Recurring threads of Brazilian Art.

• Position: Americas Ojo! - Brief Article

EXCITING exhibition of sixty-three works in diverse media, created in the 1990s by twenty-one contemporary artists, is currently on view at El Museo del Barrio in New York City. O Fio da Trama/The Thread Unraveled: Contemporary Brazilian Art, which opened on October 12, will remain on display through February 3, 2002.

Part of an extensive celebration of Brazilian art and culture currently gracing New York and Washington, this new show concurrently involves a large exhibition of Brazilian art from the colonial period to the early twentieth century at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, with an accompanying film festival, and another exhibition, Virgin Territory: Women, Gender, and History in Contemporary Brazilian Art, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Organized by El Museo del Barrio's chief curator, Fatima Bercht, O Fio da Trama/The Thread Unraveled comprises photography, video, and sculpture as well as multimedia installations that range in scale from the intimate to the monumental. Bercht explains that "the exhibition is not intended as a statement that offers a national definition of Brazilian art; rather, it is meant to weave together different artistic sensibilities that are notable in themselves and to provide a window onto complex issues, both formal and substantive, that recur in the art of contemporary Brazilian artists."

O Fio da Trama/The Thread Unraveled offers a fascinating range of meanings conveyed in surprising combinations of disparate materials. In Swing, Nazareth Pacheco has fashioned an instrument of play from glittering, seductive materials. Beautiful to look at from afar as it glitters in the light, the viewer is drawn...