The MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, on the occasion of the bicentennial of the independence of Brazil, exhibits the group show “Histórias Brasileiras”. It occupies the 1st floor and 1st and 2nd basements of the institution. The exhibition is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, guest curator, and others such as Tomás Toledo, Clarissa Diniz and Sandra Benite. In addition, several curators from the institution: Amanda Carneiro (assistant curator), André Mesquita (curator), Fernando Oliva (curator), Glaucea Britto (assistant curator), Guilherme Giufrida (assistant curator) and Isabella Rjeille (curator).
Continuing the exhibitions dedicated to stories at MASP, which have been taking place since 2016, with Childhood Stories (2016), Sexuality Stories (2017), Afro-Atlantic Stories (2018), Women's Stories, Feminist Stories (2019) and Stories from dance (2020), the new show of this series offers new, more inclusive, diverse and plural visual narratives about the history of Brazil.
Following the model of the exhibitions dedicated to different narratives, the show is not guided by chronologically organized nuclei, but by themes, including Maps and flags, Landscapes and tropics, Land and territory, Returns, Rebellions and revolts, Religions, Feasts and Portraits, composed by works from different media, supports, typologies, origins, regions and periods, from the 16th to the 21st century. In this context, the privileged perspective is not so much that of art history, but that of social or political, intimate or private histories, of customs and everyday life, based on visual culture. In this sense, the show also expresses a more polyphonic and fragmented character, fleeing from a definitive, canonical or totalizing vision.
In order to understand the exhibition, it is important to emphasize the particular meaning of “stories” in Portuguese, which encompasses both fiction and non-fiction, historical and personal accounts, of a public and private nature, and therefore have a more speculative, open-ended quality.
Two publications will be edited by MASP on the occasion of the exhibition with approximately 400 pages each. The first is an illustrated bilingual catalog with reproductions of all the works in the show, as well as texts by the curators. The second is the anthology, aimed at both students and specialists, which brings together fundamental texts for the understanding of Brazilian histories, including texts from seminars, and presented in the same format as the anthologies that the museum publishes each year.