Meet the Curator: Alina Young
A practiced curator, Alina specialises in public realm commissions, as well as curating public exhibitions.
With a MA in History of Design from Oxford University, Alina is a trained researcher dedicated to craft practices. Her diverse career includes curating for galleries, art sales, and consulting for exhibitions and public art projects. Alina's commitment to celebrating makers leads her to regularly interview artists and write for publications. She is based in London.
A Discussion on the Brazilian Contemporary Art Scene
Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, Salvador, Bahia, Casa do Alaká, 2019
What areas of the art world or styles or ways of working are you particularly drawn to?
For me, craft is at the root of culture. In my curatorial work I’m drawn to contemporary art that interprets craft practices – ceramics, textiles, glass, stone, wood, basketry. I like to understand a place’s history through its craft – how communities form around craft practices, the use of handcrafted objects in daily life, and how craft can become a storytelling tool.
Everyday objects made by anonymous artisans inspire me just as much as fine art. A large part of why I travel is to experience localised craft in its own context, meet craftspeople and immerse myself in a completely new visual culture.
© Artelier
Why did you choose this location for your trip?
Brazil’s art, architecture and design are as wide and varied as its landscapes. It fascinated me how Brazil’s visionary modern cities, shaped by futuristic buildings by the likes of Lina Bo Bardi and Oscar Niemeyer, sit alongside the fading baroque grandeur of Brazil’s Portuguese colonial towns.
Meanwhile, masterpieces of Brazilian modernism in fine art effortlessly translate to furniture design and coexist alongside extraordinary indigenous crafts. It’s rare that a country’s cultural output can be so diverse, and yet still feel so unmistakably Brazilian.
For this trip we decided to journey round the south-west and centre of the country – São Paolo and the state’s coast, the colonial-era towns of Paraty and Ouro Preto, the art scene around Belo Horizonte, and the architecture of Brasilia. We planned it this way to get as much variety in terms of art and architecture, in a relatively short space of time.
© Artelier
© World Bank
Artelier curator trip from São Paolo and the state’s coast, to the the colonial-era towns of Paraty and Ouro Preto, Belo Horizonte, and Brasilia.
© Artelier
© Artelier
© Artelier
© Artelier
© Museu de Arte de São Paulo
Describe how the works you’ve seen were curated
I was impressed with the visionary curatorial displays in many of the art museums. The most striking was the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), with both the building and the exhibition designed by Lina Bo Bardi.
The canvases are hung on clear blocks in the middle of the room, as if suspended in mid-air, so when you ascend into the exhibition hall you have a crowd of paintings looking back at you. There’s no fixed route, and each artwork’s labels (in Portuguese and English) are on the back. I loved how both the lack of prescribed route and the hidden interpretation made you move around the display – you’re drawn to pieces entirely by your own instinct, and you’re forced to appreciate the artwork before you learn more about it. By the time you’re at the other end of the gallery, you look back at the opposite effect – a series of labels and their stories, hiding the artworks they describe.
The display rotates through the permanent collection, so many of the works are by Brazilian artists or those that emigrated and travelled in Brazil throughout the 20th century. The interpretation material was highly descriptive, both on artists’ lives and the sociopolitical contexts the works were produced in, which made these unfamiliar pieces really engaging.
© Lina Bo Bardi, 1946
Exhibition design by Lina Bo Bardi, MASP - Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, 1970. Photo: Paolo Gasparini © Instituto Bardi / Casa de Vidro / Paolo Gasparini.
Which artwork stood out to you and why?
Inhotim Museum
My favourite ‘artwork’ was actually a place – the sculpture park Inhotim. One of the world’s largest open-air contemporary art museums, Inhotim is renowned across South America as a fantastical vision for experiencing art. The museum’s landscape and architectural design are an artwork in itself; 23 architect-designed pavilions sit within a protected botanical garden, encompassing 5,000 acres of Atlantic Forest Biome.
Dotted in between are outdoor sculptures and themed gardens. The only way to describe it is like a dreamscape of tropical plants and art, where striking modern galleries seem to appear in the forest or by a lake, and you never know what art you will be met with inside.
© MASP Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand
© Inhotim Museum / Artelier
Contemporary Installations
The gallery pavilions house either permanent installations or a temporary exhibition, where they are installed annually or biennially. Almost the entire programme is contemporary art.
A particular pavilion that stood out to me was the Adriana Varejão gallery. The space was designed especially for housing Varejão’s work; futuristic and ‘floating’ in a pool of water, you ascend upwards into the exhibition hall, and so are suddenly surrounded by her installation. Varejão is a multidisciplinary artist who reflects on Brazil’s tensions around race and ethnicity; the oil and plaster installation at Inhotim reinterprets baroque Portuguese azulejos tile-making, so that the motifs of tiles surround you in a ‘seaquake’ of cracked blue waves.
© Artelier
© Hugh Martins
© Adriana Varejão Gallery at Inhotim Museum
© Artelier
© Michel Rios
© Artelier
Inhotim Museum
Did any aspect of the trip surprise you?
Indigenous Origins
The indigenous craft galleries were a revelation. We came across a handful of these in São Paolo and Paraty. I was astounded by the variety of materials and techniques, and the specialisms of individual tribes. Many of these objects – such as decorated clay pots, graphically patterned baskets, or footstool benches that depict animals – are very commonly found in interiors across the country.
Here, their indigenous origins were treated with huge respect. It was amazing how in these informal galleries each piece was labelled with the location and tribe that it came from, building a craft map of the Amazon.
© All Rights Reserved by Artefato
Local Involvements
It was humbling to see the artistic quality of the crafts and the effort that was taken to accurately place where they came from. The galleries had collections of reference books by social historians about the crafts. The gallery workers themselves were often of mixed indigenous backgrounds and were eager to discuss the objects’ contexts.
The gallerists also explained that these small galleries are in many ways a political enterprise. Charities work with indigenous tribes in the Amazon, bringing their work to cities and economic hubs to give them a market. Amazonian tribes are hugely under threat from deforestation due to agriculture. The funds earned from galleries selling their traditional crafts not only preserves their craft histories, but help the tribes to gain economic power and buy land, protecting their traditional way of life.
The involvement of charities and galleries means that indigenous people can stay in remote locations, rather than having to travel thousands of miles to sell their work. It was surprising to me how large a role craft played for protecting indigenous people’s livelihoods, and how important this was on a global scale for protecting the Amazon itself.
Where art was housed felt just as important and purposeful. The architectural design in Brazil often focuses on interior-exterior dialogue; in art spaces, the windows seemed like curated viewpoints, framing the art or sitting alongside it. It created an immersive experience without the gimic; the artwork felt very situated in its context.
Alina Young, Senior Curator at Artelier
© Denilson Baniwa / Artefato
Do you see the works being relevant in today’s context?
Art and craft is fundamental to many people’s livelihoods in Brazil – not only indigenous people and large cultural institutions, but countless local artisans. These people’s work is present around us globally, although we may not realize it.
The historic town of Ouro Preto was the first epicentre of wealth in Brazil, as it was a global mining capital for gold and precious jewels from the 18th century. Brazil continues to be a major exporter of the world’s gold and cut gems. Yet around Ouro Preto’s streets, there are still countless independent jewellers who come from generations of local gem-cutters, goldsmiths and merchants. The jewellers’ studios are often within their shops and they were eager to show them, before they send their production all over the world.
Brazil is a huge political and economic world power, but international access to its artistic and craft output is limited beyond South America. Much of the art and craft I saw was entirely new to me. Brazil’s people are incredibly diverse and have been for centuries, so Brazilian art history is truly unique to its locality. It’s encouraging to see more blockbuster exhibitions like the Royal Academy’s Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, which shows the public appetite for Brazilian culture abroad. I hope that the daring contemporary art and craft I saw in Brazil, which so readily and imaginatively tackled domestic sociopolitical challenges, will also find an audience.
© Artelier
© Robert Weldon/GIA
© Royal Academy of Arts
