The first English-language monograph on seminal Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa (born 1961), this substantial volume is also the artist’s most comprehensive to date. Pessoa’s sculptural work, which often mobilizes materials like human hair, leather, wax and animal blood, evokes issues related to human and animal bodies, vacillates between beauty and abjection and forges formal connections between indigenous Brazilian traditions and international postminimal art.
Surveying work from throughout Pessoa’s career, from her beginnings in the late 1980s through to the present, with selections from the artist’s sketchbooks and archives, this volume argues for Pessoa’s unique contribution to Brazilian art. Included are texts by international scholars Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira and Alex Bacon, as well as an interview with Pessoa by Liz Munsell. Solange Pessoa introduces English-language readers to the artist’s compelling body of work from the past three decades.
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is a British/Venezuelan art historian and curator in modern and contemporary art, specializing in Latin American art. Most recently she was a visiting scholar in the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University. She was the chief curator of the Museum of Latin American Art, MOLAA in Long Beach, California, and the director and chief curator of the Cisneros Fontanals Arts Foundation (CIFO) and the Ella Fontanals Cisneros Collection.
Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira is Assistant Professor of Literature, Arts and Media at Universität Zurich and member of the Lateinamerika-Zentrum Zürich and the Zentrum Künste und Kulturtheorie. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Paris, and the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil. He is the author of A invenção de uma pele: Nuno Ramos em obras (Iluminuras, 2017).
Liz Munsell is the Lorraine and Alan Bressler Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she has served in curatorial positions since 2009. Beginning in 2012 she worked to establish the MFA as the first encyclopedic museum in the U.S. to fully integrate performance art into its exhibitions and permanent collection. Between 2012-17 she held a visiting curator post at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. A Fulbright Scholar to Chile in 2006, Munsell holds a BA in International Letters and Visual Studies from Tufts University and a Masters in Cultural Studies from the Universidad de Chile.