MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, on the occasion of the bicentennial of the independence of Brazil, exhibits until October 30th, 2022, the group exhibition Brazilian Histories, occupying the 1st floor and 2nd basement floor of the institution. The exhibition has curatorial direction by Adriano Pedrosa, MASP artistic director, and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, guest curator, and curatorship by Tomás Toledo, Clarissa Diniz, and Sandra Benites, in addition to several other 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. During the exhibit period, all Tuesdays and Thursdays will have free admission.

Continuing the series of exhibitions dedicated to Histories at MASP, which have been running since 2016 with Histories of Childhood (2016), Histories of Sexuality (2017), Afro-Atlantic Histories (2018), Women’s Histories, Feminist Histories (2019), and Histories of Dance (2020), the exhibition Brazilian Histories offers new, more inclusive, diverse, and plural visual narratives about the history of Brazil, reflecting the very approach of the series, bringing a diversity of voices not only in the body of artists and works, but also in its curatorial structure.

The show brings together some 380 works – 24 of them previously unseen – by approximately 250 artists and collectives that cover different media, supports, typologies, origins, regions, and periods, organized into eight thematic sections: Flags and Maps, Landscapes and Tropics, Land and Territory, Resumptions, Portraits, Rebellions and Uprisings, Myths and Rites, and Celebrations. In this context, the privileged perspective is not so much that of art history, but rather social or political histories, whether intimate or private, regarding customs and daily life, starting from visual culture and expressing a more polyphonic and fragmented character, and thus escaping from a definitive, canonical, and totalizing vision.

To understand the exhibition, it is important to emphasize the particular meaning of the term ‘history’ in Portuguese, which encompasses both fiction and non-fiction, historical and personal accounts, of both public and private nature, and which therefore have a more speculative, open-ended, and procedural quality than the traditional notion of history.