Curated by James Rondeau, Stephanie D’Allesandro, and Luis Pérez-Oramas

Designed to introduce North American audiences to Tarsila do Amaral, a leading Brazilian post-Cubist painter, this show features Abaporu, 1928, a sweeping, Picassoesque depiction of a man seated beside a cactus, which helped spark Brazil’s influential Anthropophagist movement. Inspired by Amaral’s work, Oswald de Andrade penned the “Manifesto Antropófago” (Cannibalist Manifesto) that same year, invoking the indigenous ritual of eating the enemy’s flesh as a metaphor for the country’s transformative appropriation of Euro-American culture. (In the Tupi-Guarani language, abaporu means “the man who eats man.”) In addition to a thorough exploration of Amaral’s contributions to this key national-cultural project, the exhibition and its catalogue are poised to reveal other aspects of the artist’s practice, from her early work in Paris to her bracing depictions of the working class. Travels to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Feb. 6–June 3, 2018. 

— Kaira M. Cabañas