La Tallera

David Alfaro Siqueiros built La Tallera in 1965 as what he called the first workshop for muralism anywhere — a great barn of a shed lit from above, stocked with mobile scaffolding, laboratories for testing pigments, film cameras — and lived in it for the last nine years of his life. Frida Escobedo's rehabilitation, begun in 2010 and opened in 2012, refuses the white cube. Her single decisive move was to unbolt two of the enormous mural panels standing in the courtyard and swing them out of their original alignment, so that the museum's private yard becomes a public plaza and the murals now address the street. Around the workshop she wrapped screens of perforated concrete block, which shade the building, ventilate it and print a shifting lattice of light across it. The paintings are treated as a civic possession rather than an exhibit.