UDEM Center for the Arts: Creating Experiences that Activate Community Through Art

• The UDEM Center for the Arts develops exhibitions, public programs, and interdisciplinary initiatives that integrate art into university life as a platform for connection, reflection, and participation. Through cultural initiatives open to the broader community, we seek to strengthen dialogue, creativity, and holistic education, consolidating UDEM as a cultural leader committed to its social environment.

At the UDEM Center for the Arts, we work to transform the campus into a vibrant space for engagement, participation, and reflection, where art and creative practice generate transformative experiences for students, faculty, staff, and the wider community. Through temporary exhibitions, public programs, interdisciplinary activities, and institutional collaborations, we aim to foster new ways of thinking, dialogue, and coexistence, strengthening UDEM’s role as a cultural reference point while promoting a more thoughtful, critical, and connected community.

This Spring semester, we launched our temporary exhibition program with José Luis Carrera and the Persistence of Printmaking. Carrera’s work is rooted in the living tradition of printmaking, understood not as the static preservation of a technique, but as its ability to remain relevant through rigor, critical thought, and sustained practice. His artistic approach is grounded in a deep mastery of the craft while engaging contemporary concerns through the incorporation of technology as an ally in the creative process, without losing the direct relationship with materiality, mark-making, and the temporality inherent to artistic production.

It is also important to highlight a significant aspect of this project: the series Habitat and Landscape has been incorporated into the University’s contemporary art collection, enriching the institutional holdings and strengthening the connection between artistic creation, education, and community. This acquisition enables the works to become part of university life as tools for knowledge, reflection, and shared memory.

Continuing this line of artistic research and experimentation, we presented the work of Santiago Borja in the exhibition Schema. The exhibition explores diagrams as tools that not only organize thought but also influence the ways in which knowledge is constructed. Presented within a university context, the exhibition acquires particular significance by inviting audiences to reflect on the instruments we use to learn, analyze, and imagine.

In the current context, as the city prepares to become part of a global event such as the FIFA World Cup 2026, the UDEM Center for the Arts identified an opportunity to contribute to this conversation through contemporary art. Through July, the installation Silbatazo en el campo (Whistle on the Field) is on view in the garden of the Roberto Garza Sada Center. The work consists of sixty devices activated by wind currents, generating a sonic and kinetic choreography.

Through air—an invisible yet constant element—the installation activates whistles and objects associated with refereeing, transforming the landscape into an expanded field where rules, signals, and calls for attention emerge in unexpected ways. In this gesture, the air itself becomes the referee.

In addition, with the objective of broadening access and sharing these projects with wider audiences, exhibitions at the UDEM Center for the Arts can be experienced virtually through the Bloomberg Connects application and the Roberto Garza Sada Center website. These virtual tours extend the exhibition experience beyond the physical space and strengthen the relationship between art, community, and knowledge.

Explore Our Virtual Tours

• Schema - Santiago Borja
• José Luis Carrera and the Persistence of Printmaking
• Creative Convergences
• Abraham Zabludovsky at UDEM
• When the Landscape Speaks

Beyond its temporary exhibitions, the UDEM Center for the Arts promotes activities that expand cultural engagement and encourage participation within the university community. Guided tours, workshops, activations, and public conversations allow art to become an active vehicle for connection, exchange, and shared learning.

This year, we launched the Art Club for UDEM Team, a program designed to provide a space for artistic exploration and community building through creative activities that foster imagination, holistic well-being, a sense of belonging, and engagement with art as a transformative experience.

We also continue to offer artistic and recreational activities for the children of university staff, through the initiative known as Fun Fridays. To date, the program has served more than 180 participants, in addition to the 167 children who participated during the previous semester.

As part of the programming associated with our exhibitions, a workshop on the use of diagrams was led by artist Santiago Borja, alongside specialized guided tours conducted by professor and artist José Luis Carrera. Additionally, an introductory course on cultural project management was offered by the specialist in arts management, Daniela Cubas. All of these activities were open to the public.

Through these initiatives, the UDEM Center for the Arts continues to consolidate a cultural experience that understands art not merely as exhibition, but as a platform for building connections, activating creativity, and fostering reflections capable of inspiring new forms of participation and understanding. In this way, we seek to strengthen UDEM’s role as an institution committed to holistic education and to the cultural development of its community and surrounding environment.