Exhibition

Featuring 42 textile works and oil paintings, Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets is the first comprehensive survey of Santos Reinbolt’s art ever presented and marks the first-ever solo museum exhibition for the artist organized outside her native Brazil. Best known for her large-scale embroideries made from hundreds of vibrant colored threads, which the artist referred to as quadros de lã (“wool paintings”), the exhibition represents more than half of all known works by the artist and examines the artist’s work through a variety of lenses, including gender, race, and socio-economic dynamics.

A Head Full of Planets explores the context in which Santos Reinbolt’s artistic practice crystallized in the early 1950s, after she became a live-in cook for the architect Lota de Macedo Soares and her partner, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, at their home in Petrópolis, a mountain getaway favored by Brazilian high society. It was not until the mid-1960s, while working in another household, that she began to dedicate herself to embroidery and would begin creating many of the works for which she is best known today.

Presented nonchronologically, A Head Full of Planets is divided into four main sections. The opening section explores the often-competing pluralities of her life as an artist, domestic worker, and Black woman, tracing her path from her younger life growing up on a small farm in rural Bahia, to her migration to the wealthier cities of the southeast seeking employment opportunities. Another section presents her body of work as a condensation of time, space, and racial dynamics, ranging from farm life to crowded city scenes, as she rendered festive celebrations, collective meals, and outdoor spaces—mountains, skies, fauna, flora—both native to Brazil and belonging to distant lands, real and imagined. The exhibition concludes with an exploration of the shared affinities of Santos Reinbolt’s embroideries with long-standing textile traditions practiced by women across Brazil, including contemporary Brazilian artists.

To honor and give voice to Santos Reinbolt, the exhibition includes recordings of Santos Reinbolt’s interviews with anthropologist and art critic Lélia Coelho Frota performed by poet, educator, and Black feminist scholar Luana Reis who, like Santos Reinbolt, was born and raised in Bahia, Brazil.

This landmark exhibition is organized by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), where it debuted in fall 2022 as part of the MASP’s biennial program devoted to Brazilian Histories, and was curated by Amanda Carneiro, Assistant Curator, and André Mesquita, Curator. The exhibition at AFAM, curated by Valérie Rousseau, Curatorial Chair for Exhibitions and Senior Curator of Self-Taught Art & Art Brut, with Dylan Blau Edelstein, a PhD candidate in Spanish & Portuguese at Princeton University, builds on the MASP presentation and provides further contextualization of the artist and her work.