Bedsheets Hold Memory at Museo de la Ciudad de Mérida
Bedsheets are usually associated with rest and privacy, but in a new exhibit at the Museo de la Ciudad de Mérida, Yucatecan artist Elena Martínez Bolio turns them into a public meditation on memory, dreams and the lives of women.
“T’eep: Sheets From the Center of the Maya World / The Expanded Bedroom” brings together roughly 50 textile-based works and installations. Through embroidery, fabric and found objects, the show takes on subjects that rarely make it into public view: dreams, desire, family expectations, patriarchy, abortion and conception.
At the Museum of the City of Mérida, artist Elena Martínez Bolio has turned roughly 50 bedsheets — embroidered, torn, tide-marked — into a shared record of what usually stays behind closed doors.Photo: Elena Martínez Bolio
At the Museum of the City of Mérida, artist Elena Martínez Bolio has turned roughly 50 bedsheets — embroidered, torn, tide-marked — into a shared record of what usually stays behind closed doors.Photo: Elena Martínez Bolio
At the Museum of the City of Mérida, artist Elena Martínez Bolio has turned roughly 50 bedsheets — embroidered, torn, tide-marked — into a shared record of what usually stays behind closed doors.Photo: Elena Martínez Bolio
“Sheets are never just fabric,” reads the curatorial text for the show, selected by Miguel Covián of Estudio Malix. The exhibit, Covián notes, moves bedsheets out of the bedroom and into a shared, collective experience.
Martínez Bolio said she began collecting pieces and materials for the project before knowing whether she would have funding to complete it, eventually receiving support through a grant for established artists from the Mérida city government.
“I had already started thinking about this exhibit with or without funding. I said, I’m going to build it and buy the pieces,” she said.
Obstacles Along the Way
The process shifted along the way. While preparing the show, Martínez Bolio had hip surgery, and her students stepped in to help finish pieces — work that evolved into what she calls a “sewing circle,” a space where participants shared their own dreams and reflections.
Dreams are a central thread in “T’eep.” Martínez Bolio embroiders them, using thread to fix in place what normally vanishes on waking, turning each stitch into a way of preserving memory and desire.
The sheets also speak to generational patterns that have shaped women’s lives. One installation draws on a childhood memory: watching her grandmother cut a sheet. Her mother later explained that some Catholic women once used wedding sheets with a hole cut into them, allowing the body to stay covered during sex. Martínez Bolio built a piece titled “Alone at Night I Marry the Sheet” around that memory, framing an inherited practice within a contemporary reflection on the body and sexuality.
Patriarchy appears directly in the show as well, rendered through a visual installation that keeps the exhibit’s poetic tone rather than a heavier, more solemn approach.
Other pieces look outward, reflecting concerns about Mérida’s rapid growth, the loss of green space and the spread of concrete and pavers that intensify the city’s heat. Sheets tied to tides, hammocks with frayed edges, a clothesline and a kiosk extend the bedroom motif into something closer to a landscape.
“T’eep” runs through the end of October at the Museo de la Ciudad de Mérida, or the Mérida City Museum.
Fast Facts
- Exhibit: “T’eep: Sheets From the Center of the Maya World / The Expanded Bedroom”
- Artist: Elena Martínez Bolio
- Curated by: Miguel Covián, Estudio Malix
- Venue: Museo de la Ciudad de Mérida
- Runs through: End of October 2026
- Works on view: About 50 pieces and installations
With reporting from La Jornada Maya
Yucatán Magazine has the inside scoop on living here. Sign up to get our top headlines delivered to your inbox every week.
