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Making my way down the driveway of a low-slung Modernist building in a posher part of Mexico City, I was stopped in my tracks by the cartoony monumentality of Urs Fischer’s “Bad Timing, Lamb Chop!”, an aluminium sculpture of a half-empty cigarette pack merging into a wooden chair. There’s more attention-grabbing work inside the house: to the right of the main entrance hangs Robert Rauschenberg’s “Forge”, a two-metre-high Combine piece, uniting metal, paper, a sock and a necktie, while up on a mezzanine sits Carl Andre’s emblematic “Lead Aluminum Alloy Square”. These are just a few of the works Eugenio López Alonso lives with.

López Alonso is the sole heir to Grupo Jumex, which makes Mexico’s favourite brand of packaged fruit juices, and with those resources he created Fundación Jumex in 2001 to promote the production and research of contemporary art. The foundation in turn runs Colección Jumex, with more than 3,200 artworks, and Museo Jumex, essential art institutions in Mexico City. “It all started,” he says as we talk in his library, “when I walked into Sotheby’s in 1994 wanting to buy a respectable painting.” It may have started modestly, but it has in many ways reshaped the landscape of contemporary art in Mexico City.

As a child, López Alonso says, he was very curious, “to the point of being irritating”, especially about culture and its objects, the things people surrounded themselves with and the histories that accompanied them: the golden rococo surfaces of Versailles, old dynasties as portrayed by Velázquez. His parents — “not art people, they were more into jewellery” — took him on a tour of Europe’s greatest hits and it was there that he first felt the collector’s urge. Ironically for a collector distinguished for his vision in contemporary art, “I am interested in the past more than I am in the future . . . The past is what makes us, the present we are just living in.”

He is recognised for being an early champion of the 1990s and 2000s generation of Mexican artists who, with his help, have achieved visibility in international markets and institutions. More importantly, their practices can be read within a global context, thanks in large part to the multicultural collection that López Alonso has put together, where Olafur Eliasson sits next to Abraham Cruzvillegas, Andy Warhol next to Francis Alÿs. These correspondences are evident in one of López Alonso’s many entertaining areas, where a golden Damien Hirst pill shelf and photographic Paul McCarthy works serve as backgrounds for Gabriel Orozco’s “Oval Billiard Table” (1996) and Gabriel Kuri’s “Carretilla I and IV” (1999), two wheelbarrows filled to the brim with popcorn and Christmas ornaments respectively.

By going against the grain of Mexican collections at the time — which were mostly focused on Modernism, muralism and Frida Kahlo — and through his championing of this local generation of artists, he has managed to alter the focus of Mexico’s institutions and collectors. (It also helped there were young artists hungry for a more international presence and a less nationalistic visual language.) The excitement in his voice about the success of the artists he has championed remains childlike: “I never expected it, for their value to blow up like that, it made me feel like one of those wise collectors and marchands d’art from past eras.”

He is proudest of his (free-to-enter) museum, however, and particularly that its architect David Chipperfield was in May this year awarded a Pritzker prize, his profession’s most prestigious honour. For López Alonso, this was assurance that his legacy was on the right path, that he was endowing the people of Mexico with something worthwhile. He was adamant in having a foreign architect design the headquarters of his institution when it moved from the outskirts of the city into its centre 20 years ago: “Why could Spain and the US have all these beautiful buildings designed by internationally renowned architects but not Mexico City? I wanted that for us too.”

Like his collection, López Alonso embodies this contradictory but pragmatic position, of an international perspective that focuses on growing and developing the local. Fundación Jumex is known for its expansive grant programmes for Mexican art students looking to study abroad, for the production and research of exhibitions and for the editorial projects based on them. This keeps the foundation, as he likes to put it, “significant, for generations to come”.

Part of his keeping up with the times is, obviously, a relationship with art fairs, which he values. “They bring wealth and opportunity to a city, more importantly they keep the art world going: people party there, they splurge, but art fairs also cultivate new collectors and new audiences, essential elements of a healthy art world.”

But when it comes to the market, he abhors speculation and trusts his taste. “When people start telling you how great you are, what a great eye and expensive collection you have, you start buying [according to] your ego. That’s foolish . . . speculation destroys careers, I saw that in the 1980s . . . In the end everything comes back to its rightful place.”

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

During Art Basel Miami Beach, the city is transformed into a hotbed for art deals and debates. Art Basel’s Conversations programme this year brings together 30 cultural experts to discuss topics from international art markets to creative fungi that shed light on local art scenes as well as some of the pressing questions facing the industry.

This year the programme has a special emphasis on Latin America. A talk from artist and teacher María Magdalena Campos-Pons, whose spiritual multimedia works draw on her Afro-Cuban roots, traces her 40-year trajectory from the Cuban countryside to her current retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

In Collecting in Brazil, a panel of collectors and gallerists look at the continent’s largest art market in light of the government’s new commitment to the arts, following last year’s election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “The change of government seems to be giving Brazilian art a renewed momentum,” says panellist Luisa Strina, founder of Galeria Luisa Strina in São Paulo, who sees this as an exciting time for the country’s art market as it has “still plenty of room for growth”.

The programme also looks closer to home. Figures representing Florida’s dynamic non-profit art spaces, such as Bakehouse Art Complex and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, come together to discuss the importance of artist residencies in fostering local talent. The state’s ecosystem is also the subject of From Supercontinents to Florida, which explores artistic responses to this unique ecology, climate change and the impact of technology.

Science also goes under the microscope in Biohacking Creativity as artists Xin Liu, Eduardo Kac and James Bridle consider the implications of artworks that use non-human species such as bacteria, fungi and viruses as collaborative agents. Found in Translation, meanwhile, looks at whether we can use different forms of knowledge and language, such as pre-Hispanic dances, to reconstruct lost histories.

Finally, Renewing the Institution brings together experts from newly opened or redesigned US art museums to share how they are finding innovative ways to engage with audiences and create institutions for current times.

“Public education is a museum’s superpower, we are one of the last places on earth where you can learn in public and not be judged,” says speaker Tonya M Matthews, president of the International African American Museum in Charleston, which opened in June after two decades of planning. “We must grow in our ways of thinking, reckoning and reconciling our past and our present as we expand into our future. That’s why museums must fill in the gaps that expand the narrative.”

The Conversations programme runs December 7-9, artbasel.com

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

On a warm Miami night in early November this year, the opening of Katia David Rosenthal’s new gallery, KDR, which had just moved from Little Havana to the industrial neighbourhood of Allapattah, was joyously crowded. People drank and chatted at the reception, enjoying the autumn weather, as breezes stirred the palm trees and wild chickens, a normal part of the landscape, looked for appetiser crumbs.

Don and Mera Rubell, Miami’s influential contemporary-art collectors, hugged Max Voloshyn, who, with his wife, Julia, had just launched their gallery Voloshyn on the same block, featuring eastern European art. “We are about to have four art galleries lined up,” said Andrew Reed, owner of Andrew Reed Gallery, which also shares the block with Mindy Solomon Gallery. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like this here.” Soon afterwards, La Cometa gallery also launched in the neighbourhood.

Allapattah has been touted as Miami’s next art-world hotspot since at least 2019, when the Rubells opened the Rubell Museum to show their collection. The same year, developer Jorge Pérez, chair of the Related Group and principal private donor to the Pérez Art Museum Miami, inaugurated his contemporary art space, El Espacio 23, in the area. Marquez Arts Projects and immersive extravaganza Superblue also reside there. As Art Basel Miami Beach brings even more art to the city in early December, Allapattah has become a standout district.

Much has changed since the first artist-run spaces and commercial galleries opened in Miami in the Eighties and Nineties. Bakehouse Art Complex, Locust Projects and Dimensions Variable all started in the neighbourhood of Wynwood, along with BFI in the Design District, Diaspora Vibe in Little Haiti and Oolite Arts in Miami Beach. Art Basel may have helped shape a cultural ecosystem in Miami but Miami’s people have, without a doubt, made it an art beacon in its own right.

Before buying an old warehouse in Wynwood in 2000, Brook Dorsch, who now co-runs Emerson Dorsch, operated an art gallery from his own walk-up apartment. It was an inspiration, says Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, who co-founded Dimensions Variable with Frances Trombly: “His first apartment had all the windows drywalled, and he lived in the bedroom while the rest of the space was all walls, and that’s where he was showing exhibitions. I remember thinking, this guy is insane.

“The city was full of artists who took it upon themselves to create something new. That energy left a huge impression on me and what I do today,” he adds. This year, a book, an exhibition at Dimensions Variable (December 6-26) and a digital archive, all titled Making Miami, will tell the story of those artists who worked and made the city’s art community from 1996 to 2012.

To survive Miami’s rising housing costs, most art spaces and commercial galleries had to move neighbourhoods through the years, from Wynwood (rebranded as the Arts District in the early 2000s) to Little Haiti, Little River or Allapattah, chasing affordable housing as the city continued to grow, change and gentrify. Wherever artists go, real estate value also goes up: after the inception of Art Basel Miami Beach in 2002, developers saw the value in Wynwood and started buying warehouse buildings. Gentrification happened so fast that, by 2015, most artists and the working-class community were priced out.

“The city was overflowing with artists, but it was hard to find a decent place to rent,” says Rodriguez-Casanova, who thinks the city is in a similar spot today: Miami has officially become the least affordable housing market in the country. Most non-profits that offered free studio spaces to artists have had to change their model or start charging modest rates. For Lorie Mertes, executive director of Locust Projects, “It is difficult to see how our city becomes less affordable to sustain the cultural and economic diversity that makes us so exciting.”

Since 2017, Mindy Solomon has co-organised Progressive Art Brunch, a programme where art dealers open to the public several Sundays throughout the year for gallery-hopping. “It started as a conversation between myself and Tyler Dorsch, who co-founded Emerson Dorsch Gallery, during our long walks together thinking about the arts community and ways that we could grow and bring more people in,” Solomon says. Dainy Tapia, the creator of ArtSeen 365 on social media, shares information daily about every contemporary art show in Miami and south Florida.

But can the city’s own scene be self-supporting as it expands? To Fredric Snitzer, who opened in 1977, more people must engage with art for galleries to thrive outside of Miami Art Week. “I want the city to be a hotbed of collectors and enthusiasm all year round. But I just don’t see it yet,” he says. But Dejha Carrington, co-founder and executive director of Commissioner, a local organisation that empowers Miamians to collect art and support artists, remains optimistic. “We want to break access barriers and debunk the idea that a collector looks a certain way and is wealthy,” she says. “When someone who has never collected art acquires their first piece, it’s magic.”