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Camila Maroja

Brandeis University, Fine Arts, Faculty Member

Brown University, History of Art & Architecture, Post-Doc

Colgate University, Art and Art History, Faculty Member

McGill University, Art History & Communication Studies, Faculty Member

California State University, Fullerton, Visual Arts, Faculty Member

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Camila Maroja specializes in modern and contemporary art within a Southern context. Her areas of interest include exhibition history, localized experimental art practices since the 1960s, the creation of art historiographies, cultural exchanges between South and North, the difficulties of cross-cultural methodologies and interpretations, location of global art, and the relationship between Brazil and Latin America. Maroja’s work engages with the geopolitical circulation of objects and ideas in the Americas and beyond, and aims to put marginal discourses at the center of art history.

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UFRJ

Vera Beatriz Siqueira

Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna

Christiane Wagner

USP

Guilherme Ferreira

Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)

Marcos de Brum Lopes

Instituto Brasileiro de Museus - MinC

FURG - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande

Marina Pereira Penteado

FURG - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande

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Papers by Camila Maroja

Repensando as conexões entre arte e ecologia a partir do sul global

MODOS: Revista de História da Arte

Este dossiê trata das relações entre arte e ecologia a partir das perspectivas latino-americana e... more Este dossiê trata das relações entre arte e ecologia a partir das perspectivas latino-americana e do Sul Global. Os artigos aqui reunidos buscam precisamente repensar essas relações e analisar a produção artística gerada desde o impacto da emergente conscientização ambiental na arte e no modo como a arte é pensada. Demonstram a importância não só de apresentar noções ecológicas provindas da América Latina e de outros espaços pós-coloniais na criação artística contemporânea, mas também de repensar a historiografia e a análise da arte a partir de novos parâmetros que reconsideram o papel da natureza na arte.

Projecting Latin America: Ángel Kalenberg’s Controversial Audiovisual at the Paris Biennial

Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Apr 1, 2022

The curatorial project as well as some official correspondence is kept at the Archives de la crit... more The curatorial project as well as some official correspondence is kept at the Archives de la critique d'art (AICA) in Rennes, France. I thank Laurence Le Poupon for her help during my research. 3. Uruguay's coup d'état started in June 1973 and the regime lasted for twelve years. The accusation against Kalenberg derives from his official position as the director of the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales de Montevideo, which lasted from 1969 to 2007. In a letter sent to Ehrenberg, artist Clemente Padín wrote that "since 1970 no artist in Uruguay would exhibit in official venues for obvious reasons" and claimed that if Kalenberg had been nominated in Paris, it was because he was complicit with the current "socio-political and cultural politics" in Uruguay. This letter was published anonymously in the Mexican counter-catalog in Spanish and French, and reprinted later together with the correspondence between the biennial's organizers and the Mexican artists. See Helen Escobedo, ed.,

The Persistence of Primitivism: Equivocation in Ernesto Neto's A Sacred Place and Critical Practice

Arts, 2019

During the 2017 Venice Biennale, the area dubbed the "Pavilion of the Shamans" opened with A Sacr... more During the 2017 Venice Biennale, the area dubbed the "Pavilion of the Shamans" opened with A Sacred Place, an immersive environmental work created by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto in collaboration with the Huni Kuin, a native people of the Amazon rainforest. Despite the co-authorship of the installation, the artwork was dismissed by art critics as engaging in primitivism and colonialism. Borrowing anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's concept of equivocation, this article examines the incorporation of both indigenous and contemporary art practices in A Sacred Place. The text ultimately argues that a more equivocal, open interpretation of the work could lead to a better understanding of the work and a more self-reflexive global art history that can look at and learn from at its own comparative limitations.

Displaying Whose Modernity? The Bardis and the Museum of Art of São Paulo

New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era, 2021

In 2015, after an almost 20-year hiatus, the Museu de arte de Sao Paulo (Museum of Art of Sao Pau... more In 2015, after an almost 20-year hiatus, the Museu de arte de Sao Paulo (Museum of Art of Sao Paulo, MASP) reinstalled the celebrated crystal easel display designed by the architect Lina Bo Bardi. To present “civilized art” as an authentic Brazilian expression, however, Bardi needed to assure his readers that it, too, was autonomous and local. In his chapter on the Brazilian art falling into this category, titled “Approach to Modernity,” Bardi thus glossed over the art of the colonial period and largely dismissed the academic and neoclassical art of the nineteenth-century as spurious and derivative. In his writings about modern Brazilian painting, Bardi thus construed a Brazilian modern art narrative based on European notions of the genius loci, the avant-garde and originality that reflected the Western model of modernity and art history.

From São Paulo to Paris and Back Again: Tarsila do Amaral

Stedelijk Studies 9 , 2019

This article surveys the 1920s transatlantic trajectory of painter Tarsila do Amaral, whose contr... more This article surveys the 1920s transatlantic trajectory of painter Tarsila do Amaral, whose contributions to the history of a global modernism have recently begun to be more widely recognized. By arguing that Amaral’s negotiation of a place in the international art world can serve as a model for exhibiting contemporary art from non-mainstream areas, the essay also underscores the relevance of avant-garde ideas for the contemporary art world.

Meandering Pathways: Tropical Barroquism in the Work of Scherezade García

Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic, 2020

Catalogue essay about the work of Scherezade García edited by Olga Herrera (AMA, 2020)

Maroja Pop America

T he IX Bienal de São Paulo in 1967 immediately became known as the "Bienal do Pop" (Pop Biennial... more T he IX Bienal de São Paulo in 1967 immediately became known as the "Bienal do Pop" (Pop Biennial). This nomenclature reflected not only one of the exhibition's most prominent national representations-Ambiente USA: 1957-1967 (Environment USA: 1957-1967), which featured iconic works by Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana, among others-but also referred to a shared tendency among many of the artists to seek the direct appropriation of reality in their work. 1 By uniting artworks as diverse as Julio Le Parc's kinetic objects and Nelson Leirner's "paintings" with polyester and zippers under the Pop label (see page 44; figures 2.1, 2.2), the biennial's Pop rubric generated a false impression of artistic homogeneity. Indeed, by amassing a range of local terminologies that were operative in the late 1960s, including popular and Environmental art, objetos (objects), nouveau réalisme (New Realism), and nova objetividade (New Objectivity), the exhibit appeared to contradict the very idea of Pop as a global art movement. 2 Mexican art critic Ida Rodríguez Prampolini argued as much in a letter written to the exhibition committee urging them to scrap the outdated biennial criteria, as reflected in its o ering a "grand prize for painting," and to establish new artistic categories such as arte integrado (integrated art). She even challenged the organizers to stop displaying artworks according to country, because "art has no political borders." 3 Rodríguez Prampolini's vision of an integrated global village as imagined by media guru Marshall McLuhan proved to be overly optimistic, however, and contrasted vividly with the passionate public reaction to the show. Indeed, the IX Bienal became the first São Paulo biennial to be vandalized when one leftist demonstrator, taking advantage of a half-hour blackout, inscribed "Viva Guevara. Fora USA!" (Long Live Guevara. USA Out!) next to James Gill's Marilyn (see page 45, figure 2.3). Only a few months later, during the IV Salão de Arte Moderna do Distrito Federal, extreme-right militants used axes to hack o the wall Claudio Tozzi's panel GUEVARA VIVO OU MORTO... GUEVARA, ALIVE OR DEAD…) (see page 46, figure 2.4), a Pop depiction of Cuban revolutionary icon Che Guevara. 4 As these attacks demonstrate, Pop art's appropriation of reality could not be separated from politics during the heyday of the Cold War and, contrary to Rodríguez Prampolini's belief, art did have political boundaries. Even more importantly, these acts of violence against Pop artworks-one from the left and one from the right-threaten the supposedly univocal category of Pop and compel us to rethink the canonization of Latin American Conceptual art, or Conceptualism, a movement that became known in the region for its leftist political inflection. 5 These actions demonstrate that the shared visual vocabulary of Pop and Conceptual art could code-switch, communicating radically di erent meanings depending on its agent and audience.

Vontade Construtiva: Latin America’s Sensitive Geometry

by Mariola Alvarez and Camila Maroja

New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America, 2018

Chapter in the anthology "New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America" edited by Mar... more

Inside the Sandcastle

Red Shift: Cildo Meireles and the Definition of the Political-Conceptual

This article examines Cildo Meireles's refusal to describe Red Shift, his 1984 installation, as c... more This article examines Cildo Meireles's refusal to describe Red Shift, his 1984 installation, as conceptual, political art. I use his rejection of these terms to reconsider conventional categories of the political in Latin American conceptualism as these have been historicized in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I argue that the artist builds his notions of conceptual and political art based on socio-artistic theories propagated in the short-lived but highly influential publication, Malasartes. This groundbreaking magazine, founded by Meireles and eight others in 1975, published texts crucial to Brazilian art history and translated international articles. These shaped the theoretical ideas that would inform the Brazilian art scene in the 1970s. Revisiting theses debates permits a deeper understanding of Meireles's view of art and politics. Revealing, in particular, the manner in which this generation of artists criticized the incipient art market in Brazil, then seen as synonymous with the larger art system. Proposing a differentiated art history, offering an autochthonous point of view, Malasartes's editors challenged the traditional view of the artwork as an isolated, commodified object, inserted in larger art movements through the stultifying imposition of stylistic categories on the artist. This critique of the art market helps to explain Meireles's stance on rejecting identification as a conceptual and political artist, despite the fact that his opus can be seen as both political and conceptual.

“Transforming Spectators Into Witnesses: Artur Barrio’s Bloody Bundles”

Published in Art & Documentation, n. 10 (Spring 2014): 23-29.

Vectors or Constellations? Curatorial Narratives of Latin American Art

by Camila Maroja and Abigail Winograd

Artlas Bulletin, 2014

This paper examines the curatorial visions guiding the Mercosul Biennial (1997), curated by Frede... more This paper examines the curatorial visions guiding the Mercosul Biennial (1997), curated by Frederico Morais, and Inverted Utopias (2004), co-curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea. Both strove to shift the association of Latin American art with the fantastic that had dominated the region's historiography. The structural metaphors used to frame these shows demonstrated differing aims: Morais's desire to create an autochthonous historiography versus Ramírez and Olea's wish to revise constructions of global modernism. Nonetheless, both exhibitions showcased similar works and helped to consolidate a revised vision of Latin American art.

Entrevista com Lynn Zelevansky

ARS (São Paulo), Oct 27, 2017

Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium

Um dos maiores paradoxos na carreira de Hélio Oiticica é o fato de o artista ter finalmente exper... more

Modernités Plurielles 1905-1970

arte e ensaios, 2013

Resenha da exposição Modernités Plurielles 1905-1970, realizada no Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris... more

Volpi, Alfredo (1896–1988)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism

One of Brazil’s greatest colorists, Alfredo Volpi (b. 1896, Lucca, Italy; d. 1988, São Paulo, Bra... more One of Brazil’s greatest colorists, Alfredo Volpi (b. 1896, Lucca, Italy; d. 1988, São Paulo, Brazil), immigrated with his parents to Brazil in 1897 and was trained as a painter-decorator by the age of fifteen. This training instilled in him a passion for artistic processes, as evidenced in the painter’s lifelong habit of stretching his own canvases and preparing tempera paint, a technique he embraced after discovering Giotto in an influential visit to Italy in 1950. His initial production is mostly figurative. Noteworthy from this early period are his 1939–1941 marine landscapes made in Itanhaém, following his encounter with the painter Ernesto De Fiori. From the 1950s onwards his artworks became more abstract. He painted the characteristic colonial façades and decorative little flag pennants (literally, bandeirinhas or "little flags"), which poetically evoke popular taste and local tradition. Although his oeuvre cannot be easily inserted into artistic movements, Volpi pa...

Introduction to "The Permanence of the Transient. Precariousness in Art"

How should one approach the notion of the precarious in art – its meanings and its outcomes? Its ... more How should one approach the notion of the precarious in art – its meanings and its outcomes? Its presence in artistic practices may be transient, yet it instigates permanent changes in the production, discourse, and perception of art. The Permanence of the Transient: Precariousness in Art gathers essays that examine the traces and implications of precariousness in contemporary art, and lays a foundation for a thoughtful study of its emergence in related fields throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

The different perspectives represented in this volume touch on art history and theory, curatorial practice, media art, philosophy, language, and transnational studies, and highlight artists’ narratives. Together, these interdisciplinary essays locate precariousness as an undercurrent in contemporary art and a connective tissue across diverse areas of knowledge and everyday life.

“Visualizing Other Histories: Paulo Herkenhoff’s Cannibalization of Alfred Barr’s Chart”

In 1998, Brazilian curator Paulo Herkenhoff organized the 24th São Paulo Biennial around the them... more In 1998, Brazilian curator Paulo Herkenhoff organized the 24th São Paulo Biennial around the theme of anthropophagy. The term, coined in 1928 by Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade, quickly became the most celebrated concept in the country for understanding national culture. Like the Tupy Indians who devoured their enemies to absorb what was most valuable in them, Andrade urged Brazilian intellectuals should incorporate imported references into the construction of a hybrid national culture. Guided by this metaphor, Herkenhoff used anthropophagy as a method to display international art from a national standpoint in the exhibition Historical Nucleus. Contrasting Herkenhoff’s 1998 diagram intended to inform Historical Nucleus’s multiple exhibits with the famous map of the history of modern art made by Alfred Barr, MoMA’s first director, in 1936, this article demonstrates that the two diagrams are aesthetically and politically similar in their intention to create new models of art history. Yet despite Herkenhoff’s intention to set the epistemological grounds for a new, post-colonial art narrative coming from the South, the article argues, his cannibalization of Barr’s radial structure ultimately had questionable results. Nonetheless, by weaving a transhistorical and cross-cultural narrative in the show based on the curatorial strategy he termed “contamination,” the 24th São Paulo Biennial demonstrated that other art historical narratives were possible and necessary.

Framing Latin American Art: Artists, Critics, Institutions and the Configuration of a Regional Identity

… 1960-1970 Instituição: PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO-PUC-RIO Autor (es): CAMILA SANTORO MAROJA Colaborador (es): CECILIA …

maxwell.lambda.ele.puc-rio.br

Resumo: Rejeitando a noção de uma produção artística pautada em uma linearidade, o trabalho de Ro... more

Repensando as conexões entre arte e ecologia a partir do sul global

MODOS: Revista de História da Arte

Este dossiê trata das relações entre arte e ecologia a partir das perspectivas latino-americana e... more Este dossiê trata das relações entre arte e ecologia a partir das perspectivas latino-americana e do Sul Global. Os artigos aqui reunidos buscam precisamente repensar essas relações e analisar a produção artística gerada desde o impacto da emergente conscientização ambiental na arte e no modo como a arte é pensada. Demonstram a importância não só de apresentar noções ecológicas provindas da América Latina e de outros espaços pós-coloniais na criação artística contemporânea, mas também de repensar a historiografia e a análise da arte a partir de novos parâmetros que reconsideram o papel da natureza na arte.

Projecting Latin America: Ángel Kalenberg’s Controversial Audiovisual at the Paris Biennial

Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Apr 1, 2022

The curatorial project as well as some official correspondence is kept at the Archives de la crit... more The curatorial project as well as some official correspondence is kept at the Archives de la critique d'art (AICA) in Rennes, France. I thank Laurence Le Poupon for her help during my research. 3. Uruguay's coup d'état started in June 1973 and the regime lasted for twelve years. The accusation against Kalenberg derives from his official position as the director of the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales de Montevideo, which lasted from 1969 to 2007. In a letter sent to Ehrenberg, artist Clemente Padín wrote that "since 1970 no artist in Uruguay would exhibit in official venues for obvious reasons" and claimed that if Kalenberg had been nominated in Paris, it was because he was complicit with the current "socio-political and cultural politics" in Uruguay. This letter was published anonymously in the Mexican counter-catalog in Spanish and French, and reprinted later together with the correspondence between the biennial's organizers and the Mexican artists. See Helen Escobedo, ed.,

The Persistence of Primitivism: Equivocation in Ernesto Neto's A Sacred Place and Critical Practice

Arts, 2019

During the 2017 Venice Biennale, the area dubbed the "Pavilion of the Shamans" opened with A Sacr... more During the 2017 Venice Biennale, the area dubbed the "Pavilion of the Shamans" opened with A Sacred Place, an immersive environmental work created by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto in collaboration with the Huni Kuin, a native people of the Amazon rainforest. Despite the co-authorship of the installation, the artwork was dismissed by art critics as engaging in primitivism and colonialism. Borrowing anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's concept of equivocation, this article examines the incorporation of both indigenous and contemporary art practices in A Sacred Place. The text ultimately argues that a more equivocal, open interpretation of the work could lead to a better understanding of the work and a more self-reflexive global art history that can look at and learn from at its own comparative limitations.

Displaying Whose Modernity? The Bardis and the Museum of Art of São Paulo

New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era, 2021

In 2015, after an almost 20-year hiatus, the Museu de arte de Sao Paulo (Museum of Art of Sao Pau... more In 2015, after an almost 20-year hiatus, the Museu de arte de Sao Paulo (Museum of Art of Sao Paulo, MASP) reinstalled the celebrated crystal easel display designed by the architect Lina Bo Bardi. To present “civilized art” as an authentic Brazilian expression, however, Bardi needed to assure his readers that it, too, was autonomous and local. In his chapter on the Brazilian art falling into this category, titled “Approach to Modernity,” Bardi thus glossed over the art of the colonial period and largely dismissed the academic and neoclassical art of the nineteenth-century as spurious and derivative. In his writings about modern Brazilian painting, Bardi thus construed a Brazilian modern art narrative based on European notions of the genius loci, the avant-garde and originality that reflected the Western model of modernity and art history.

From São Paulo to Paris and Back Again: Tarsila do Amaral

Stedelijk Studies 9 , 2019

This article surveys the 1920s transatlantic trajectory of painter Tarsila do Amaral, whose contr... more This article surveys the 1920s transatlantic trajectory of painter Tarsila do Amaral, whose contributions to the history of a global modernism have recently begun to be more widely recognized. By arguing that Amaral’s negotiation of a place in the international art world can serve as a model for exhibiting contemporary art from non-mainstream areas, the essay also underscores the relevance of avant-garde ideas for the contemporary art world.

Meandering Pathways: Tropical Barroquism in the Work of Scherezade García

Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic, 2020

Catalogue essay about the work of Scherezade García edited by Olga Herrera (AMA, 2020)

Maroja Pop America

T he IX Bienal de São Paulo in 1967 immediately became known as the "Bienal do Pop" (Pop Biennial... more T he IX Bienal de São Paulo in 1967 immediately became known as the "Bienal do Pop" (Pop Biennial). This nomenclature reflected not only one of the exhibition's most prominent national representations-Ambiente USA: 1957-1967 (Environment USA: 1957-1967), which featured iconic works by Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana, among others-but also referred to a shared tendency among many of the artists to seek the direct appropriation of reality in their work. 1 By uniting artworks as diverse as Julio Le Parc's kinetic objects and Nelson Leirner's "paintings" with polyester and zippers under the Pop label (see page 44; figures 2.1, 2.2), the biennial's Pop rubric generated a false impression of artistic homogeneity. Indeed, by amassing a range of local terminologies that were operative in the late 1960s, including popular and Environmental art, objetos (objects), nouveau réalisme (New Realism), and nova objetividade (New Objectivity), the exhibit appeared to contradict the very idea of Pop as a global art movement. 2 Mexican art critic Ida Rodríguez Prampolini argued as much in a letter written to the exhibition committee urging them to scrap the outdated biennial criteria, as reflected in its o ering a "grand prize for painting," and to establish new artistic categories such as arte integrado (integrated art). She even challenged the organizers to stop displaying artworks according to country, because "art has no political borders." 3 Rodríguez Prampolini's vision of an integrated global village as imagined by media guru Marshall McLuhan proved to be overly optimistic, however, and contrasted vividly with the passionate public reaction to the show. Indeed, the IX Bienal became the first São Paulo biennial to be vandalized when one leftist demonstrator, taking advantage of a half-hour blackout, inscribed "Viva Guevara. Fora USA!" (Long Live Guevara. USA Out!) next to James Gill's Marilyn (see page 45, figure 2.3). Only a few months later, during the IV Salão de Arte Moderna do Distrito Federal, extreme-right militants used axes to hack o the wall Claudio Tozzi's panel GUEVARA VIVO OU MORTO... GUEVARA, ALIVE OR DEAD…) (see page 46, figure 2.4), a Pop depiction of Cuban revolutionary icon Che Guevara. 4 As these attacks demonstrate, Pop art's appropriation of reality could not be separated from politics during the heyday of the Cold War and, contrary to Rodríguez Prampolini's belief, art did have political boundaries. Even more importantly, these acts of violence against Pop artworks-one from the left and one from the right-threaten the supposedly univocal category of Pop and compel us to rethink the canonization of Latin American Conceptual art, or Conceptualism, a movement that became known in the region for its leftist political inflection. 5 These actions demonstrate that the shared visual vocabulary of Pop and Conceptual art could code-switch, communicating radically di erent meanings depending on its agent and audience.

Vontade Construtiva: Latin America’s Sensitive Geometry

by Mariola Alvarez and Camila Maroja

New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America, 2018

Chapter in the anthology "New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America" edited by Mar... more

Inside the Sandcastle

Red Shift: Cildo Meireles and the Definition of the Political-Conceptual

This article examines Cildo Meireles's refusal to describe Red Shift, his 1984 installation, as c... more This article examines Cildo Meireles's refusal to describe Red Shift, his 1984 installation, as conceptual, political art. I use his rejection of these terms to reconsider conventional categories of the political in Latin American conceptualism as these have been historicized in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I argue that the artist builds his notions of conceptual and political art based on socio-artistic theories propagated in the short-lived but highly influential publication, Malasartes. This groundbreaking magazine, founded by Meireles and eight others in 1975, published texts crucial to Brazilian art history and translated international articles. These shaped the theoretical ideas that would inform the Brazilian art scene in the 1970s. Revisiting theses debates permits a deeper understanding of Meireles's view of art and politics. Revealing, in particular, the manner in which this generation of artists criticized the incipient art market in Brazil, then seen as synonymous with the larger art system. Proposing a differentiated art history, offering an autochthonous point of view, Malasartes's editors challenged the traditional view of the artwork as an isolated, commodified object, inserted in larger art movements through the stultifying imposition of stylistic categories on the artist. This critique of the art market helps to explain Meireles's stance on rejecting identification as a conceptual and political artist, despite the fact that his opus can be seen as both political and conceptual.

“Transforming Spectators Into Witnesses: Artur Barrio’s Bloody Bundles”

Published in Art & Documentation, n. 10 (Spring 2014): 23-29.

Vectors or Constellations? Curatorial Narratives of Latin American Art

by Camila Maroja and Abigail Winograd

Artlas Bulletin, 2014

This paper examines the curatorial visions guiding the Mercosul Biennial (1997), curated by Frede... more This paper examines the curatorial visions guiding the Mercosul Biennial (1997), curated by Frederico Morais, and Inverted Utopias (2004), co-curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea. Both strove to shift the association of Latin American art with the fantastic that had dominated the region's historiography. The structural metaphors used to frame these shows demonstrated differing aims: Morais's desire to create an autochthonous historiography versus Ramírez and Olea's wish to revise constructions of global modernism. Nonetheless, both exhibitions showcased similar works and helped to consolidate a revised vision of Latin American art.

Entrevista com Lynn Zelevansky

ARS (São Paulo), Oct 27, 2017

Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium

Um dos maiores paradoxos na carreira de Hélio Oiticica é o fato de o artista ter finalmente exper... more

Modernités Plurielles 1905-1970

arte e ensaios, 2013

Resenha da exposição Modernités Plurielles 1905-1970, realizada no Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris... more

Volpi, Alfredo (1896–1988)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism

One of Brazil’s greatest colorists, Alfredo Volpi (b. 1896, Lucca, Italy; d. 1988, São Paulo, Bra... more One of Brazil’s greatest colorists, Alfredo Volpi (b. 1896, Lucca, Italy; d. 1988, São Paulo, Brazil), immigrated with his parents to Brazil in 1897 and was trained as a painter-decorator by the age of fifteen. This training instilled in him a passion for artistic processes, as evidenced in the painter’s lifelong habit of stretching his own canvases and preparing tempera paint, a technique he embraced after discovering Giotto in an influential visit to Italy in 1950. His initial production is mostly figurative. Noteworthy from this early period are his 1939–1941 marine landscapes made in Itanhaém, following his encounter with the painter Ernesto De Fiori. From the 1950s onwards his artworks became more abstract. He painted the characteristic colonial façades and decorative little flag pennants (literally, bandeirinhas or "little flags"), which poetically evoke popular taste and local tradition. Although his oeuvre cannot be easily inserted into artistic movements, Volpi pa...

Introduction to "The Permanence of the Transient. Precariousness in Art"

How should one approach the notion of the precarious in art – its meanings and its outcomes? Its ... more How should one approach the notion of the precarious in art – its meanings and its outcomes? Its presence in artistic practices may be transient, yet it instigates permanent changes in the production, discourse, and perception of art. The Permanence of the Transient: Precariousness in Art gathers essays that examine the traces and implications of precariousness in contemporary art, and lays a foundation for a thoughtful study of its emergence in related fields throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

The different perspectives represented in this volume touch on art history and theory, curatorial practice, media art, philosophy, language, and transnational studies, and highlight artists’ narratives. Together, these interdisciplinary essays locate precariousness as an undercurrent in contemporary art and a connective tissue across diverse areas of knowledge and everyday life.

“Visualizing Other Histories: Paulo Herkenhoff’s Cannibalization of Alfred Barr’s Chart”

In 1998, Brazilian curator Paulo Herkenhoff organized the 24th São Paulo Biennial around the them... more In 1998, Brazilian curator Paulo Herkenhoff organized the 24th São Paulo Biennial around the theme of anthropophagy. The term, coined in 1928 by Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade, quickly became the most celebrated concept in the country for understanding national culture. Like the Tupy Indians who devoured their enemies to absorb what was most valuable in them, Andrade urged Brazilian intellectuals should incorporate imported references into the construction of a hybrid national culture. Guided by this metaphor, Herkenhoff used anthropophagy as a method to display international art from a national standpoint in the exhibition Historical Nucleus. Contrasting Herkenhoff’s 1998 diagram intended to inform Historical Nucleus’s multiple exhibits with the famous map of the history of modern art made by Alfred Barr, MoMA’s first director, in 1936, this article demonstrates that the two diagrams are aesthetically and politically similar in their intention to create new models of art history. Yet despite Herkenhoff’s intention to set the epistemological grounds for a new, post-colonial art narrative coming from the South, the article argues, his cannibalization of Barr’s radial structure ultimately had questionable results. Nonetheless, by weaving a transhistorical and cross-cultural narrative in the show based on the curatorial strategy he termed “contamination,” the 24th São Paulo Biennial demonstrated that other art historical narratives were possible and necessary.

Framing Latin American Art: Artists, Critics, Institutions and the Configuration of a Regional Identity

… 1960-1970 Instituição: PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO-PUC-RIO Autor (es): CAMILA SANTORO MAROJA Colaborador (es): CECILIA …

maxwell.lambda.ele.puc-rio.br

Resumo: Rejeitando a noção de uma produção artística pautada em uma linearidade, o trabalho de Ro... more

Contemporary Black Atlantic Panel at Duke

The Global Brazil Humanities Lab at the Franklin Humanities Center is hosting this April 8, 2015 ... more