Add art to your Yucatán itinerary, and you'll mingle with Mérida's sophisticated but friendly gallery crowd, see interesting work not yet available up north, and enter the city's most delightfully restored edifices.
"I wanted a community space - a place for locals as well as Mérida's diverse expats," said Louis E. V. Nevaer, whose Casa Frederick Catherwood opened in March in a restored French-style townhouse. Nearly 450 people attended its opening, Nevaer said, "including expat Argentines, Catalans, Canadians, Italians, Lebanese, and Cubans, plus Maya ladies in their 'huipiles' [traditional dress], and hipsters in their Goth attire."
Nevaer, a US economist and author whose mother's family in the Yucatán dates to the 1600s, owned a rare 1844 folio of Catherwood lithographs, and thought Mérida deserved them. (Catherwood was the London artist who journeyed with American explorer John Lloyd Stephens documenting Mayan ruins between 1839 and 1841. The hand-colored lithographs are based on Catherwood's drawings of the ruins as he and Stephens found them, covered with dense vegetation.)
Nevaer purchased an abandoned townhouse in 2006, and spent two years restoring it. "This house was built in 1895 by a man who made his money in the first chocolate factory in Mérida," he said. "The floor tiles were imported from Marseilles. It has 21 sets of very valuable tropical mahogany doors."
Upstairs two pristine rooms contain the framed lithographs. Downstairs is a temporary exhibition space, a small garden of indigenous plants, a coffee shop, and a community room where chess players meet. In a charming mix of art and life, Mérida galleries often include things like cafes, or owners' studios and homes - even artist residency space. One can view art, have a drink, perhaps peek at a private garden or pool.
To see more of Mérida's newest galleries travel clockwise around the central Plaza Grande, starting from Casa Frederick Catherwood. The route is walkable, but taxis here are plentiful and cheap.
