NEW YORK, December 16, 2024 – In February 2025, the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) will present a historic survey for the self-taught Brazilian artist Madalena Santos Reinbolt—who is best known for her large-scale embroideries made from hundreds of vibrant colored threads—marking the first-ever solo museum exhibition for the artist organized outside her native Brazil.
Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets (February 12 – May 25, 2025) is a rare opportunity for an international audience to experience the first comprehensive survey of Santos Reinbolt’s art ever presented. 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.
Coinciding with the exhibition at MASP, the artist’s work has received increased attention in recent years, including inclusion in Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940 – 1980 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. With A Head Full of Planets, Santos Reinbolt is now the subject of new scholarly focus. In addition to the exhibition, AFAM will host a milestone symposium this spring dedicated to Santos Reinbolt, which will be the first significant program devoted to the artist and her work. More details on the symposium and programming will be announced in due course.
Featuring 42 textile works, which the artist referred to as quadros de lã (“wool paintings”) and oil paintings, Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets represents more than half of all known works by the artist and will examine the artist’s work through a variety of lenses, including gender, race, and socio-economic dynamics. The exhibition will explore 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. There, Santos Reinbolt painted in her spare time, rendering scenes with expressive brushstrokes in oil on paper and canvas. 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.
The exhibition title, A Head Full of Planets, is derived from the only interviews given with the artist, conducted in 1974 and 1975 by anthropologist and art critic Lélia Coelho Frota, who included Santos Reinbolt’s works in the Brazilian pavilion of the 1978 Venice Biennale. The title refers to an expression (“Uma cabeça cheia de planetas”) that calls attention to the artist’s insistence on her fertile inner world, set against a confining backdrop of class inequality and onerous labor fulfillments, which limited her exposure to the artistic networks of her time and prevented her from embracing a fuller artistic career.
To honor and give voice to Santos Reinbolt, the exhibition will also include recordings of Santos Reinbolt’s interviews with Coelho Frota performed by poet, educator, and Black feminist scholar Luana Reis who, like Santos Reinbolt, was born and raised in Bahia, Brazil.
Valérie Rousseau, Curatorial Chair for Exhibitions and Senior Curator of Self-Taught Art & Art Brut at the American Folk Art Museum, commented: “Nearly 50 years since her death, Madalena Santos Reinbolt’s artistic achievements are only now beginning to receive the critical attention they deserve. Her work presents spaces of creative freedom as much as they are expressions of resistance, echoing her own intersecting existences. We were inspired to organize the exhibition according to the artist’s predominant compositional choices, recurrent subjects, and self-affirming forms of visual thinking. As the exhibition title alludes, Santos Reinbolt’s work can be understood as a form of knowledge that bridges multiple realms, situating her art within a richer perspective honoring diverse cultural legacies.”
Jason T. Busch, Becky and Bob Alexander Director and CEO, American Folk Art Museum, remarked: “For more than six decades, the American Folk Art Museum has shared the largely untold stories of folk and self-taught artists from the United States and across the globe. In presenting the first dedicated museum exhibition for Santos Reinbolt outside Brazil—and the first exhibition for a Brazilian artist at AFAM—we are boldly rethinking how to tell the history of self-taught and folk art in the 21st century. We are honored to partner with such an esteemed institution as MASP to celebrate Madalena Santos Reinbolt in this groundbreaking exhibition.”
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Lead support for Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets is provided by the Ford Foundation.
Major support is provided by The Coby Foundation and the Madalena Santos Reinbolt Advisory Committee: Vilma Eid, Lee Ann Dillon, Luciana Solano, Maria Fernanda Mazzuco.
Additional support is provided by the Consulate-General of Brazil in New York / Instituto Guimarães Rosa, Citi, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the David Davies and Jack Weeden Fund for Exhibitions.
About the American Folk Art Museum
Founded in 1961, the American Folk Art Museum is a global leader dedicated to the preservation and promotion of folk and self-taught art across time and place. Candid, genuine, and unexpected, the Museum celebrates the creativity of individuals whose singular talents have been refined largely through personal experience rather than formal artistic training. With a collection spanning 8,000 works of art from four centuries and nearly every continent, the American Folk Art Museum engages people of all backgrounds through its collections, exhibitions, publications, and public programs as the leading forum shaping the understanding and appreciation of folk and self-taught art. Thanks to the generous support of our members, patrons, and donors, admission to the Museum is always free.