Oscar Niemeyer Museum brings African art collection to Morretes
A selection from the exhibition “Africa: Artistic Expressions of a Continent,” organized by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON), will be open to the public starting October 1st in Morretes, on the coast of Paraná. Curated by Renato Araújo da Silva, the exhibition brings together approximately 30 artworks.
The initiative is part of Paraná's cultural policy to promote and encourage the democratization of art and culture by taking the collection outside the institution. This initiative is fully aligned with the MON's goal of becoming increasingly accessible to all audiences.
The exhibition presents a selection from a donation of approximately two thousand African artworks, 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.
The MON was the museum chosen to house the donation due to its technical facilities, management capabilities, and institutional credibility. Other major collections have been donated to the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in recent years for the same reasons, such as over four thousand works by the artist Poty Lazzarotto in 2022 and approximately three thousand works of Asian art in 2018.
African exhibition
The exhibition “Africa: Artistic Expressions of a Continent,” organized by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON), is on long-term display in the museum’s Room 4 in Curitiba. A selection from the show is now arriving in Morretes as a traveling exhibition.
According to the exhibition's curator, Renato Araújo da Silva, the works donated to the MON were acquired over the course of more than 50 years by the couple Ivani and Jorge Yunes, owners of one of Brazil's largest art collections.
“With the exhibition at the MON of objects from such distinct cultural heritages, we find an important common ground: within the museum, they are elevated to the same artistic platform, placing African art on par with world art,” he says. “This is a way to honor the visual ancestry of the past and to open up new plantings, routes, and perspectives for this art in the future,” comments Renato.
The works in the collection originate from countries such as Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mozambique, among others.
Renato Araújo da Silva is a historian specializing in philosophy, holding a degree from the University of São Paulo, and the co-author of the book “África em Artes”, among other published works. A curator and researcher, he has worked at the Museu Afro and organized exhibitions at other museums, such as the Museum of Sacred Art of São Paulo.
The incorporation of the African art collection was part of a process to consolidate the MON’s guiding framework, which establishes the institution’s distinctive focus as prioritizing the collection of art from Paraná and Brazil while expanding its non-Eurocentric perspective to include Latin American, Asian, and African art.
