“Histórias Latino-americanas”

A recent survey co-authored by researchers from the University of São Paulo found that only 4 percent of Brazilian respondents selected Latin American as their main civic identity—80 percent identified first and foremost as Brazilian, while 11 percent saw themselves as “citizens of the world.”1 Those figures were on my mind as I entered the new MASP building, the Pietro Maria Bardi. The entrance hall of this vertical black block, which resembles the monolith from Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, leads to the official shop, where you will find for sale a tote bag bearing the slogan “Soy Latino” (I Am Latino). Later on in “Histórias Latino-americanas,” a group show featuring 148 artists of which 41 were born in Brazil, I encounter Em 2050 descobrimos: Brasil é América Latina by Randolpho Lamonier. The embroidered textile piece displays the titular phrase (“In 2050 We Discover: Brazil Is Latin America”) and is part of a series aptly titled “Prophecies” (2018).

“These are Latin American histories told from Brazil,” co-curator Amanda Carneiro tells me in the exhibition hall. I agree with her: telling these stories (histórias in Portuguese refers both to stories and histories) is necessary here and now. The problem is how to foster a broader regional sense of Latin American rather than nationalistic identity when the histories being told—as Adriano Pedrosa, the director of MASP himself, states in the catalog—are speculative, fragmentary, and even contradictory, not least for that 4 percent of “Latin American Brazilians.”

“Histórias Latino-americanas” is divided into five chapters, each occupying a separate floor of the monolith, which allows each gallery to be understood as an exhibition independent of the whole. The arrangement is thematic rather than chronological.2 Irregular walls inspired by Hélio Oiticica’s “Metaesquemas” painting series of disrupted modernist grids (1956–58) divide the spaces, fostering dialogs among groupings of seven or eight works. The big question is: Does another exhibition dedicated to Latin American art make sense, given the boom in such ventures—a trend that seemed to have run its course a decade ago due to the difficulty of encompassing a vast region’s creative output in a single show?

The first chapter, “O mundo ao revés,” is the most thematically successful. The curatorial thesis rests on the idea that Latin American contemporary art inverts the way European art was imposed following the Conquest. Indeed, while we have heard this story/history before, it makes sense to tell it again in the context of a museum housing the region’s finest collection of European art, and in a country that can seem more interested in the Anglo-Saxon world than in the output of its immediate neighbors. For her 2023 work El mundo al revés I, Sandra Gamarra covered with iron oxide a recreation of an encyclopedic Spanish colonial-era painting that represents spatial planning. She titles the piece in reference to Amerindian chronicler Guamán Poma de Ayala, who in his 1200-page account of Peruvian history from the rise of the Incan empire to the horrors of Spanish colonization, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, completed around 1615, positioned Spain beneath the Andes, both graphically and through the phrase “Castile beneath the Indies.”

The works included in this chapter address the power of images to indoctrinate and acculturate; in some cases, they challenge it. The tapestry O indígena caçador from the “Pequenas Índias” series (1723–30), produced by the Gobelins Manufactory in Paris, depicts the exuberant flora and fauna of the New World as described by colonizers. Unsettling shadows of flies appear across its woven surface. Positioned a few meters in front of the work is Vivian Caccuri’s Mosquito Shrine (2018): figures woven onto mosquito netting allude to the deadly diseases brought by the conquistadors. The work features silhouettes of mosquitoes alongside other figures, such as the Three Graces; their subtle juxtaposition creates one of the most brilliant moments of Carneiro and Julieta González’s curation.

In the next four chapters, the range of topics is so wide as to confuse the sense of unity. “Retórica do progresso” focuses on issues familiar from earlier exhibitions addressing Latin American history: urban development, modernist utopias, colonial cartography, and social imbalances. It features works that update these narratives and link them to contemporary issues such as urban insecurity, seen in the shattered glass of Marcelo Cidade’s Intramuros (2005), and precarious Brazilian constructive solutions, as in the handmade roofing system in Gabriel Sierra’s Telhado Rebelde (2025). “Sociedades americanas”3 mixes too many issues—education, the rural world, feminisms, religion, indigeneity, migration, and racism—while “Estamos em salsa” is dedicated to economics, advertising, and assimilation of influences. The thematic sections conclude with “A queda do céu,” the exhibition’s most open (and least cluttered) space, which is dedicated to the dream world, Indigenous cosmologies, and visions of the future. Here we find the aforementioned work by Randolpho Lamonier.

“We are deconstructing histories that were never fully constructed,” stated art historian Ivonne Pini while analyzing the exhibition “F(r)icciones,” curated by Ivo Mesquita and Pedrosa.4 We have moved from Latin American frictions back to the fiction of Latin America, a concept explored in a chapter of the exhibition catalog. While the exhibition may not break new ground discursively or conceptually, it does highlight young and mid-career artists from Latin America who have gained international acclaim—MASP’s recent acquisitions of their work fill gaps in the museum’s collection—and underscores the importance of reinforcing the Latin American identity against the rising nationalism in a country suffering from myopia.