Picture Gallery in Transformation: Women in Front
march 5 - 10, 2019
Museu de Arte de São Paulo, MASP
with Olivia Ardui, Camila Bechelany, Paula Coelho, Bianca Gonçalves, Ana Luiza Maccari, Maria Carolina Maia, Marina Moura, Nalu Maria de Medeiros, Tarsila Oliveira, Juliana Peixoto, Indrani Taccari, Erika Uehara, Cecília Winter and Juliana Ziebell
In March 2019, a group of women workers at MASP proposed an inversion in the works of the long-term exhibition, which occupies the second floor of the museum. This gesture, in addition to highlighting the production of women artists, also draws attention to the imbalance that exists between the number of male artists and the number of female artists in this exhibition, a reflection of the museum’s collection.
Acervo em transformação is MASP’s long-term exhibition featuring a selection of works from the museum’s collection. The show’s main characteristic is that it’s constantly changing with works being included and excluded as they are loaned, acquired, in a rotating display of works from the collection—thus its title. In this sense, we offer a leaflet-plan with the location of each work and the date when the last “transformation” took place.
Among the unique characteristics of this show is the use of glass easels—a radical way of exhibiting artworks conceived specially for this exhibition space by Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992), who also designed this building, inaugurated in 1968. Removing the paintings from the walls and hanging them on crystal easels atop concrete bases makes them more familiar and accessible to the public. The placement of informational labels on the back of the paintings allows for a more direct first encounter with the works, free of contextualization and information about authorship, title, and date. The crystal easels make the works appear to be suspended in mid-air, inviting the visitor to walk through a kind of forest of pictures. In this manner, visitors are able to build their own paths, creating unexpected juxtapositions and dialogues between African, Brazilian, Latin-American and European art. The open, fluid, transparent, and permeable gallery offers multiple possibilities of access and reading, eliminating hierarchies, predetermined scripts, and challenges canonical art historical narratives.
On the week of International Women’s Day—March 8—paintings by male artists will be hung on the back of the easels. This gesture, in addition to highlighting female artists’ productions, also calls attention to the existing unbalance between the number of male artists and female artists featured in the exhibition, a reflection of the museum’s collection. The American artist collective Guerrilla Girls had an exhibition at MASP in 2017 and created a poster, displayed here, highlighting this disparity and signaling the need for a response by the institution for these issues. Ongoing changes in this exhibition aim at strengthening the presence of female artists in this gallery as well. The percentage of female artists in the exhibition is constantly updated on the leaflet-plan in contraposition to the 6% observed by the Guerrilla Girls in October 2017. That effort is particularly relevant in a year when the Museum’s schedule is fully devoted to Women’s Histories and Feminist Histories.
Acervo em transformação’s live and dynamic character unfolded in an exchanges program with other museums around the world. From 2018 on, each year, the Museum will be showing a selection of works from a partner-institution on the easels in a dialogue with our collection. After Tate in 2018, starting on April 4, 2019, MASP will display, for nine months, works from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Photos: Juliana Ziebell