by Drake Konow
In the dead of winter in Texas, when even Austin is no longer impervious to the cold, the sun beats down in Southern hemisphere. Sunbathing tourists pack the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. Clothes get looser and flip flops almost obligatory—even in São Paulo—as the city prepares for its carnaval da rua. The northeastern port city of Salvador da Bahia makes its own preparations for two celebrations at the start of the calendar year, both with water and religion at their center: theLavagem de Bomfim where women dressed in white wash the steps of the city’s central church and the Festa de Iemanjá honoring the orixá of water, queen of the ocean. This past December, I traveled to Brazil not to escape the Austin winter, put my toes in the sand, or chase after the euphoria of carnaval, but rather to spend time researching in the archives of three of Brazil’s most important art institutions.
My doctoral dissertation considers how contemporary art museums in São Paulo have helped construct, manage, and discipline the secular in Brazil over the last twenty-five years. Currently titled Museum Strategies: Navigating Secular Aesthetics in Brazilian Contemporary Art, I analyze five case studies of artists whose work harnesses religion to work within and respond to the disciplinary constraints of museums. I show how they have navigated what I call the secular aesthetics of the museum—wrestling with the museum’s disciplinary restraints and investing it with spiritual potential. I also chart how art museums have themselves invested in harnessing spiritual, ritual, and auratic powers. In this way, I explore how, in the case of Brazilian contemporary art museums, secular aesthetics emerge from ongoing negotiations between actors across multiple institutions and interests.
This project has come together during my time at UT Austin. Since enrolling in 2020, I’ve traveled every summer to Brazil, and eventually during the 2023-2024 academic year I lived there to conduct independent research. My dissertation project crystallized at the end of that year, and the contours of my case studies (each comprising one chapter) took their final form in the summer of 2024, upon my return. With my dissertation committee’s help, I decided to return to Brazil for follow-up archival research and interviews with artists and museum workers.
I began that follow-up research this past winter break, focusing on the archives of Pinacoteca de São Paulo, the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP). Each is attached to a Brazilian contemporary art institution central to my dissertation. In terms of deepening my body of research, I was able to read and scan hundreds of primary source documents and access a range of books and publications scarcely available in the U.S. This research trip also confirmed something I’ve experienced many times before. The archives always contain an element of surprise—silence where you anticipate abundance, excess where you least expect it, and details sending you in unpredictable directions. I was also reminded of the importance of building relationships with archivists. In several instances, archivists helped clarify information, put a detail into context, or point me in the right direction. These kinds of in-person interactions are invaluable to the research process.
Archival holdings at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo are central to two of my chapters. My second chapter analyzes “Bori,” a performance by artist and Candomblé practitioner Ayrson Heráclito which occurred at the Pinacoteca. In 2022, I witnessed the performance live in the museum’s central octagon. During my visit this past winter, I was able to examine archival documents related to the acquisition and performance of the piece. I also was able to watch the video documenting the performance, Irawo Bori: Ofrenda para cabeça cósmica, on view at the museum and the culmination of the performance’s acquisition into the museum’s permanent collection. While sorting through Pinacoteca’s archives, I also had the curious experience of finding myself in the archives. Having attended the original performance, I was in several of pictures taken on the day of the original performance. My time at the Pina also included extensive research on Véxoa: Nós sabemos, which included a piece by Denilson Baniwa, an indigenous artist whose work I analyze in my third chapter. This was a landmark exhibition for its presentation of indigenous contemporary art in Brazil. In addition to reviewing the catalog, press releases, and documentation of the opening, I also was able to examine key internal documents that concerned planning the exhibition and acquiring works, offering insight into the curators’ approach to the exhibit. The main piece by Baniwa reflects his ongoing provocations about the relationship between indigeneity and art museums. Installed in front of the museum, Baniwa planted flowers and medicinal plants into soil which contained remains of the 2018 fire at the National Museum in Rio, making reference to the destruction of indigenous culture and artifacts previously held by the museum.
In one way or another, the São Paulo Biennial appears in three chapters of my dissertation, so I spent a significant amount of time at the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo archives. There, I found extensive documentary evidence about a 2000 mega-exhibition marking five hundred years since the arrival of Pedro Álvarez Cabral to the land we now call Brazil. My research focused on the exhibition’s “Indigenous Arts” module. I am particularly interested in this exhibit because it marked a temporary homecoming of one manto Tupinambá—a feathered cloak sacred to the indigenous Tupinambá people—which until very recently were all held in museums in Europe. In the archives, I accessed records of the “Indigenous Arts” co-curators’ loan requests to several European museums where the cloaks are held, multiple rejections, and the eventual terms of the loan made by the Nationalmusset in Denmark. My chapter four examines the work of Glicéria Tupinambá who two decades later visited a manto held in France and from that experience revived the construction of cloaks in Brazil. I track Glicéria’s encounters with sacred objects held in the museum and the political consciousness over ownership of indigenous objects that emerged alongside her artistic practice. The records of the quintennial exhibit—including relations with European museums and disagreement among the curators about the nature of indigenous art—provide a rich historical context for the chapter I will write on Glicéria’s work.
Planning my trip to Brazil over winter break, I knew there would be a patchwork of feriados, or holidays, breaking up my possible work days. I was able to get several good weeks of work done, but São Paulo, where I was based, more or less emptied out over New Year’s. The archives closed, I decided to follow the crowds (and my friends) to Rio—the heart of many of the celebrations. On January 2nd, I’d head back to São Paulo, back to the archives. But for a few days, I did find my toes in the sand. Like thousands of others, I dressed in white on New Year’s Eve and spent the last minutes of 2024 standing on Copacabana beach listening to Ivete Sangolo, the queen of carnaval, teaching the crowd her latest axé song. The first moments of 2025, I marched through the streets of Rio in the cortejo da virada, the first carnaval parade of the new year. We danced and sang from one side of the city to the other, traversing Copacabana and arriving at the beach on Ipanema. The water crashing against the shore, I entered into the ocean and performed the customary seven New Year’s wave jumps. As the sun rose over the beach, overwhelmed by the night’s events, the line between studying Brazil and experiencing Brazil blurred.
I am reminded of a phrase my Brazilian friends often say about outsiders entering into their culture: “Brazil is not for beginners.” In both the depth and specificity of the research I was able to complete and the intensity of cultural experiences I was able to access, this trip relied on a foundation built over many years: my many previous research trips to Brazil, relationships cultivated with Brazilian friends and colleagues, and extensive study. It was an immensely productive research trip—in no way beginner level.
Drake Konow is a Ph.D. Candidate in Religion in the Americas. His work focuses on religion, art, and the secular in Brazil and the U.S.