It’s packed, but the moment you start emptying it out, you create space. That is what happens in your body when you release your emotions or the beliefs that are blocking you from doing something. You release and release, and you start getting space inside you.

And when you get space inside you, you get space for you, but also for others. The more space I create for myself, the more I can connect with others freely, not imposing my points of view, not expecting them to fill me with something I believe that is missing. But just in this loving connection.

With The Ant Project, my goal is that we just connect as human beings, creative human beings. And we share our passion, which is art. Art has a very high vibration. When we create, we are pouring out our hearts. If we connect there, we will be able to change our own chemistry. So I really think that art can get us to our consciousness. And this is what I’m feeling in The Ant Project, little by little.

A: What’s your advice to the art world at this moment?

G: We need to get to our true selves. The more you strengthen yourself, the more you are seen. I feel this moment is craving for meaning, but it’s not coming from outside. The work from artists who are totally in themselves is very powerful. Even when they speak about their vulnerabilities. The more intimate, the more universal. We’ve all been there.