How disruptive is it for an ox cart to take visitors to a painting exhibition? This scene took place in the city of Conselheiro Lafaiete, in the countryside of Minas Gerais, during a touring edition of the Arte nas Estações project, which travels across different territories of the country, exhibiting a collection of works by self-taught artists belonging to the holdings of the late International Museum of Naïve Art of Brazil, formerly based in Cosme Velho.
“This is the most radical confrontation I could imagine,” says educator Janaína Melo, responsible for conceiving and coordinating the educational program that accompanies Arte nas Estações. In 2023, the project also traveled to two other towns in Minas: Ouro Preto and Congonhas. It is currently hosted at the José Octávio Guizzo Cultural Center in Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, with three sequential exhibitions featuring a total of 262 works by 25 self-taught artists.
By decentralizing the traditional geographic axis of art exhibitions, Arte nas Estações, curated by Ulisses Carrilho, invests in technologies of relationship and participation among people and educators, in order to reaffirm the expression of regional identities wherever it goes. “I see enormous value in the institutional technology generated by the educational program that accompanies the project, for how disruptive it is in proposing programming in articulation with the territory,” Carrilho affirms.
During the Minas stage, the educational team worked with individuals, collectives, and cultural agents from each city to develop various poetic unfoldings of the program, reflecting with audiences on new ways of learning, relating, communicating, interacting, and above all, co-creating from the artworks and exhibitions.
As initially outlined in the Rouanet Law, the educational program of Arte nas Estações was designed to offer teacher-training workshops, as well as accessibility and inclusion initiatives. “But what we actually did—after much discussion, challenges, and reflection—was to trust in the impulse and desire that drive the production of the artists presented in the project. In many cases, these are people who work all day in other jobs and, upon arriving home at night, still find time to paint, weaving commentary on their memories and daily life. We believe this impulse is something common to every individual, provided they find a favorable environment for desire to emerge. Creating this symbolic space was precisely the mission of the educational work we developed,” explains Janaína.
With this principle in mind, the project’s coordination proposed that each participant in the workshops and training programs appropriate the content of the exhibitions and, from their own subjective experience, discover points of connection and convergence with their personal histories. This dynamic extended to the visiting public, who were likewise encouraged to pursue the same desire: to glimpse connections, imagine other stories, and create captions for the works on display.
Shaped by the nature of each territory, the program developed a popular agenda, close to the idea of tradition, linked to what is painted and celebrated by the artists featured in Arte nas Estações.
“I believe we went beyond what was initially envisioned by proposing to the trainee educators that they involve other agents who represent the culture of those territories in the process. From there, extremely rich experiences began to emerge—experiences we hadn’t anticipated, since we didn’t know the particularities of each place. Thus, self-taught individuals in education—coming from other fields of knowledge (a social worker, a tourism professional, a photographer, a graffiti artist, people with no previous experience in cultural mediation but with deep knowledge of the territory)—began to bring in capoeira groups, theater troupes, quilombola communities, people with profound knowledge of herbs, singers, dancers, Carnival blocs, and even a horseback parade. An explosion of relational possibilities came to the surface,” observes Janaína.
The communities began to integrate their practices and interests into the body of the exhibitions: “This became the foundation of our training, which was shaped along the way. We understood that inviting each community, with its experiences and identities, to find points of connection would be the most effective path to spark in visitors a genuine desire for engagement,” says the educator.
“Fortunately,” Janaína continues, “we also built a very powerful team to lead the educational program in the second phase of the project, in Campo Grande, under the coordination of Marcus Perez, an educator who researches and develops practices in dance and popular culture through the lens of queer theory. She and her team quickly identified the public program of Arte nas Estações as a territory of possibilities, especially for their communities. She connected the set of exhibitions with the LGBTQIAPN+ community of Campo Grande. This ‘turn’ added even more power to the educational program and reaffirmed that our methodology—which is based on weaving the program together with the people of each territory—truly enables the creation of a potent environment for learning and, in my view, many other surprising practices of co-creation with audiences.”
By bringing into the center of its spaces bodies that so often remain on the margins, the project becomes even more relevant. If art is a space of experimentation, freedom, and transformation, then presences and absences must be questioned. Is there, in fact, solidarity in the territories where it operates?
“In Campo Grande, there are collectives of sexual dissidents who, coordinated by Janaína, proposed a twist on heterosexuality to talk about afro-trans-centered love, inspired by Dalvan’s painting The Women’s Club (1994). This takes me back to the ox cart in front of the A ferro e fogo exhibition in Conselheiro Lafaiete. It’s a very happy example because it’s allegorical, extravagant, and radical, and at the same time so characteristic of Minas,” notes Carrilho.
Among the activities of the Mato Grosso do Sul stage, the educational program has offered circles of popular dances, abayomi doll-making workshops, charm dance classes, performative activations inspired by the paintings on display, literature workshops, and experimental practices in various artistic languages. Always free of charge, these activities take place within the exhibition space. This week, the play Cult of the Transvestites, by the company De Trans para Frente (From Trans Onward), composed of trans and cross-dresser artists, was presented. The performance blends ballroom culture with sensory elements to reflect on trans identity and visibility.
International recognition
On November 13, the educational program of Arte nas Estações was the subject of a panel during a cycle of conferences organized by the renowned platform La Escuela, in partnership with the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (Malba) and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. The event aimed to create spaces for exchange, dissemination, and critical reflection on artistic-pedagogical practices connected to relevant communities in Latin America.
At the event, Janaína Melo presented the talk “Arte nas Estações: Crossings Between Art, Culture, and Community”, based on the experiences accumulated during the tour through Minas Gerais.
Seeing this conceptual approach validated in international gatherings allows these alliances to expand globally as well, fostering Latin American connections rooted in local practices and in axes that stand as alternatives to the Rio–São Paulo circuit, with special attention to the cultural diversity of Brazil’s different states.
I take this opportunity to call private initiative’s attention to the relevance of art as an economic driver. Culture is a tool of high strategic potential in promoting education, citizenship, and collective well-being, as well as in reducing violence. It is the constitutive and symbolic agent that represents us and inserts us into the international arena, being one of the country’s greatest export values. From an internal perspective, it is one of the most effective instruments for understanding the many different “Brazils,” from North to South.