Oscar Niemeyer Museum brings collection of African art to Assaí
A section of the exhibition "Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent", held by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON), will be open to the public from October 17 at the Japanese Immigration Memorial in Assaí, in the north of Paraná. Curated by Renato Araújo da Silva, the exhibition brings together around 30 works.
"The initiative is part of Paraná's cultural policy of promoting and encouraging the democratization of art and culture, taking the collection outside the institution," comments the Museum's director-president, Juliana Vosnika. "This initiative is totally in line with MON's proposals to become increasingly accessible to all audiences."
MON is the largest art museum in Latin America, with a floor space of over 35,000 square meters. It is state property linked to the Paraná State Department of Culture. With its natural vocation for visual arts, architecture and design, it has Asian and African collections.
The exhibition is a selection of the donation of approximately 1,700 works of African art, the result of a partnership between the Oscar Niemeyer Museum and the Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection (CIJY), in São Paulo. Since 2021, the collection has belonged to the state of Paraná.
MON was chosen to house the donation because of its technical conditions, management capacity and the institution's credibility. Other large collections have been donated to the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in recent years for the same reasons, such as more than four thousand works by the artist Poty Lazzarotto in 2022 and around three thousand works of Asian art in 2018.
"For all these reasons, MON's collection has recently increased fivefold and now has more than 14,000 pieces, making it one of the most important in South America," explains Juliana.
African Exhibition
The exhibition "Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent", organized by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, can be seen in Room 4 of the MON in Curitiba. One section is now traveling to Assai.
According to the exhibitions's curator, Renato Araújo da Silva, the works donated to MON were acquired over more than 50 years by Ivani and Jorge Yunes, who have one of the largest art collections in Brazil.
"With the exhibition at MON of objects from such different cultural heritages, we find an important common point here: within the Museum, they are elevated to the same artistic platform, bringing African art up to the level of world art," he says. "This is a way of honoring the visual ancestry of the past and opening up new plantings, routes and perspectives for this art in the future," says Renato.
The works in the collection come from countries such as Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique, among others.
Renato Araújo da Silva is a historian with a degree in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo and co-author, among other published works, of the book "Africa in the Arts". A curator and researcher, he worked at the Afro Museum and held other exhibitions at museums such as the Sacred Art Museum in São Paulo.
The addition of the African art collection was part of a process to consolidate MON's frame of reference, which sets the institution apart by prioritizing the collection of art from Paraná and Brazil and expanding its non-Eurocentric gaze to Latin American, Asian and African art.
ABOUT MON
The Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON) is a state heritage site linked to the State Secretariat for Culture. The institution houses important references of national and international artistic production in the areas of visual arts, architecture and design, as well as large Asian and African collections. In total, the collection has approximately 14,000 works of art, housed in a space of more than 35,000 square meters, making MON the largest art museum in Latin America.
Service
Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent" exhibition
Opening: 17/10/2025, at 11am
Exhibition period: until 25/1/2026
Location: Japanese Immigration Memorial (Rua Presidente Kennedy, 480, Assaí - PR)
Organized by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON)
www.museuoscarniemeyer.org.br
