First trained as an architect, Mexican artist Pedro Reyes engages with social and political issues through activism, pedagogy, participatory theater, and various artistic mediums, including video, painting, and sculpture. His projects range from the ephemeral to the monumental. Tlali is an eighteen-foot sculpture assembled of individual blocks of carved volcanic stone inspired by the scale of the colossal Olmec heads found in Veracruz, Mexico. Reyes’s previous design comprised a complete head. LACMA’s iteration, however, features a portion of a face, from the forehead to the chin, supported by a stone base and a steel armature. While still monumental in scale, the sculpture is reminiscent, in both form and iconography, of a smaller class of artifact, the Olmec mask (see, e.g., AC1992.134.2 and M.86.311.6).
The sculpture blends human and zoomorphic features commonly found in depictions of Olmec otherworldly beings—a human nose and smooth arched eyebrows, feline jaguar eyes, a downturned mouth, and a flaring upper lip. The resemblance between Olmec masks’ formal traits and Reyes’s sculpture exemplify how contemporary artists continue to draw inspiration from ancient artifacts such as those stewarded in collecting institutions like LACMA.
The sculpture’s title, Tlali, comes from the Nahuatl word tlalli, meaning “land” or “earth.” Classical Nahuatl was used in the Aztec Empire, and its contemporary variations are spoken by more than 1.5 million people. Reyes sourced the stone from a quarry on the flanks of the Popocatépetl volcano in Central Mexico and shaped it using a technique called direct stone carving, which has a rich history in Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past and modernist public sculpture. Reyes’s use of this technique in his large-scale stone works represents his adaptation of ancient American motifs and material traditions.
Tlali was commissioned in 2021 by Mexico City’s government to replace a Christopher Columbus statue in the Paseo de la Reforma, one the city’s main avenues. However, the announcement was met with mixed reviews, which led to a petition from Mexico’s arts and culture community to halt work on the sculpture and choose a different monument. Today, that roundabout is dedicated to The Women Who Fight and Mexico’s femicide victims.
Tlali’s installation at LACMA places it in conversation with other prominent outdoor works like Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass (M.2011.35) and Mariana Castillo Deball’s Feathered Changes, and with ancient American artifacts and ancestors present in the inaugural installation of the North and South entrances of the David Geffen Galleries.
2025
