The Bronx Museum of the Arts

On October 7, 2006, the Bronx Museum of the Arts opened its fall exhibit, Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture in its new home, a $19 million postmodern, streamlined minimalist structure designed by the New York and Miami-based firm Arquitectonica. The new building, which features a second-floor space for public programs and special events and a third-floor education center and media lab, is part of an initiative to expand education programs for youth and families. Funding is provided in part by Congressman Jose E. Serrano through the U.S. Small Business Administration, the City of New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, and Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, Jr., among others. JPMorgan Chase is the Fall 2006 opening sponsor.

The title “Tropicalia” derives from both an installation created by Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica in 1967 and a wildly successful 1968 pop album featuring musicians Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, and Caetono Veloso. Developed in no small part as a response to an oppressive military dictatorship, Tropicalia is “less a movement than a moment,” says guest curator Carlos Basualdo of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in that this experimental period, melding Brazilian art, music, film, architecture and theater, organized not around a set manifesto but grew organically through a series of conversations between artists.

Says Basualdo, “For many, the name ‘Tropicalia’ is synonymous with the liberating Brazilian pop music scene of the late 60s. In part, this exhibition is an effort to restore the proper multidisciplinary nature of the Tropicalia movement and convey its real achievement as one of profound cultural transformation. In the end, these artists drew from a range of disciplines and local and international influences to create new hybrid forms that were uniquely Brazilian.”

Among the notable multidisciplinary objects out of the more than 250 currently on display include such works as Tropicalia (1967) and Eden (1969) by Helio Oiticica, which turn viewers into active participants through revolutionary usage of texture, sounds, and smells as well as arresting visuals (Eden also employs two six-month-old parrots, Nelson and Otto, sure to delight children and animal lovers alike). Lygia Pape’s Roda dos prazeres (Wheel of Delights) invites visitors to sample colorful flavored liquids, and Lygia Clark’s Sensorial Objects (1964-1968) affords them the opportunity to “engage their senses beyond the conventional visual art experience” through the usage of masks, goggles, and gloves. Inspired by artist Oswald de Andrade’s idea of “cultural cannibalism,” Oiticica, Pape, and Clark, as well as their contemporaries Antonio Dias and Nelson Leirner, sought to expand the concept of art beyond the traditional, often stifling, European definition, using their artwork to smash through centuries-old barriers of elitism and connoisseurship and bring about a universal, populist understanding of the media. (Nelson Leirner is perhaps more famous, or notorious, for his work O Porco (The Pig) (1966), a taxidermied pig in a wooden crate, which he entered in an art competition and took first prize. He used this as an opportunity to lambaste the judges for their specious criteria.) Part of the exhibit is a multimedia production devoted to de Andrade’s groundbreaking play The Candle King as performed by the Oficina Theatre in 1967.

For those visitors who prefer to take their art in more traditional forms, the Tropicalia exhibit also includes concrete and neoconcrete works by such artists as Clark, Pape, Augusto de Campo, Waldemar Cordeiro, and Ferreira Gullar. However, traditional form does not exclude revolutionary political content, as evidenced by Antonio Dias’s 1965 painting Nota sobre a morte imprevista (Note on the Unforeseen Death), a meditation on the devastation of Hiroshima.

While the Tropicalia period lasted officially only from 1967 to 1972, its lasting impact has settled on a new generation of artists and musicians from Brazil and throughout the world. (Upon arriving at the Bronx Museum, the visitor is treated to a psychedelic floor-to-ceiling wall sticker called Baby (2003), a work by the United States artist collective assume vivid astro focus.) The exhibition’s design, a scaffolding structure by Brazilian architects Vinicius de Andrade and Marcelo Morettin, is a reflection of the Tropicalia era’s usage of the mundane to embody the era’s aforementioned populist spirit.

Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture remains at the Bronx Museum of the Arts until January 28, 2007. It will be the last chance for viewers to see the exhibition in the U.S. The Bronx Museum of the Arts is open Wednesdays and Thursdays from noon to 6 pm, Fridays from noon to 8 pm, and Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 6 pm. Suggested admission is $5 for adults, $3 for students and seniors, and free for members and children under 12.

1040 Grand Concourse (@ 165^th Street)

Bronx, NY 10456

Phone: 718-681-6000/Fax 718-681-6181

www.bronxmuseum.org

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By: Karla Keffer

Karla Keffer is a freelance writer based in Astoria, NY. She is a graduate of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and New York University. Her poems and articles have appeared in Smartish Pace, Limozine, New York Construction, and the All Stars Project's Quarterly E-Newsletter.

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