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New York, NY | Curator-Led Tour of “Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets” at the American Folk Art Museum
May 1 | 9:30 am – 10:30 am
Join ArtTable for a curator-led tour of Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets at the American Folk Art Museum, led by Valérie Rousseau, PhD, Curatorial Chair and Senior Curator of 20th-Century & Contemporary Art.
Featuring 42 textile works and oil paintings, Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets is the first comprehensive survey of Santos Reinbolt’s art ever presented and marks the first-ever solo museum exhibition for the artist organized outside her native Brazil. Best known for her large-scale embroideries made from hundreds of vibrant colored threads, which the artist referred to as quadros de lã (“wool paintings”), the exhibition represents more than half of all known works by the artist and examines the artist’s work through a variety of lenses, including gender, race, and socio-economic dynamics.
A Head Full of Planets explores the context in which Santos Reinbolt’s artistic practice crystallized in the early 1950s, after she became a live-in cook for the architect Lota de Macedo Soares and her partner, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, at their home in Petrópolis, a mountain getaway favored by Brazilian high society. It was not until the mid-1960s, while working in another household, that she began to dedicate herself to embroidery and would begin creating many of the works for which she is best known today.
Click here to read more about the exhibition and this mysterious yet extraordinary artist, as well as a recent artnet article about the exhibition and Dr. Rousseau’s curatorial process.
The American Folk Art Museum is fully accessible. Gallery stools and wheelchairs are available upon request, and an access ramp is available to enter the upper gallery if needed. If you require additional accommodations, please email us at programs@arttable.org.
Program Admission:
- ArtTable Members – $15
- Member Guests – $20
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Please note that ArtTable registration fees go toward administrative costs for the nonprofit organization.
ArtTable’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
About Valérie Rousseau, PhD
Valérie Rousseau, PhD, is Curatorial Chair and Senior Curator of 20th-Century & Contemporary Art at the American Folk Art Museum, New York. She overviewed critically acclaimed exhibitions, notably Willem van Genk: Mind Traffic (2014), When the Curtain Never Comes Down (AAMC award, 2015), Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet (2015), Photo|Brut (2021), Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered (2022), as well as projects on the legacy of Francesc Tosquelles, the concomitance of psychiatric and artistic avant-gardes (FACE Foundation Curatorial Fellowship “Étant Donnés,” 2019), neurodiversity (IMLS, 2023–2025), art brut literature, art environments, and artists like Henry Darger, William Edmondson, Eugen Gabritschevsky, and Madalena Santos Reinbolt. She authored Bill Traylor (FILAF award, 2018), “Regarder par les failles de ce monde: Intersections de l’art brut et de l’art populaire” (Les cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, 2024), The Hidden Art (Rizzoli, 2017), “Visionary Architectures” (Alternative Guide to the Universe, Hayward Gallery, 2013), and guest edited the issue “The Fate of Self-Taught Art” (The Brooklyn Rail, 2018). In 2022, she participated in the seminar “Showing/Searching: art brut and its archival impulse” of the Bibliothèque Kandinsky Summer University (Centre Pompidou, Paris).
Image credits:
Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Untitled, 1965–1976. Acrylic wool on burlap, 35 7/8 x 46 in. Collection Renan Quevedo, São Paulo, Brazil
Valérie Rousseau, courtesy of the American Folk Art Museum.
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