Adele Nelson and MacKenzie Stevens win Andy Warhol Foundation grant

The Visual Arts Center at The University of Texas at Austin has received a $75,000 grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to support the Fall 2021 exhibition Social Fabric: Art and Activism in Contemporary Brazil. Organized in response to a heightened political and cultural climate in Brazil, Social Fabric seeks to provide a platform for Brazilian artists who are facing increasingly challenging times.

Co-organized by UT Department of Art and Art History Assistant Professor of Art History and Associate Director of the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) Adele Nelson and Director of the Visual Arts Center MacKenzie Stevens, Social Fabric will bring together emerging and mid-career Brazilian contemporary artists whose work contends with and is responsive to the democratic erosion in Brazil. Nelson and Stevens position Social Fabric as ideally suited for a university context, and specifically the University of Texas at Austin, because of its strong multidisciplinary faculty working on Brazilian subjects.

“Social Fabric asks us to consider recent political and social changes in Brazil alongside the country’s complicated history and to engage in interdisciplinary inquiry between art history, cultural studies, history, political science and other disciplines,” say Nelson and Stevens.

The exhibition will feature artists whose work is overtly political, blurring the boundary between art and activism; those whose work engages with environmental issues; and those who consider identity politics and freedom of expression. The exhibition includes artists living and working in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s most populous cities, as well as those from and in some cases still residing in the interior, Amazon, and Northeast of the country—regions long considered peripheral.

“We are thrilled to make our first grant to the Visual Arts Center at The University of Texas at Austin for Social Fabric: Art and Activism in Contemporary Brazil,” says Rachel Bers, program director at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. “An ambitious project that promises to bring international attention to the social and political dimensions of contemporary art making in Brazil, Social Fabric exemplifies the foundation’s belief that artists have important contributions to make to conversations about democracy and freedom of expression—in Brazil and around the world.”

The grant will support the production of the exhibition on view from September to December 2021, in addition to research trips to Brazil, and a fully illustrated catalogue, including essays by Nelson and Stevens as well as artist entries and an annotated chronology documenting Brazil’s recent history.