At Mexico City’s Museo del Objeto del Objeto (MODO), a museum dedicated to objects, the 2025 exhibition Las reglas del juego (The Rules of the Game) brought together works made by people receiving psychiatric care while confined at CEVAREPSI and Tepepan, two penitentiary institutions. The exhibition exemplifies a form of contemporary Outsider Art in which psychiatric treatment and legal confinement limit artists’ access to the art world. As Outsider Art has gained increasing recognition in museums and markets (Tansella, Reference Tansella2007; Maclagan, Reference Maclagan2009), these works, too, entered public circulation through MODO, while their makers remained confined.

In these forensic psychiatric settings, Ricardo Caballero has run workshops for more than two decades. MODO has collaborated with the project since 2016, and Las reglas del juego, the sixth exhibition to emerge from these workshops, included more than 100 works. In a curatorial statement published on MODO’s official website, Caballero explains that, for a person deprived of liberty, ‘time is a quantifiable matter’ and that play and artistic creation depend on agreements that ‘cannot be imposed’ (Caballero, Reference Caballero2025; my translation). The Spanish word juego is polysemous: it can refer both to a game governed by rules and to play as a freely chosen activity. The exhibition’s title sets up a tension: how can a museum show art made under strict institutional control without allowing that context to overdetermine what the public sees? I argue that two display logics organise the exhibition: withholding and crowding.

Withholding first appears in the omission of clinical and penal information: there were no diagnoses or offences. The use of first names and pseudonyms helped prevent the makers from being defined by their psychiatric and legal classifications and their work from being interpreted solely through those categories. This contextual restraint is one curatorial form of withholding. A second form concerns whether the works reach the museum at all. In an interview on 14 March 2025, Caballero told me that some participants create only for themselves; they may destroy what they make or decide who is allowed to see it. Withholding is therefore both a curatorial strategy and an exercise of the artists’ agency. Yet some aspects of the exhibition process remain unclear, including how works were selected, whether the artists were consulted about installation and labelling, and what role prison authorities played. Although all proceeds from sales went to the artists, the exhibition provided little indication of the extent to which they participated in decisions about displaying their work.

Crowding structures the display spatially and visually. In the first room, a maze-like cardboard structure occupied the centre of the space and interrupted sightlines to the works on the wall behind it (Fig. 1). Drawings, sculptural objects and pieces from MODO’s collection, including rulers that served as a material cue to the exhibition’s title, were mounted on the wall (Fig. 1). Folded sheets were suspended from the ceiling, overlapping in a row (Fig. 2). As visitors moved around them, one section came into view while another disappeared behind a fold. The arrangement obstructed movement and prevented the works from being seen in full. These restrictions echoed aspects of the artists’ confinement: movement was obstructed and visual access restricted.

Figure 1.

Installation view of Las reglas del juego (The Rules of the Game) at MODO, Mexico City. A cardboard maze obstructs sightlines to the works on the gallery walls. Photograph © 2025 Velebita Koričančić.

Figure 2.

Installation view of Las reglas del juego (The Rules of the Game) at MODO, Mexico City. Suspended folded works permit only partial and shifting views. Photograph © 2025 Velebita Koričančić.

The dense collective display presented the artists first as a group and later as individuals. MAFO’s works, however, stood apart by occupying an entire wall. Images of dragons and samurai weaponry also made the work of another artist recognisable. Still, allocating more space to a single artist may reproduce art-world hierarchies, even within Outsider Art, which has developed its own canon of recognised works and artists (Rexer, Reference Rexer2005). Crowding works when viewers can still distinguish one artist from another. Here, crowded walls and partial views encouraged slower looking, while the uneven distribution of space made some artists easier to recognise than others.

When these artworks entered the museum, the conditions under which they were made did not disappear. Withholding clinical and penal information allowed viewers to encounter works as art rather than as symptoms, but it could also make the penitentiary institutions harder to scrutinise. Crowding slowed down the pace of looking, but it also made individual artists harder to distinguish.

The display shows what is at stake in contemporary Outsider Art exhibitions: how to acknowledge the circumstances in which artists live and work without making those circumstances a totalising explanation of the art. In prison, the institution decides how the day will pass, but play begins with a choice, however narrow. Rules condition the artists’ lives, but they do not dictate what the artists create or choose to do with their work; there is still room for play.