Wexner Center for the Arts announces Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil

The Wexner Center for the Arts presents Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil an exhibition on view February 1–April 20, 2014.

As part of Via Brasil, a multidisciplinary, multi-year initiative focusing on today’s vibrant art and culture of Brazil—and made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—the Wexner Center for the Arts presents Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil, among the most ambitious exhibitions in the center’s 25-year history. Occupying the entirety of the center’s four galleries, and including a site-specific installation created especially for this show by Lucia Koch in the center’s lobby, Cruzamentos is the result of more than three years of curatorial research and in-country exploration by Wexner Center staff in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Recife, and Belo Horizonte, as well as less-traveled urban centers in Brazil. With 80 artworks by 35 artists (many of whom have never widely exhibited in the US, if at all), Cruzamentos is the most comprehensive exhibition of recent Brazilian art ever to be presented in North America.

Cocurated by the Wexner Center’s Jennifer Lange (curator, Film/Video Studio Program), and Bill Horrigan (curator at large), along with distinguished contemporary art historian and independent curator Paulo Venâncio Filho (a professor at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), Cruzamentos highlights work by artists who are relatively young, though recognized and highly respected in Brazil, if not yet globally. Cruzamentos represents a full range of artistic practices and media—including painting, site-specific installation, photography, sculpture, and moving-image works—and features several works produced specifically for the exhibition. Visual artists working today in Brazil commonly move freely and urgently among various mediums, and Cruzamentos reflects that improvisatory impulse, as it does the equally distinctive repurposing of nontraditional materials—often domestic objects put to unexpected but striking use.

The word cruzamentos translates literally as “crossings” or “intersections,” but in Brazil, it also refers metaphorically to the mixing of cultures and ethnicities that renders the country so distinctive. Cruzamentos aims to extend that metaphor to contemporary art, focusing on artists whose practices and influences are as varied as the social, racial, and geographical landscapes of the country itself.

Artists
Márcio Almeida, Jonathas de Andrade (in residence), Claudia Andujar, Luiza Baldan, Brígida Baltar, Laura Belém, Tatiana Blass, Rodrigo Braga, Gisele Camargo, Leda Catunda, Cia de Foto (a collective), Marcelo Cidade, Theo Craveiro, Alexandre da Cunha, José Damasceno, Detanico Lain (a collective), Dias & Riedweg, Marcius Galan, Alair Gomes, Fernanda Gomes, Cao Guimarães, Lucia Koch (in residence), Jac Leirner, Cristiano Lenhardt, Cinthia Marcelle, Vânia Mignone, Beatriz Milhazes, Odires Mlászho, Maria Nepomuceno, Caio Reisewitz, Rosângela Rennó, Regina Silveira, Adriana Varejão, Erika Verzutti, and Marcia Xavier

Wexner Center for the Arts
The Ohio State University
1871 N. High Street
Columbus, OH 43210
T +1 614 292 3535