When the taxi drops me off in Mexico City’s Doctores neighbourhood, it takes me a moment to locate the Museo de Arte Transfemenino or Museum of Transfeminine Art (Dr. Andrade 24, Doctores, Mexico City). Flanked by graffiti-drenched aluminum gates on a humble street a little ways south of the colonial centre’s hustle and bustle, the newly opened gallery’s presence is signalled only by a bright pink logo on glass doors that reads “MAT.” It’s a subtle signal you might miss if you aren’t looking for it. Even if you do see it, you’d be forgiven if the acronym doesn’t immediately click. It isn’t every day that you find an art gallery dedicated exclusively to work by transfeminine artists on an unassuming street in Mexico City—or on any street, anywhere in the world, for that matter.
Past the glass doors, the transfem art gallery consists of a single white-walled room showcasing temporary exhibits that change about once a month. In February, the inaugural exhibit, “Cuinas,” Mexican slang for “queens,” fills the space with work from a dozen local transfeminine artists in diverse mediums. On the walls are clusters of illustrations and photographs: glamorous divas posing in fur stoles, poppy scenes of a nude woman with huge, empty eyes, a surreal painting of a slit-open serpent and jewels.
Sculptures sit in the centre of the room: a chaotically ruffled top, silvery thread crying down it onto the tiled floor; a doll caught in the middle of pulling red thread out of its stomach. All in all, the gallery is about the size of a modest studio apartment. So it comes as a surprise when Sofía Moreno, co-creator of the space alongside Rojo Génesis, tells me that around five hundred people showed up for their opening night in February.
“We closed the street,” Moreno says in English. “It was a bunch of trans girls. People were dancing, and because it was so packed, people were going to the bar next door. So the first night, the entire space was activated.” The enthusiastic community response to the project is fitting, given the boldness and unconventionality of its vision. The museum is the only physical space dedicated explicitly and exclusively to transfeminine art in the country—perhaps in the world.
Moreno and Génesis, transfeminine artists themselves, thought it was important to create a space that could serve as a material record of trans women’s contributions to art and culture.
“The inspiration for the space is the legacy of trans culture and how trans women have participated in culture, especially in Mexico in the last 50 years. Most of that culture doesn’t really have a name. We just appear, kind of like objects,” says Moreno. “There has to have been groups of trans women that were making art, but we don’t know about them. That’s why these spaces are created. So we can try to get back to our lineage and reconnect the dots.”
Finding a space to showcase transfeminine art ended up proving complicated. “For trans women here, it’s very difficult to rent a space. They question you, like, ‘What are you going to do with the space? Are you going to be doing sex work?’ It always goes to that,” Moreno says. Eventually, they ended up taking over the space formerly occupied by Travesura, a beloved, scrappy seafood-restaurant-slash-queer-bar-slash-dance-club (why not?) owned by two lesbians that was sadly shuttered at the end of last year. The passing of the mantle to the MAT couldn’t be more apt.
The opening of the gallery comes at a time when Mexico City has been marked by high-profile instances of trans activism—and anti-trans violence. At the end of January, sex workers and trans activists stormed judicial buildings in the capital to protest the release of a man who had stabbed Natalia Lane, a prominent trans advocate, in an attempted murder three years prior. In 2024, the state of Mexico City passed a law making transfemicide—murder specifically of trans women—a crime. It was a milestone moment, yet undergirded by the grimness of the need to pass such a law in the first place.
Moreno insists that she doesn’t see the project as activism per se. Yet the act of claiming space for trans women, and of having trans women themselves taking control of their narratives and their artistic representations, is political in its own right.
“I want people to know that we’re beyond this idea that the world has put on us and our bodies,” says Moreno. “Because when people think about trans women, they already think they know more about us than we know about ourselves.”
For such a fledgling space there are big plans for the future, including collaborations with other Mexican museums—and perhaps more parties like the opening night’s. These plans may also include reworking the subtle aesthetics of the gallery, which for now blends in unobtrusively on the dusty Doctores street.
“I think it still needs a little bit more detail. Rojo was like, ‘Oh my God, it looks really boring.’ [We need to] not make it too white, or too plain. Because within trans culture, we’re actually pretty fun,” Moreno laughs.
A solo show of the archival work of Viviana Rocco, a trans Mexican photographer who passed away in 2016, runs at the gallery until April 13. An exhibition on representations of the trans body in pornography since the 1970s will open on April 24.
