Yvette Mayorga's 'Magic Grasshopper' Installed at Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg

Yvette Mayorga's 'Magic Grasshopper' is a thirty-foot sculpture installed outside the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, on view through July 26, 2026. The work is a baby pink carriage with white horses, piled with pink luggage adorned with smiley faces and neon flowers, and wheels inscribed with 'Where Dreams Are Made.' The title references the Nahuatl word 'chapultepec,' meaning 'hill of the grasshopper,' and the carriage is modeled after the imperial carriage of Emperor Maximilian I during the Second Mexican Empire (1860s), itself styled after Louis XVI's coronation coach at Versailles. Mayorga coined the term 'Latinxoco'—a portmanteau of Latinx and Rococo—to describe her practice's maximalism and decadence, linking French royal courts and Mexican colonial palaces. The sculpture incorporates references to her family's migration from Jalisco, Mexico, to Chicago, and her mother's work in bakeries, using piped acrylic resembling cake frosting. The work functions as a 'Trojan Horse,' combining playful surfaces with themes of migration, memory, and transcultural history.