Banking on Folk Art: Banamex-Citigroup and Transnational Cultural Citizenship

Abstract

This article offers two readings of The Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art, a travelling exhibition of the Fomento Cultural Banamex, AC's folk art collection that coincided with Citigroup's buyout of Banamex, Mexico's second largest bank. The first, a political economic critique, situates the exhibition within the neoliberal economic reform of the Mexican banking system and the designs of US-based transnational banks on migrant remittances. The second, a material culture approach, focuses on the exhibitionary strategies employed to incentivise folk art consumption as a mode of cosmopolitan citizenship.