Tomás Toledo – författare

A colossal, panoramic, much-needed appraisal of the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic territories across six centuriesPublished with Museu de Arte de São Paulo.Named one of the best books of 2021 by ArtforumAfro-Atlantic Histories brings together a selection of more than 400 works and documents by more than 200 artists from the 16th to the 21st centuries that express and analyze the ebbs and flows between Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe. The book is motivated by the desire and need to draw parallels, frictions and dialogues around the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic territories—their experiences, creations, worshiping and philosophy. The so-called Black Atlantic, to use the term coined by Paul Gilroy, is geography lacking precise borders, a fluid field where African experiences invade and occupy other nations, territories and cultures.The plural and polyphonic quality of “histórias” is also of note; unlike the English “histories,” the word in Portuguese carries a double meaning that encompasses both fiction and nonfiction, personal, political, economic and cultural, as well as mythological narratives.The book features more than 400 works from Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean, as well as Europe, from the 16th to the 21st century. These are organized in eight thematic groupings: Maps and Margins; Emancipations; Everyday Lives; Rites and Rhythms; Routes and Trances; Portraits; Afro Atlantic Modernisms; Resistances and Activism.Artists include: Nina Chanel Abney, Emma Amos, Benny Andrews, Emanoel Araujo, Maria Auxiliadora, Romare Bearden, John Biggers, Paul Cézanne, Victoria Santa Cruz, Beauford Delaney, Aaron Douglas, Melvin Edwards, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Ben Enwonwu, Ellen Gallagher, Theodore Géricault, Barkley Hendricks, William Henry Jones, Loïs Mailou Jones, Titus Kaphar, Wifredo Lam, Norman Lewis, Ibrahim Mahama, Edna Manley, Archibald Motley, Abdias Nascimento, Gilberto de la Nuez, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Dalton Paula, Rosana Paulino, Howardena Pindell, Heitor dos Prazeres, Joshua Reynolds, Faith Ringgold, Gerard Sekoto, Alma Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Rubem Valentim, Kara Walker and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Lina Bo Bardi is regarded as one of the most important architects in Brazil’s history. Beginning her career as a Modernist architect in Rome, Bo Bardi and her husband emigrated to Brazil following the end of WWII. Bo Bardi quickly resumed her practice in her adopted homeland with architecture that was both modern and firmly rooted in the culture of Brazil. In 1951 she designed “Casa de Vidro” (“Glass House”), her first built work, where she and her husband would live for the rest of their lives. She also designed the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo Art Museum), a landmark of Latin American modernist architecture which opened in 1968. It was for this museum she created the iconic glass easel display system, which remains radical to date. This book presents a comprehensive record of Bo Bardi’s overarching approach to art and architecture and shows how her exhibition designs, curatorial projects, and writing informed her spatial designs. Essays on Bo Bardi’s life and work accompany archival material such as design sketches and writings by the artist, giving new insight into the conceptual and material processes behind this radical thinker and creator’s projects.

The debut monograph on the Brazilian fotoclubismo photographerThis is the first monograph dedicated to the work of the trailblazing German Brazilian photographer Gertrudes Altschul (1904–62). Featuring an elegant uncoated paper cover with stamped lettering, it reproduces all 70 of the artist’s known vintage prints, exploring her main themes: modern Brazilian architecture, botanical motifs and still lifes. The volume includes a selection of the artist’s archival material, such as contact sheets.Of Jewish origin, Altschul migrated in 1939 from her hometown, Berlin, to Brazil with her husband, fleeing the Nazi regime. She settled in São Paulo, where she divided her time between photography and the production of flowers for hats in a factory run by the couple. Altschul was one of the few women to be part of the well-known Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB) in São Paulo, an important group that brought together photographers aligned with modernist photography in Brazil.

A long-needed appraisal of the abstractions, mail art and conceptual work of Anna Bella Geiger, one of postwar Brazil’s unsung pioneersBrazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger (born 1933) was one of the first artists to engage in abstract art in Brazil, participating in the historic exhibition of Brazilian abstract art held in Rio de Janeiro in 1953. Since the 1970s she has also worked with video, conceptual art and mail art.Native Brazil/Alien Brazil, named after her provocative political postcard series from 1976, covers the artist’s entire seven-decade career from the 1950s to the present, providing an overview of the extraordinary scope and diversity of Geiger’s work and themes, including informal abstraction, self-portraits, maps, landscapes and equations, as well as the artist’s interest in the interior of the human body, and her critiques of art systems and analyses of political and historical issues of Brazil.

A fresh view of the acclaimed Brazilian modernist painter through the lens of arte popularItalian-Brazilian artist Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988) was a central figure of Brazilian art in the 20th century. His painting is influenced by both modern and customary traditions, including handcraft, popular parties, religious themes and the facades of Brazilian colonial and vernacular architecture.