Contributions: Michael Asbury
Michael Asbury is a London-based art historian, art critic, and curator. He is Reader of Art History and Theory at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London (UAL) and founding member of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN). Over the last twenty years he has written extensively on themes involving modern and contemporary art with a particular emphasis on Brazilian culture. His work has been published internationally by Americas Society, Art in America, Astrup Fearnley, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Cosac Naify, Documenta Kassel (12), Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Flash Art, Fundação Iberê Camargo, Liverpool University Press, MIT Press, Perspectiva, Rodopi, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Tate Publishing, Third Text, Turner Contemporary, and Wilhelm/Fink, among others. He has curated a number of exhibitions on artists such as Alfredo Volpi, Anna Maria Maiolino, Antonio Manuel, Cao Guimaraes, Cildo Meireles, Detanico and Lain, Ibere Camargo, Jose Oiticica Filho, José Patricio, and Rosangela Rennó as well as on themes such as Brazilian photography and architecture, concrete and neoconcrete art, and the monochrome in contemporary art.
Contributions: Antonio Sergio Bessa
Antonio Sergio Bessa holds a Ph.D. from the Steinhardt School of Education, New York University. For sixteen years he worked as the Director of Curatorial and Education Programs at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, in addition to teaching at the School of Visual Arts and Columbia University’s Teachers College. A scholar of concrete poetry, Bessa is the author of Öyvind Fahlström—The Art of Writing, co-editor of Novas—Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos, and editor of Mary Ellen Solt—Towards a Theory of Concrete Poetry and Paulo Bruscky: Poesia Viva.
Contributions: Claudia Calirman
Claudia Calirman is associate professor in the Department of Art and Music at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York. Her areas of study are Latin American, modern, and contemporary art. She is the author of Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (2012), which analyzes the intersection of politics and the visual arts during the most repressive years of Brazil’s military regime from 1968 to 1975. The book received the 2013 Arvey Award by the Association for Latin American Art. Calirman is a recipient of the Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation and was a Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). Calirman has curated several exhibitions in New York, including Berna Reale: While You Laugh (2019); Basta! Art and Violence in Latin America (2016); and Antonio Manuel: I Want to Act, not Represent! (2011).
Contributions: Frederico Coelho
Frederico Coelho is a researcher, essayist, and professor of Brazilian literature and performing arts in the Department of Literature at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). He has an MA in history from Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and a PhD in literature from PUC-Rio. He was a researcher for the exhibitions Tropicália—A Revolution in Brazilian Culture (2006) and Hélio Oiticica—To Organize Delirium (2018). His publications include Livro ou livro-me: os escritos babilônicos de Hélio Oiticica (2010), Eu, brasileiro, confesso minha culpa e meu pecado: cultura marginal no Brasil 1960/1970 (2010), and (with César Oiticica Filho) Hélio Oiticica: Conglomerado/Newyorkaises (2013).
Contributions: Marcos Gonçalves
Marcos Augusto Gonçalves is a journalist and the editor of Ilustríssima, the cultural supplement of Folha de São Paulo. He is the author of 1922—A Semana que não Terminou (2012) and coauthor (with Heloísa Buarque de Holanda) of Cultura e Partipação nos anos 60 (1983).
Contributions: Simone Homem de Mello
Simone Homem de Mello is a poet and translator. Her poems are collected in Périplos (São Paulo, 2005), Extravio Marinho (São Paulo, 2010), and Terminal, à escrita (São Paulo, 2015), as well as in anthologies of Brazilian contemporary poetry. She has written libretti for operas, including Orpheus Kristall (composed by Manfred Stahnke, Munich, 2002), Keine Stille außer der des Windes (composed by Sidney Corbett, Bremen, 2007) and UBU—Eine musikalische Groteske (composed by Sidney Corbett, Gelsenkirchen, 2012). She has translated into Portuguese novels by Peter Handke and several modern and contemporary German poets (including Arno Holz, Thomas Kling, Ulf Stolterfoht, and Barbara Köhler). She has also translated Augusto de Campos’s poems into German (Augusto de Campos: Poesie, 2019). Mello studied German literature at the University of São Paulo and at the University of Cologne. Her PhD thesis in translation studies the University of Santa Catarina is about the translation of avant-garde poetry. From 2012 to 2014, she coordinated the Centro de Referência Haroldo de Campos (Casa das Rosas, São Paulo). Since 2011 she has directed the Center for Literary Translation Studies at the museum Casa Guilherme de Almeida in São Paulo.
Contributions: Jose Lira
José T. Lira is professor at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP). He used to be a research affiliate of the Brazilian National Council of Research (CNPq, 1999–2014) and directed USP’s Center for Cultural Preservation (CPC-USP, 2010–2014). His PhD dissertation (FAU-USP, 1997) explores the connections between housing debates, urban culture, and architectural and planning discourses in Recife, Brazil, in the first half of the twentieth century. His post-doctoral research (Tese de Livre Docência, FAU-USP, 2008) focuses on the life and work of Ukrainian avant-garde architect Gregori Warchavchik (1896–1972) in Brazil from the 1920s to the 1950s. He has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (2009) and at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris—Malaquais (2015), as well as a visiting professor in the Program in Latin American Studies and the School of Architecture at Princeton University (2020). He is the author of O visível e o invísivel na arquitetura brasileira/The visible and the invisible in Brazilian architecture (2017) and Warchavchik: Fraturas da vanguarda (2011); coeditor of Domesticidade, gênero e cultura material (2017), Patrimônio construído da USP: Políticas de proteção, gestão e memória (2014), Memória, trabalho e arquitetura (2013), and São Paulo: Os estrangeiros e a construção das cidades (2011); and contributor to numerous books and journals, writing on architectural and planning history and criticism; modernism, architecture, and the city; Brazilian social thinking; housing history; architecture’s material production; and ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in architecture and urbanism.
Contributions: Fernanda Lopes
Fernanda Lopes is assistant curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. She received her MA and her PhD in art history and criticism from the School of Fine Arts at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She is coeditor (with Aristoteles A. Predebon) of Francisco Bittencourt: Arte-Dinamite (2016) as well as author of Área experimental: lugar, espaço e dimensão do experimental na arte brasileira dos anos 1970 (2012) and “Éramos o time do Rei”—A Experiência Rex (2006). Her curating experience includes the Special Room of the Rex Group at the 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010). In 2017 she received the Brazilian Art Critic Association’s Maria Eugênia Franco Prize for Best Exhibition Curatorship for the exhibition In a frenzy—An overview of the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro Collection at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (2016).
Contributions: Martin Mäntele
Martin Mäntele is lecturer in design history and exhibition theory at the Ulm Polytechnic, Würzburg Polytechnic, and Schwäbisch Gmünd Polytechnic. He is also the director of public relations and education at the Museum Ulm and, since 2013, of the HfG-Archiv, the archive of the former Ulm School of Design (1953–1968). After studying art history and modern German literature at the universities of Tübingen, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Hamburg, he received his MA and PhD in art history from the University of Tübingen. His publications include Ulmer Modelle—Modelle nach Ulm (2003), an exhibition catalog published in conjunction with a travelling exhibition celebrating the 50th founding anniversary of the Ulm School of Design.
Contributions: Adele Nelson
Adele Nelson is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also associate director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS). She received her BA in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and Art Semiotics from Brown University and her MA and PhD in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art of Latin America, with a focus on the postwar and contemporary art of Brazil. She is the author of Jac Leirner in Conversation with Adele Nelson (Fundación Cisneros, 2011), which was translated into Portuguese by Cosac Naify in 2013. Her articles have been published in Art Journal and ARTMargins and national and international museum publications, including Lygia Clark: Painting as an Experimental Field (2020), Mário Pedrosa: De la naturaleza afetiva de la forma (2017), Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium (2016), Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents (2015). Nelson is co-organizing, with MacKenzie Stevens, the exhibition Social Fabric: Art and Activism in Contemporary Brazil for the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin in fall 2021. The project has received the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts grant. She also contributed to the catalog and helped to organize the award-winning exhibition Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927–1937 (MoMA, 2008). Her current book project, Forming Abstraction: Art and Institutions in Postwar Brazil, studies how the practice and theory of abstract art developed in Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s in close relation to new modern art institutions. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright US Scholar Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Contributions: Eduardo Oliveira
Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira is assistant professor at the Institute of Romance Studies at the University of Zurich, where he also coordinates the Institute of Brazilian Studies (literature, culture, media). He published several articles on the topic of animals and animality in Brazilian art and literature, concrete poetry, and performance and contemporary literature. His research interests include literature and visual arts; modernities and migration in literature and art, representations of violence, and technics of writing.
Contributions: Claudia Saldanha
Claudia Saldanha is the director of Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro, an institution dedicated to contemporary art. She has a PhD degree in visual arts from UERJ and an MFA degree from Pratt Institute, New York, and teaches art history at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). She also used to be the director of the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage (2008–2014), the Division of Theory and Research at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói, Rio de Janeiro (2003–2005), and the Visual Arts Division at RioArte (1993–2005) and organized many notable exhibitions, including: Alviceleste, a survey of performance artist Márcia X; Paulo Roberto Leal—Espaços Articulados, at Paço Imperial (2015); Paulo Werneck—Muralista Brasileiro at the Museu de Arte Moderna de Recife and the Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2014); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and at Caixa Cultural de Brasília (2011); Da Matéria Nasce a Forma—Paulo Roberto Leal at Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói (2007); Abrigo Poético—Diálogos com Lygia Clark, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói (2006); Márcia X., at Galerie Weisser Elephant, Berlin (2006); Márcia X. Revista, at Paço Imperial (2005); Insertae Sedis: José Rufino, at Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói (2005).
Contributions: Eduardo Sterzi
Eduardo Sterzi is a writer, critic, curator, and professor of literary theory at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), where he also coordinates the Graduate Program in literary theory and history. His research includes the relations between the Middle Ages and modernity in literature, as well as the topos of the waste land in modern and contemporary poetry and the survival and dissolution of myth, as well as the relationship between anthropology, literature, and the arts in Sousândrade, Oswald de Andrade, and Mário de Andrade. He cocurated the traveling exhibition Variations of the Wild Body: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Photographer (SESC Ipiranga, São Paulo, Brazil, September 2015 to January 2016; Weltkulturenmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany, November 2017; and International Center of Arts José de Guimarães, Portugal, February 2019). He carried out part of his doctoral (2003–2004) and postdoctoral (2009) research at the Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza in Italy. He received scholarships from the main research promotion agencies in Brazil (CAPES, CNPq and FAPESP). His publications include Por que ler Dante (2008) and A prova dos nove: alguma poesia moderna e a tarefa da alegria (2008), Prosa (2001), Aleijão (2009), Cavalo sopa martelo (2011), and Maus poemas (2016). He used to be the editor of Do céu do futuro: cinco ensaios sobre Augusto de Campos.
Contributions: Luisa Valle
Luisa Valle is a doctoral candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research focuses on Latin American architecture and its implications for art production from the region, with a special interest in the local, national, and global contexts of modernism. She has published articles on Roberto Burle Marx and the synthesis of the arts, Mary Vieira and concretism, and Thomas Hirschorn’s Gramsci Monument. She is in the process of finishing her dissertation entitled “The Beehive, the Favela, the Mangrove, and the Castle: Modern Architecture in Rio de Janeiro, 1885–1945.” She has received several fellowships—including a CUNY Teaching Fellowship at Hunter College and an Avery Foundation/The Bronx Museum of the Arts Curatorial Fellowship—and has taught art and architectural history at the City College of New York and Hunter College.
