Curatorial Walkthrough and Discussion - American Folk Art Museum

On Thursday, May 15, GradFUTURES will organize a visit to the exhibition Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets at the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) in New York City.

Attendees will be responsible for getting to and from the museum on their own. The museum is across the street from Lincoln Center — right in front of the 66th Street stop off the 1 train. There is construction on the block, so the museum is currently under scaffolding. 

Please meet in the lobby of the American Folk Art Museum at 4:30PM so the tour can begin promptly at 4:45. The tour should conclude by 5:50. 

 The visit will include a tour with AFAM curator Valérie Rousseau and Dylan Blau Edelstein, PhD Candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department, who joined the exhibition’s curatorial team with the support of a GradFUTURES social impact fellowship.

Featuring 42 textile works and oil paintings, the exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Madalena Santos Reinbolt’s art ever presented and marks the first-ever solo museum exhibition for the artist organized outside her native Brazil. Best known for her large-scale embroideries made from hundreds of vibrant colored threads, which the artist referred to as quadros de lã (“wool paintings”), the exhibition represents more than half of all known works by the artist and examines the artist’s work through a variety of lenses, including gender, race, and socio-economic dynamics.

"A Head Full of Planets" explores the context in which Santos Reinbolt’s artistic practice crystallized in the early 1950s, after she became a live-in cook for the architect Lota de Macedo Soares and her partner, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, at their home in Petrópolis, a mountain getaway favored by Brazilian high society. It was not until the mid-1960s, while working in another household, that she began to dedicate herself to embroidery and would begin creating many of the works for which she is best known today.

This landmark exhibition originally debuted in fall 2022 at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), where it was curated by Amanda Carneiro and André Mesquita. To honor and give voice to Santos Reinbolt, the exhibition includes recordings of Santos Reinbolt’s interviews with anthropologist and art critic Lélia Coelho Frota performed by Luana Reis — a poet and lecture in Princeton’s Spanish and Portuguese Department — who, like Santos Reinbolt, was born and raised in Bahia, Brazil.

Dylan, whose research at Princeton explores marginalized sites of modernist artistic and literary production, worked closely with curator Valérie Rousseau to conceive of many elements of the exhibition's New York iteration, helping to contextualize the artist for an American public. He also conducted on-the-ground research in Brazil last summer that helped uncover new information about Santos Reinbolt’s artistic practice and biography, including new dates of birth and death.

Dylan spoke about the artist and his research for the exhibition on a recent episode of the Portuguese-language podcast Rádio Novelo Apresenta: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4aUuRtH7CiUGZCOhhZ3s4N?si=lBk_CvnISkS0Bs_BuMr9Zw