New York, NY | Artist Studio Visit with Josely Carvalho

Josely Carvalho (b. 1942, São Paulo, Brazil) is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, and activist whose work spans printmaking, installation, blown glass, public art, and olfactory media. Informed by early memories, including childhood memories of Paraná’s vanishing Araucaria forests, her practice uses personal experience to explore ecological, political, and social themes. Josely Carvalho classifies her work as “Diaries” “Books” and “Chapters”. By approaching a broad range of materials as texts, Carvalho unravels narrative expectations to address issues of feminism, indigenous rights, and shelter in her multisensory and empathetic oeuvre.

Carvalho studied art and architecture in St. Louis, Missouri, before relocating to New York City in the 1970s, where she became a pivotal figure in the city’s activist and Latin American artist communities. She was a leading member of Artist’s Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. She founded The Silk Screen Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, amplifying marginalized voices through collective creative production. In recent years, Carvalho has emerged as a pioneer in the field of olfactory art through her ongoing Diary of Smells series, culminating in works like Glass Ceiling: Resilience (2018), at at the Museum of Contemporary Art in São Paulo, for which she received the International Art and Olfaction Sadakichi Award in 2019.

Her work has been exhibited widely across the Americas, including exhibitions at the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes (Rio de Janeiro), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Museum of Contemporary Art (São Paulo), and the Brooklyn Museum’s landmark exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. Carvalho’s practice has been recognized with major awards from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2022, she became the first Brazilian artist to receive the Lee Krasner Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. This distinction honors her decades-long contributions to contemporary art and social consciousness.

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