Sandra Benites, MASP’s First Indigenous Curator, Quits amid Censorship Kerfuffle
Sandra Benites, a member of the Guaraní Ñandeva individuals who in 2019 turned the primary Indigenous curator employed by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), has resigned from the establishment after officers there declined to indicate a half dozen works depicting the left-leaning Landless Employees Motion (MST) in an exhibition she was co-organizing. The six pictures confirmed members of the Marxist-influenced group, which for greater than thirty years has supported the redistribution of land as a method of rectifying wealth disparity, and have been to have appeared in “Retomadas” (Resumptions), a phase of the bigger present “Histórias Brasileiras.” That exhibition, itself a part of MASP’s profitable “Histórias” collection launched in 2016 by then-curator Adriano Pedrosa and investigating themes of race, class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism, will open in July. Absent fully would be the part organized by Benites, an adjunct curator, and visitor curator Clarissa Diniz, each of whom recused themselves from the present simply days earlier than Benites’s announcement that she was leaving the establishment altogether.
MASP has denied censoring the pictures, contending that its refusal to permit the works’ show hinges on the curators’ failure to use for the required approval to do 4 to 6 months forward of the occasion’s opening, as requested. In accordance with Fohla de São Paulo, the curators and artists—Brazilian photographers Edgar Kanaykõ, André Vilaron, and João Zinclar—claimed they have been by no means made conscious of any deadline for the exhibition, which was initially scheduled to open in June. Benites and Diniz on Monday issued an announcement noting that they weren’t invited to curate their part till mid-January and that the choice to yank the images violated the spirit of the exhibition and left them feeling “wronged and disrespected.”
Benites had been slated to curate “Indigenous Histories,” at MASP, a yearlong program of exhibitions, publications, workshops, programs, and talks devoted to Indigenous artwork and voices. Initially scheduled for 2021, that present will now happen in 2023, although now with out the oversight of an Indigenous curator.
