Maria Martins (1894–1973) spent much of her life outside Brazil (she was a diplomat’s wife in countries throughout Europe, South America, and Asia, as well as in the United States), and her work was not widely lauded in her native country until the 1950s. Even so, her art, and her sculpture in particular, was clearly crucial to the emergence of abstraction in Brazil and a growing focus on indigenous beliefs in its art. “Maria Martins: Desejo imaginante” (Maria Martins: Tropical Fictions), curated by Isabella Rjeille and Fernanda Lopes, presented Martins’s sculptures, engravings, and drawings—along