Sertão Negro Studio and School of Arts: a project for the future in the center of Brazil

On display at Sesc Ribeirão Preto, 31st Youth Arts Exhibition – MAJ presents works by 46 new talents in the visual arts of Brazil, selected from more than 700 entries by curators Camila Fontenele and Tiago Gualberto, on the occasion of the celebration of the 35th anniversary of the exhibition conceived by Janete Polo Melo, former sociocultural technician at the Unit who, in 1989, launched the first edition of MAJ in partnership with the Center for Communication and Arts at the University of Ribeirão Preto (UNAERP).

Showcase and agent of visibility and incentive for the production of artists aged between 15 and 30, over more than three decades, BIGGER has allowed young talents from all regions of the country to express their creativity through diverse artistic expressions, such as paintings, engravings, sculptures, interventions and performances, stirring up the artistic scene in the interior of São Paulo and broadening the discussion of socioeconomic and cultural diversity. As in previous editions, at the opening of the 31st edition, the curators will also announce the three artists who have been awarded the Incentive Prize.

Driven by the purpose of facilitating access to the world of arts and disseminating and projecting new artists to Brazil and the international scene, the collective exhibition at Sesc Ribeirão Preto contributed to the revelation of important names in the visual arts, such as Jaime Lauriano, Marcelo Moschetta, Cordeiro de Sá, Beta Ricci, Felipe Góes, Fabricio Sicardi, Renata Lucas, Nilton Campos, Sofia Borges and Renato Rebouças, as well as artists nominated for the PIPA Prize, such as Carla Chaim (2016), Talles Lopes (2022 and 2024) and Vulcanica Pokaropa (2024), among others.

With over 600 talents presented to the public over the course of 35 years, the 31st edition of MAJ features a panel of ethnic diversity that includes white, mixed-race, black, Asian and indigenous people. In this edition, the artists selected by the curators come from nine states in Brazil – São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, Paraná, Pernambuco, Pará, Minas Gerais and Amazonas – and the Federal District.

Check out the complete list of artists present at the 31st MAJ below:

Abner Sigemi – Amauri – Anna Livia Taborda – Barbara Savannah – Bruno Benedicto – Cho – Cicero Costa – Diego Rocha – Diez – Donatinnho – Estela Camillo – Felipe Rezende – Giovanna Camargo – Gu da Cei – Gustavo Ferreira – Hanatsuki – Isabela Picheth – Isabella Motta – Isabelle Baiocco – Italo Carajás – Janaina Vieira – Juniara Albuquerque – Kaori – Kelly Pires – Kuenan Tikuna – Leid Ane – Lorre Motta – Lucas BRACO – Lucas Gusmão – Lucas Soares – Luiza Poeiras – Mar Yamanoi – Mariana Simões – MAVINUS – Murillo Marques – Nat Rocha – Nike Krepischi – O Tal do Ale – Okarib – Pedro Mishima – Rayane Gomes – Samuel Cunha – Sophia Zorzi – Vitor Alves – Yan Nicholas – Yanaki Herrera

Curatorial process

In the exhibition's curatorial text, prepared based on reflections recorded in a long dialogue between Camila Fontenele and Tiago Gualberto, one concern guided the process developed by them from September 2023 onwards: the complexity of selecting a selection from a significant number of artists aspiring to exhibit their work at the 31st MAJ.

“When observing the 722 entries – which went through three selection phases, initially 114, then 72, until we reached the 46 selected people – I notice the fluid and coherent way in which these works mutually strengthen each other, while also generating tensions and contrasts”, says Camila.

“As important as recognizing the merit of the outstanding research by this group of 722 artists to whom we dedicate ourselves is understanding the formative and educational role built over the dozens of editions of the MAJ. In other words, the gesture of awarding a representative group of this young art should not be separated from the gesture of listening and offering conditions for improvement to the other artists not selected. In curatorial terms, the hundreds of non-selected research projects served as a great chorus of voices to guide us in identifying topics, agendas, social, political and aesthetic demands,” concludes Gualberto.

Opening to the public at 19:30 p.m. on December 5th, at Sesc Ribeirão Preto, the 31st Youth Arts Exhibition – MAJ can then be visited during the unit's normal opening hours: Tuesday to Friday, from 13:30 p.m. to 21:31 p.m.; Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, from 9:30 a.m. to 18 p.m. With free admission, the exhibition will be on display until June 8th, 2025.

Service

O Sesc Vila Mariana receives the unprecedented exhibition MAM Garden at Sesc, a co-production of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo and Sesc São Paulo. The exhibition is curated by Cauê Alves and Gabriela Gotoda and re-enacts elements of the MAM Sculpture Garden at the entrance to Sesc Vila Mariana. In it, the public will be able to appreciate works from the MAM collection, including iconic sculptures by Alfredo Ceschiatti, Amilcar de Castro and Emanoel Araújo, and works that explore social criticism, such as works by Regina Silveira, Luiz 83 and Marepe.

For MAM president Elizabeth Machado, the partnership with Sesc reinforces the museum’s commitment to expanding access to art: “The MAM collection is a living heritage, and this exhibition at Sesc Vila Mariana allows an even wider audience to come into contact with fundamental works of our history, promoting encounter and reflection on Brazilian art. Sesc is a long-standing partner of MAM, and this collaboration reaffirms our joint mission to expand access to culture.”

The artists participating in the exhibition are Alfredo Ceschiatti, Amílcar de Castro, Bruno Giorgi, Eliane Prolik, Emanoel Araujo, Felicia Leirner, Haroldo Barroso, Hisao Ohara, Ivens Machado, Luiz83, Marepe, Mari Yoshimoto, Márcia Pastore, Mario Agostinelli, Nicolas Vlavianos, Regina Silveira, Roberto Moriconi, Rubens Mano and Ottone Zorlino.

The selection of works includes pieces that have already been part of the MAM Garden, as well as works from the museum's collection that discuss themes such as nature, the city and materiality. The installation at Sesc Vila Mariana recreates the dynamics of the Sculpture Garden, using scenographic elements that evoke the winding topography of Ibirapuera Park designed by the office of the iconic landscape architect Burle Marx, stimulating new interactions between body, space and art.

Opened in 1993, the MAM Sculpture Garden is an initiative that revived the museum’s collection in its own free space with a large circulation of people. “By proposing a kind of reenactment of the MAM Garden in the External Square of Sesc Vila Mariana, we sought to develop the idea that, just like the garden space in Ibirapuera Park, the Sesc space functions as a center for urban encounters,” says Cauê Alves. “The exhibition includes works from the MAM collection that relate, in different ways, to nature, the body, the city, materiality, and to languages ​​that express some of the inescapable tensions in society,” adds the curator.

The proposal for the MAM Garden exhibition at Sesc Vila Mariana is to stimulate this relationship between bodies, works and space, transforming the unit's External Square into a territory for circulation, experimentation and discovery. Without intending to emulate the park's landscaping, the project's scenography recreates the curves and volumes that mark the original garden, proposing a spatial rhythm between the sculptures. For Gabriela Gotoda, curator of the exhibition alongside Cauê Alves: “If the most original and authentic principle of modern art is that it is close to life, a museum that is dedicated to collecting it and updating it in its present time must continually strive to offer its audiences possibilities of enjoyment that do not distance them from their realities, but rather meet them.”

Educational MAM

During the exhibition period, the public will be able to participate free of charge in educational activities promoted by MAM Educativo, which develops programs and projects in dialogue with its audiences, through accessible and free programming that seeks to equalize opportunities and reduce physical, sensory, intellectual, social or mental health barriers.

Inspired by the experiments carried out in the museum's Sculpture Garden in Ibirapuera Park, part of MAM Educativo's May activities will be adapted to the Sesc Vila Mariana space, proposing different forms of interaction between bodies, works and the exhibition environment. Aimed at audiences of all ages and profiles, the activities will seek to stimulate new ways of looking at, inhabiting and reflecting on urban space through art.

The activities will be divided into programs. “Contacts with art” promotes the cultural education of teachers, educators, researchers and university students, encouraging their role as multipliers of different artistic expressions and pedagogical approaches based on diverse creative processes. “MAM Family” promotes the encounter of the museum’s artistic universe with childhood cultures, through storytelling, games, artistic workshops, guided tours followed by poetry experiences, among other activities. “MAM Sunday” includes activities that invite the public to experience different artistic languages ​​based on thematic axes that encompass dance, music, popular culture, street culture, debates and plastic arts workshops.

There is also the “Visiting Program”, which caters to all types of audiences and encourages access to art and culture through the exercise of critical thinking. The program includes guided tours, poetic experiences and a relationship program with partner schools. Guided tours with MAM Educativo are conversations in which critical reflection is encouraged through art and poetic experiences, which bring the museum’s public closer to artistic experiences and processes. Groups can schedule visits to the MAM Garden exhibition at Sesc by email at educativo@mam.org.br.

The program also includes activities that are part of the National Museum Week – an initiative of the Brazilian Institute of Museums (Ibram) in celebration of International Museum Day (May 18) and which, in 2025, will take place from May 12 to 18 under the theme “The Future of Museums in Rapidly Transforming Communities” – and the World Play Week – an action promoted by the Alliance for Childhood that invites society to value play and the importance of childhood and which, in 2025, will have the theme “Protecting the Enchantment of Childhood” and will take place from May 24 to June 1.

Service
Exhibition | MAM Garden at Sesc
From the 14th of May to the 31rd of August
Tuesday to Friday, from 7am to 21:30pm, Saturdays, from 10am to 20:30pm, and Sundays and holidays, from 10am to 18pm

Monologue is the name given to a speech made by only one person or character, without interaction with other participants and in an uninterrupted manner, with the aim of expressing their thoughts and feelings silently or out loud. Both to themselves, to the audience, to others. I believe that this is how the artist, the creator acts. A soliloquy, in their corner, in their Kant, thinking, reflecting and executing their work. It is no coincidence that the origin of the word comes from theater and its etymology, from Greek, means “solitary”, “alone”. The stage of the writer, perhaps one of the most solitary professions, is the blank sheet of paper, the paper and finally the reader; the stage of the visual artist is both the support of their production in the most varied materials, as well as the audience that observes their work in the “white cube” of the gallery, in the institutional space or in the public.
 
"inner monologue” is a curation that embraces visual arts and literature in a conversation, in a dialogue crossed by fictions and frictions. And it brings together around 45 works by 18 artists to celebrate the centenary of “Mrs. Dalloway”, one of the most important books in 20th century literature, written by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), a pioneering author in the field of feminist criticism, and whose work focuses on the daily experiences of women in the patriarchal society that persists to this day, challenging the norms established in the historical-social context in which she lived. One of her most important books is the axis, the gravitational center around which the works of artists from eight states in Brazil, and of a late Lebanese artist who settled in the country, orbit. They are drawings, sculptures, photographs, installations, objects, paintings and videos that, in some way, seek to establish this journey into the particular infinite not only of the writer honored, but also, and mainly, of each of the artists present here.

Service
Exhibition | inner monologue
From May 22nd to June 21st
Tuesday to Friday, 10am to 19pm, Saturday, 10am to 18pm

We are pleased to announce SPECTRUM, individual exhibition of Siwaju in Building 11 of A Gentil Carioca, in Rio de Janeiro. The artist's sculptural practice investigates the relationships between time and diverse ecologies. Based on the reuse of steel pieces — donated, collected and recycled during frequent visits to recycling centers — her works establish a direct link with Brazilian three-dimensional thought. Her sculptures articulate matter and Cosmos, visible and invisible energies, object and surroundings, sculptural body and space, organizing themselves in a spiral temporality, in a constant flow of expansion and retrospection, which activates Afro-diasporic knowledge.

“Interconnected ‘families of works’ unfold throughout the space, each with its own grammar and gestures, but all intersected by the desire to create zones of interference where past and future, beauty and liberation coexist in creative tension. Like a 21st-century blacksmith, Siwaju does not shape steel, but negotiates with its specters: the welds are born as seams between times, the polished surfaces return disobedient reflections, the whispers of matter, suggests the artist, lead us to escape from industrial logic.” — points out the curator Nathalia Grilo, author of the exhibition's presentation text, which is on display until August 9, 2025.

Service
Exhibition | Spectrum
From May 24th to August 09th
Monday to Friday, from 12 am to 18 pm
Saturday, from 12pm to 16pm (with prior appointment)

Gentil Carioca is pleased to announce The sea has always been, solo exhibition by the artist Mariana Rocha in building 17 of A Gentil Carioca Rio de Janeiro. Inspired by the vastness of the sea and the mysteries of microscopic life, Rocha delves into a universe where the boundaries between science, myth and art dissolve. The exhibition brings together previously unseen paintings that move between figuration and abstraction, evoking organic forms such as roots, eyelashes, arms and membranes — elements that unfold as symbols of the origin and continuity of life.

In the words of the art historian and curator Renato Menezes, who wrote the text introducing the exhibition, “Mariana Rocha cheats on scale and, thus, painting itself seems to become, for the artist, a means of re-equating the essential minimums of life. Particle and whole, cell and organism, drop and ocean renegotiate their orders of magnitude right before our eyes. It is no coincidence that her research focuses on the sea: it was there, in this immense and profound vastness, that the simplest forms of life began to appear. But, as always, the minimum is also the maximum: baroque, dramatic, mysterious and vibrant, her painting metabolizes the world, to see, from its most intimate, obscure part, what is most superficial that it can reveal.”

Service
Exhibition | The sea has always been
From May 24th to August 09th
Monday to Friday, from 12 am to 18 pm
Saturday, from 12pm to 16pm (with prior appointment)

Inspired by the work of Dorothea Tanning, shows a new stage in the exhibition space Attachments , another step in the gallery owner's avant-garde trajectory Marilia Razuk, in operation for over three decades

A Marilia Razuk Gallery, inaugurates a program of projects for its space located at number 62 on Rua Jerônimo da Veiga, which will now be called Anexo Galeria Marilia Razuk. To mark this new phase, Razuk hosts the exhibition “Dining room”, with the proposal of exhibiting works in a context that refers to the environment that gives it its name.

Referring to the work Hôtel du Pavot, Room 202 (1970-1973), by American artist and poet linked to Surrealism Dorothea Tanning, art consultant Cristina Tolovi and curator Luana Fortes conceived the exhibition by approaching the veiled aspects of domestic spaces. They present works by artists and designers, not clinging to separations between these two spheres of creation. As Tolovi explains: “The proposal is an exhibition in which different languages ​​dialogue, through a blurring of boundaries between design and visual arts.”

Luana Fortes highlights: “The exhibition is born from the work of artisans-artists-creators-designers that form a set of different languages ​​and forms of expression, seeking to destabilize what is understood as a work of art and object, preserving tensions within the artistic system itself and also within relationships outside it.”

Unlike what comes to mind when you hear the words “Dining Room”, the exhibition aims, like Tanning’s work, to present this “ambivalence, this ‘discomfort’ generated by the separation between what is alive and what seems immobile”, in the words of Luana, who continues: “Thus, the exhibition brings together artists from different trajectories and forms of expression to compose an environment that refers to a space prepared for encounter, but also traversed by tensions and gestures of control.”

Gallerist Marilia Razuk agrees and adds: “With this exhibition, we seek to open doors to new ideas, formats and curatorial narratives. We want to bring a fresh perspective, without the vices that are normally acquired over the years, as well as welcome experimental practices and innovative perspectives.”

Fernanda Pompermayer's work is among the highlights of the exhibition. 'Cosmic Ads', a new work by the artist from Curitiba, presents unusual forms through the transformation and combination of different materials, including glazed ceramics, glass, resin, gold and mother-of-pearl. Another important name in the exhibition is the visual artist Daniel Jorge, who exhibits works such as 'Ancestral'. His research focuses on the sense of belonging and new images of identity by working with materials that are fundamental to the Afro-diasporic imagination, such as soapstone.

The painting “No Return to Paradise” marks Giulia Bianchi’s presence in “Dining Room”. The artist has been developing strategies that allow us to investigate new possibilities of perception that go beyond the obvious, altering the visual scale, whether due to the lines and textures implicit in her paintings or due to the synesthesia they provoke. Ana Dias Batista, in turn, brings to the exhibition works such as “The Egg and the Shell”. Ana Dias Batista’s artistic practice often involves the appropriation of everyday objects, rearranging them in a way that questions their original functions and provokes new interpretations.

Service
Exhibition | Dining room
From May 27th to July 26th
Monday to Friday from 10:19 to 11:15, Saturday from XNUMX:XNUMX to XNUMX:XNUMX

Porto Alegre breathes art with its most important festival. 14th Mercosur Biennial occupies spaces and streets and gains new airs, images and textures in the Historic Center with the inauguration of the exhibition “Poetics of the Thread – Our Plots” this Saturday, May 24, from 14 pm to 16:30 pm at Galeria Duque. The exhibition is part of the Project “Doors to Art” of the Biennale, which also occupies Rua Duque de Caxias in front of the gallery with the installation “Art Connects”. The curation is by Daisy Viola and the exhibition will remain in the space until July 12th. Free entry.

The Duque Gallery also offers an immersion into the works of great Brazilian masters with one of the most complete collections in the state. In the “Poetics of Here” exhibition, it is possible to see works by names such as Iberê Camargo, Carlos Scliar, Carlos Vergara, Di Cavalcanti, Leopoldo Gotuzzo, Danúbio Gonçalves, Cândido Portinari, Siron Franco, Burle Marx, Anita Malfatti, Ruth Schneider, Maria Lídia Magliani, Frans Krajcberg, Alice Soares, Márcia Marostega, Nelson Jungbluth, Tarsila do Amaral, Gelson Radaelli, Antonio Bandeira, Oscar Crusius, Fernando Baril, Glênio Bianchetti, Glauco Rodrigues, João Luiz Roth, Ione Saldanha, among others.

The exhibition “Poéticas do Fio – Tramas Nossas” presents works by four artists who use yarn and/or fabric as a support or means of expression for their work: Daisy Viola, Fernando da Luz, Fernando Lima and Rosane Morais. “The use of yarn and fabric in artistic creation engages with social and cultural issues through the choice of materials and techniques, such as sewing, embroidery, crochet or knitting, which are part of the life stories of many of us, of memories, especially female ones, of our grandmothers and mothers. Thus, the use of traditional craft techniques ends up being a meeting point between tradition and contemporaneity”, explains curator Daisy Viola.

Those who pass by Rua Duque de Caxias will have another type of contact with art, but one that also involves threads and weaves. It is the installation “Arte Conecta”, produced by artists Roberto Freitas, Adriana Leiria and Ronaldo Mohr. The work took two months to be assembled and displays 50 meters of recycled material, including items such as upholstery and PET, in an artistic manifestation that connects to Galeria Duque on the other side of the street and that proves that art is democratic and can be present in the most diverse spaces.

Service
Exhibition | Poetics From Here
From May 24th to July 12th
Monday to Friday, 10:18 am to 10:17 pm, Saturdays, XNUMX:XNUMX am to XNUMX:XNUMX pm