O Museum of Modern Art in Rio – MAM Rio launched the program Collectors Club in solidarity action. The project allocates half of the amount raised from the sale of works to the maintenance of the museum, to support art, education and community development actions.. The other half will go to two important social action projects in Rio de Janeiro: Snack Bar<> Snack Bar (Small Africa - Gamboa, RJ) and Bela Tide Shed (Tide, RJ).
O Collectors Club MAM Rio was created in 2004 as a way of democratizing and popularizing art by encouraging the formation of new collections. In each edition, five artists are invited by the Museum's Visual Arts Curator to develop works in multiple format. The result is a set that highlights the artistic possibilities of contemporary Brazilian production.
For edition #6 of the program, held in 2019, artists were invited: Anna Bella Geiger, Daniel Senise, Marcelo Cidade, Maxwell Alexandre and Denilson Baniwa, whose work illustrates the cover of our issue #50. The 50 sets of multiples remaining from this edition make up the solidarity action of MAM Rio. In recognition of project support, buyers receive one year of program membership MAM friends, which offers exclusive benefits such as free admission to MAM Rio and SP and a series of discounts. It is worth remembering that the museum is undergoing institutional revitalization and has been adapting its activities to the web during the pandemic.
50% of the funds raised will be directed to the Snack Bar<> Snack Bar (Pequena África – Gamboa, RJ) and Galpão Bela Maré (Maré, RJ). Lanchonete<>Lanchonete is a community kitchen and collective work mobilized by the artist Thelma Vilas Boas since 2015. Galpão Bela Maré is part of the Observatório de Favelas, an organization that includes culture as part of overcoming social inequalities, operating in Maré since 2001. Both work strongly in the development of their communities and networks of artists in vulnerable regions of the capital of Rio de Janeiro.
The constructions
Each author sent a description of their work to MAM Rio to share their inspirations and even explore a detail of the work. Check out the works and words of each artist below:
Maxwell Alexander: “Something related to the series Reprovados (2018) came to my mind, about the municipal school system in Rio de Janeiro. The idea of multiples could refer to the number of students in a class, a courtyard, or a school bus… So I chose the public school shirt and brown paper as a support, syntheses of the Reprovados and Pardo é Papel series (2018), respectively. School shirts serve to standardize/standardize, but dress individuals. Painting 100 shirts one by one, by hand, was an honest way to cross these two premises. The only matrix used in the process was my memory, from the idealized object to the gesture”.
Denilson Baniwa: “At the beginning of the world there was the great Snake-Canoe-of-Transformation and it was she who took all the first humans on board in her womb to the places where they live to this day. This great serpent that came from the sky in the form of lightning and lightning is called Pamurĩ Yuhkusiru. In the city amid concrete and iron, transiting underground daily and with its belly crammed with countless diversity of identities, it takes today's humans to their places, to this large metal snake and LED eyes I call Metro-Pamurĩ-Mahsã (Cobra – Canoe-da-Gente-metropolitana)”.
Daniel Senise: “When I was a child, my father, an aviator, used to photograph his travels. His collection of negatives is kept with me and a good part of it is cloud. The work I proposed for Clube dos Colecionadores uses one of these clouds as a central element: a moment in the sky of northern or northeastern Brazil 60 years ago, now reframed by me”.
Marcelo City: “What I propose is a collaborative work between the museum and myself, resulting in a social contract. evidencing this exchange as part of the work. In the document, the museum commits to using its institutional importance to negotiate the withdrawal from circulation of 100 firearms triggers that were seized by the Rio police. The triggers of these weapons would be donated (acquired) to the museum, and would integrate, along with the contract, the multiple that collectors will receive. The key to the work is the fact that a gun without a trigger does not work, and the intention of the work will be to try to break with the armamentist logic by literally dismantling 100 guns”.
Anna Bella Geiger: “The sequence of the four women pronouncing the word BU-RO-CRA-CIA appeared in 1974 as one of the “subjects” for one of the pages of my artist booklet entitled Sobre a Arte . It's a reference to a 1930s ad for a glitter product in which four female faces syllabically pronounce the brand's name. The other six pages of the small notebook contain the words IDEOLOGY, ADVENTUREISM, and Dependent/Dominant CURRENTS, among other controversial issues at the time. Still in 1974, I moved the design of 'Bureaucracy' to metal engraving and painting, purposefully keeping a certain style of popular poster in which the words do not have a graphic pattern of 'quality'”.
Solidarity action runs until June 30, 2020.