Professor Mario Vázquez Ruvalcaba passed away at the age of 97.

 

He was born in Mexico City in 1923 and was a man of many interests. He studied law but didn’t finish because he discovered, first, contemporary dance, and then later, when he was passing through Moneda Street, the National Museum of Mexico, where he ended up studying.

He was an important Mexican museographer and museologist. He worked at the National Museum of Anthropology and some years later was its director (1964-1989); he was President of ICOM Mexico and an ICOFOM member in the 1980s.

Alejandro Sabido, in his text “Tres momentos en la actividad museológica de Mario Vázquez” (Three Moments in the Museum Activity of Mario Vázquez) (2015), mentions three key moments for the future of ICOM in which he was present: the ICOM General Assembly in 1971, in Grenoble, France, where he and Stanislas Adotevi started the conversation over a museum that would be revolutionary in terms of inclusion or rendered extinct; the Roundtable in Santiago, Chile in 1972, where with a group of experts he suggested the concept of an “Integral Museum”; and the same year when he created the “Casa del Museo” Program, which proposed to bring the museum to visit poor and forgotten areas of the city such as Observatorio, Tacubaya and the Pedregal de Santo Domingo.

 

ICOFOM expresses its deepest condolences to his family, his friends and the museological community.

 

June 2, 2020.

(Text by Scarlet Galindo Monteagudo)