{"id":7546,"date":"2025-07-19T07:44:44","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T07:44:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/7546\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T07:44:44","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T07:44:44","slug":"solange-pessoa-tells-the-tale-of-humanity-through-the-earths-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/7546\/","title":{"rendered":"Solange Pessoa Tells the Tale of Humanity Through the Earth’s Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOn a recent summer day in the Colorado resort town of Aspen, while some were hiking through the Rocky Mountains and enjoying the heat, the artist Solange Pessoa<\/a> was indoors, strewing bones around the basement level of the Aspen Art Museum<\/a>. She worked with purpose, careful not to disturb the layer of dirt already spread across the floor, moving among burlap sacks variously overflowing with with coffee beans, seeds with significance to Indigenous communities in Brazil, and brilliantly colored powders. Elsewhere on the basement floor, rose three tall towers formed by tiers of similar sacks; periodically ascended a stepladder to reach the uppermost tier of each tower.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\n\tThe bags composing the towers were stuffed with papers printed with photographs of Spiral Jetty and Anastasi pottery, flower petals, feathers, dried peppers, sticks, and records by Brazilian musicians like Milton Nascimento, among other objects. And yet, Pessoa planned to somehow fill these sacks with even more materials.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSeventy percent of their texts are missing,\u201d she told me, speaking in Portuguese, with her gallerist Matthew Wood there to translate. \u201cUsually, they\u2019re overflowing from the bags.\u201d Those texts would arrive in the coming days, ahead of her exhibition\u2019s opening.<\/p>\n

\n\tPessoa created this piece in 1994 and exhibited it, albeit in a more modest form, in Belo Horizonte, the city where she has long been based. Over the last three decades, the artist has exhibited new iterations of the installation in locations ranging from Marfa, Texas, to Bregenz, Austria. The latest iteration, Bags \u2013 Aspen version (1994\u20132025), is the star of her current Aspen Art Museum show, one of her few solo museum exhibitions ever staged outside Brazil. She described Bags as \u201ca wider anthropology of the Americas read through the tradition of the Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBags is a work emblematic of Pessoa\u2019s practice. It\u2019s expansive and stately, and seeks to tether humanity back to the natural world. \u201cI dislike the separation of culture and nature,\u201d she said. \u201cI have this imagination of an integrated philosophy, a natural philosophy, which incorporates culture as part of nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Two<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSolange Pessoa, Bags \u2013 Aspen version, 1994\u20132025.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Paul Salveson<\/p>\n

\n\tHer practice draws no division between humankind and ecology. Bodily fluids are commonly enlisted for her sculptures, whose abstract forms tend to recall animals undergoing metamorphosis. Hair has also shown up in her work\u2014most notably in Catedral<\/a> (Cathedral, 1990\u20132015), a gigantic installation composed of a winding flow of leather and fabric with tresses stuck to it. (That work is owned by the Rubell Museum in Miami, where it has at points been accorded an airy gallery of its own.) These materials have often appeared alongside feathers, fruit, dirt, and more.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cShe\u2019s sensitive to anything that is living,\u201d said Thomas D. Trummer, director of the Kunsthaus Bregenz, where he organized a Pessoa show in 2023 that included a version of Bags. \u201cThat might be plants, that might be seeds, that might be animals, that might be individuals.\u201d For Pessoa, \u201ceverything is connected,\u201d Trummer said.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2020, art historian Cecilia Fajardo-Hill wrote that Pessoa\u2019s work had \u201conly been getting the recognition it deserves in recent years, and mostly beyond the confines of Brazil\u201d\u2014something attributable to Pessoa\u2019s decision to base herself not in an art hub like Rio de Janeiro or S\u00e3o Paulo but in the state of Minas Gerais. Then there\u2019s the bitter reaction certain pieces have elicited in her home country: In 1995, when Pessoa made an installation called Jardim (Garden) that featured leather, hair, blood, and bovine eyes, the public responded with such negativity that one Brazilian newspaper called on her to explain its meaning. \u201cThese are strong works, but they were not made to scandalize,\u201d she said at the time. She has still never appeared in an edition of the Bienal de S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil\u2019s top biennial.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Several<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSolange Pessoa, Sonhiferas I, 2020, at the 2022 Venice Biennale<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Vincenzo Pinto\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\tSuch a reception is hard to fathom now, while Pessoa is beginning to receive international fame. She appeared in the 2022 Venice Biennale, and she has gained representation with Mendes Wood DM, one of Brazil\u2019s most prestigious galleries. (Blum, another blue-chip gallery, also represented her before announcing the end of its operations earlier this month.) Her Aspen Art Museum show coincides with another institutional solo exhibition, at Tramway in Glasgow. \u201cTime has helped me grow,\u201d Pessoa said.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt has also helped her grow her art, which is approaching monumental proportions. Deliria Deveras (2021\u201324), one of the installations in her Aspen Art Museum show, occupies an entire gallery and contains a mass of crystals punctuated by nuggets of silver. Those crystals together weigh 20 tons.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"An<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSolange Pessoa, Deliria Deveras, 2021\u201324.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Paul Salveson<\/p>\n

\n\tDeliria Deveras recalls a famed Robert Smithson installation<\/a> composed of glass shards, and indeed, Pessoa cited Smithson and many Americans and Europeans working in the same paradigm as him\u2014Land artists, Minimalists, Arte Povera sculptors\u2014as being influential for her. Like those artists of the postwar era, Pessoa is fascinated by the notion that nature can be lured into clinical gallery spaces. But her work has an explicitly spiritual dimension that absent from the practices of her Western influences. \u201cWith absolute modesty, I feel like I\u2019m trying to achieve something like the psychology of the relationship of man with an earthly God,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe crystals in Deliria Deveras were mined in the Brazilian city of Ferros, where Pessoa was born in 1961. The mining industry was all around her\u2014Minas Gerais has a long history of mineral extraction\u2014and so, naturally, wound its way into her art. \u201cThere\u2019s this psychological aspect to mining,\u201d she said, referring to the act of digging beneath the surface. She called herself a minero, punning the Portuguese word for both \u201cminer\u201d and a person who comes from Minas Gerais.<\/p>\n

\n\tPessoa grew up on a farm in the remote town of Dores do Indai\u00e1 and was raised in the vicinity of many churches filled with many sculptures of saints (which are sometimes adorned with human hair, just as her sculpture Catedral is). Though Pessoa does not herself identify as a Catholic, she noted that she has a \u201cspiritual intuition\u201d and said she drew inspiration from the rich tradition of Baroque art in Brazil\u2019s churches. Alongside Land artists and Minimalists, she also named Aleijadinho, an 18th-century sculptor whose work can be found in Minas Gerais\u2019s churches, as one of her primary inspirations. Pointing to all the sacks in Bags, she said, \u201cCertainly, these are all Baroque\u2014the folding, the verticality, the excess, the emotional intensity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe attended art school during the \u201980s and during the \u201990s began making sculptures that adhered to no dominant trend in Brazil: circles of bones, masses of vegetable fiber that hung to the wall and extended onto the floor, knots of hay that dangled from rafters like a giant\u2019s braids.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cShe\u2019s a real outlier in her generation,\u201d said Matthew Wood, Pessoa\u2019s dealer. \u201cThis wasn\u2019t what people were doing, and certainly not what people valued.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Rows<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSolange Pessoa, Bags \u2013 Aspen version, 1994\u20132025.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Paul Salveson<\/p>\n

\n\tSome artists began taking note. Pessoa became friendly with Tunga, whose sculptures had emboldened her to use hair in her own art; she even became a member of the Galp\u00e3o Embra collective alongside him. Through Galp\u00e3o Embra, she also showed her work alongside artists such as Ione de Freitas and Nuno Ramos.<\/p>\n

\n\tEven after being pilloried in the press for Jardim, the 1995 installation that featured bovine eyes, she showed no desire to conform to trends. She exhibited her work outdoors, in places far removed from museums and galleries, and she continued to make sculptures that were likely to disturb viewers. Lesmalongas \u2013 Desterros (1998\u20132002), a piece divided into five \u201csituations\u201d (four of which were staged on her family\u2019s farm), featured sculptures made from plastic and a combination of lard and dirt. Some were worn by performers who screamed and wailed, as though Pessoa\u2019s creations were hurting them or forcing them to become animal-like. Pessoa admitted that her work does offer \u201csensorial perturbation,\u201d and said, \u201cI like when works take me out of my comfort zone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut for Pessoa, pieces like Lesmalongas accomplished more than shocking their viewers\u2014they established a new relationship between people and their surroundings. \u201cBlurring the [boundary] between human and nonhuman is very important to her,\u201d said Claude Adjil, a curator at large at the Aspen Art Museum and the organizer of Pessoa\u2019s show there.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the past couple decades, Pessoa has continued producing art musing on that very theme, though her work no longer seems designed to unsettle in the way that it once did. Years ago, she began making drawings that resemble animals that do not actually exist (\u201cinsects emerge from her mind and are not entomologically correct,\u201d art historian Cecilia Fajardo-Hill once wrote); she has recently begun exhibiting them with greater frequently, in venues such as the 2022 Venice Biennale. And she has begun working in bronze, which is longer-lasting than many of the organic substances she used during the \u201990s.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Several<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSolange Pessoa, NIHIL NOVI SUB SOLE (fragments), 2019\u201321.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Paul Salveson<\/p>\n

\n\tShe\u2019s also enlisted soapstone, a material once used for commemorative statues and fountains, for sculptures such as NIHIL NOVI SUB SOLE (2019\u201321), which appeared outside the Arsenale during the 2022 Biennale and is now being exhibited on the roof of the Aspen Art Museum. Into this soft stone, Pessoa has carved leaf-like forms that collect rainwater. That rain, in turn, further alters the surfaces of her sculptures, which were already mottled from exposure to the elements.<\/p>\n

\n\tPessoa is keenly aware that her sculptures might not last forever\u2014and she has even embraced that quality of her art. \u201cI feel the necessity of ephemerality, but on the other hand, I also feel the necessity of eternalization,\u201d she said. \u201cThese contradictory philosophies are inseparable.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On a recent summer day in the Colorado resort town of Aspen, while some were hiking through the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,8154,49,48,356,75,8155,8156],"class_list":["post-7546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-aspen-art-museum","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-solange-pessoa","tag-venice-biennale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}