Mestre Didi: Spiritual Form

Exposición / El Museo del Barrio / 1230 Fifth Avenue (en 104th Street) / Nueva York, New York, Estados Unidos
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Cuándo:
13 mar de 2025 - 13 jul de 2025

Inauguración:
13 mar de 2025

Organizada por:
El Museo del Barrio

Artistas participantes:
Abdias Nascimento, Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos, Antonio Oloxedê, Aurelino dos Santos, Ayrson Heráclito, Deoscóredes Maximiliano dos Santos - Mestre Didi, Emanoel Alves de Araújo, Goya Lopes, Jorge dos Anjos, Nadia Taquary, Rubem Valentim

       

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Descripción de la Exposición

Organized by El Museo del Barrio, "Mestre Didi: Spiritual Form" is a landmark monographic exhibition exploring the work of the late Afro-Brazilian sculptor, writer, cultural advocate and spiritual leader Mestre Didi (Salvador, Bahia, 1917-2013). As the first major U.S. museum exhibition of Didi’s work in 25 years, the survey unites over 30 of his sculptures and offers a rare view of his far-reaching spiritual and artistic legacy. Over the course of his career, from the 1960s until the 2010s, Mestre Didi was a visionary emissary for Candomblé, an Afro-diasporic religion which developed in Brazil as formerly enslaved Africans handed down their Yoruba spiritual practices. He was perhaps the first artist to reimagine Candomblé ritual objects as artworks in their own right. El Museo’s exhibition will foreground Mestre Didi’s spiritually evocative and formally imaginative sculptures and present new interpretations of his symbolic repertoire. His distinctive artworks combine the traditional materials, shapes, and symbols of the orishas, the Candomblé deities, to create a modern sculptural language. "Mestre Didi: Spiritual Form" also contextualizes Didi’s practice by including key works by his artistic peers and by contemporary practitioners. In addition to Mestre Didi, the exhibition includes works by Emanoel Araújo, Jorge dos Anjos, Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos, Aurelino dos Santos, Ayrson Heráclito, Goya Lopes, Antonio Oloxedê, Abdias Nascimento, Arlete Soares, Nádia Taquary, and Rubem Valentim. The influence of these artists’ shared interest in African visual languages ranges from 20th century modernisms to the continued innovation of Black diasporic aesthetics today. The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue featuring contributions from the curators and newly commissioned scholarly essays by art historians Roberto Conduru and Abigail Lapin Dardashti and biographer Joselia Aguiar. It will also include selected reprints of the artist’s own writings, made available in English for the first time. Mestre Didi: Spiritual Form is curated by Rodrigo Moura, chief curator and guest curator Ayrson Heráclito with Chloë Courtney, curatorial fellow.

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