There are moments when I am especially proud of being Brazilian. Today, as I walked out of lunch at The Modern, the great restaurant adjacent to the MoMA, I stopped by the MoMA store to look at all the Brazilian stuff being featured in the new collection called Destination Brazil. I loved seeing the work of my jeweller friend Camila Sarpi on display - gold honeycomb earrings with hand-stitched detailing (pictured above). Very impressive! Also very nice: cutlery by architect and furniture designer Arthur Casas, his line is called Jararaca, which is a kind of snake. Click here to see photos of the whole collection.
And Brazil is not just in the museum shop, but also hanging on the walls. Until June 15, the work of Mira Schendel will be on show, in a joint exhibition with Argentinian León Ferrari.
As MoMA's site says, they are considered "among the most significant artists working in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. Their works address language as a major visual subject matter: the visual body of language, the embodiment of voices as words and gestures, and language as a metaphor of the worldly aspect of human existence through the eloquence of naming and writing. They produced their works in the neighboring countries of Argentina and Brazil throughout the 1960s and 1980s, when the question of language was particularly central to Western culture due to the central role taken by post-structuralism, semiotics, and the philosophy of language. Although their drawings, sculptures, and paintings are contemporary with the birth of Conceptualism, they are distinctively different, and have not yet been exhibited in their entirety in the United States."
