Indigenous art conquers Brazilian museums

Kássia Borges Karajá, 60, is a ceramicist and art curator who, as is the custom among indigenous Brazilians, uses the name of her ethnic group as her last name.

The Karajá live around the Araguaia River, well into the interior of Brazil.

The surprise of finding works of indigenous art in a museum was such that she perfectly remembers that first time.

It was almost two decades ago, 10,000 kilometers from home, in cold Copenhagen, Denmark.

They were pieces created by natives from lands located 14,000 kilometers further east, by Australian Aboriginal artists.

It was quite a shocking, exotic cocktail.

Karajá revisits that memory of hers during an interview at MASP (the Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo) after her recent appointment as indigenous art curator of this cultural center, one of the main ones in Brazil.

The trio's appointment reflects the growing strength and relevance of indigenous art in Brazil's museums, galleries and fairs.

The last São Paulo Biennial, held last year, took special care to invite them and give them a leading role.

Exhibitions that incorporate his gaze follow one another.

Museums incorporate works into their collections.

“I don't know if it's a trend, but Brazil couldn't be left behind, you know?” says the new indigenous art curator, who recalls the paradox that the Tate Gallery in London created the position before a country like Brazil.

“When I started, in 1980, as an indigenous artist I had no value.

So you were an artist or you weren't”.

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The artistic director of MASP, Adriano Pedrosa, explains on the phone that "indigenous art and culture are an essential part of Brazilian culture, but for a long time they were not given the attention they required."

He arrived eight years ago at what was considered by many to be a European art museum because of the collection, created from works by Goya, El Greco, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh... with the mission of turning it into a cultural institution." diverse, inclusive and plural”.

The permanent collection was expanded and reorganized so that the main room of the museum, designed by the architect Lina Bo Bardi, welcomes visitors with contemporary pieces from a much more diverse range of artists, including women, blacks, indigenous people... and concludes in the classic European men.

The MASP, with an eye on the fact that its programming for next year will be dedicated to Indigenous Stories, has signed up Karajá, the writer and professor Edson Kayapó, who belongs to the Mebengokré of Amazonia, and the journalist and screenwriter Renata Tupinambá, from homonymous town.

They take over from a first indigenous commissioner, appointed two years ago, who broke with the art gallery after a disagreement that the polarized political climate turned into bitter controversy.

Kássia Borges, a member of the Karajá people from the central region of Brazil, is an artist, researcher, curator and professor at the Federal University of Uberlândia.Lela Beltrão

The curator Karajá considers that this growing presence in rooms and galleries "speaks about the indigenous question, which Brazil has not recognized for a long time, about the invasion" five centuries ago.

That the gaze of her family enters the great museums means, according to her, "the reconquest of a space, of a territory" from which they were excluded for centuries by the conquerors and their heirs.

She aspires to bring together village and urban artists, contemporary pieces and millennial art.

Although foreigners and a large part of their compatriots consider the indigenous Brazilians as if they were a whole, the truth is that they are a small minority but still maintain enormous diversity and cultural richness.

The natives are only a small part of Brazilians, some 900,000 people, or 0.5% of the population, but they belong to 156 different peoples —from the Yanomami, who number in the thousands, to the Piripkura, who number three— and they speak about 160 languages.

More than half live in villages scattered across a vast territory that covers 12% of Brazil, the rest in cities.

Karajá lives in Uberlandia (Mato Grosso), at whose university she also teaches.

And what does the art created by different peoples have in common?

Karajá hesitates a bit before saying: “Perhaps what unites us all a bit is myths and cosmology.

That relationship with nature, with the environment.

All the indigenous people are protectors of the jungle”.

He says that in his language the word art does not exist.

“Sometimes it is difficult for them to be understood because our aesthetic manifestations are part of the day to day, of everyday life.

For example, we make a pot that is used for cooking but has aesthetic value, it has its paint…”.

And he tells the case of the potters from Mocambo, who live hidden in an area deep in the interior of the Amazon.

Visiting them from Manaus requires a first journey of 24 hours, another of five hours and then a motor boat.

“I would be a ceramist anywhere, but it is that place that makes them ceramists”, he insists.

Now their husbands help them because they have no other job, but before it was an exclusively female activity.

The MASP museum devised, with the help of its current artistic director, a program that each year revolves around a theme approached from different perspectives.

This is how Afro-Atlantic Stories have been happening, around Afro-Brazilians and the legacy of slavery, feminists, Brazilians, dance... 2023 will be the year of Indigenous Stories and then those of sexual diversity will arrive.

Pedrosa recalls that in these years the museum has welcomed indigenous art in its rooms in individual or collective exhibitions.

But now it goes a step further.

It is about maintaining a more fluid dialogue with these compatriots.

The trio of curators of indigenous art joins the fortnight that the museum already has.

For Karajá, the fact that it is a collective curatorship is most appropriate, given that it is how everything works in the lives of those who inhabit the indigenous universe.