Image: São Paulo Museum of Modern Art
The course ‘Arte, imigração e deslocamentos,’ with Marina Mazze Cerchiaro, is scheduled from 13 October to 17 November 2026. It examines mobility, migration and transnational circulation in art alongside artists’ trajectories, gender, ecological crisis and Brazilian art history.
The fourth class focuses on migration flows from Eastern Europe to Brazil throughout the twentieth century and the contribution of migrant women to the construction of São Paulo’s art scene, a contribution that has remained, to a large extent, overlooked by Brazilian art historiography. Drawing on original research into the Polish sculptors Pola Rezende and Felícia Leirner and the Bulgarian sculptor Liuba Wolf, the class examines how they built sculptural careers in Brazil from the 1940s onward, including their work, the establishment of international networks and their contributions to São Paulo’s art scene.
The final class connects the course’s historical path with the contemporary debate on forced displacement and ecological crisis, expanding the discussion to forced migrations caused by environmental disasters, economic crisis and the destruction of ecosystems—phenomena that disproportionately affect populations in the Global South. It considers Claudia Andujar, a Swiss-Hungarian photographer of Jewish origin who left Hungary in 1944 because of the persecution of Jews during the Second World War, settled in Brazil in 1955 and devoted much of her work to documenting the Yanomami people and their struggle for survival. The class also addresses Uýra Sodoma, an Indigenous artist, biologist and performer from Manaus who incorporates the Amazonian forest to denounce its destruction.
Migration routes in the Americas are examined through Paulo Nazareth’s documentation of his walk to the United States, which exposes the marks of racism, the border and South-North mobility, and Judi Werthein’s work ‘Brincos,’ which directly addresses the policies of control and exclusion governing who may move and under what conditions.
Cerchiaro has taught courses at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, MAC/USP and MAM-SP, with a focus on women artists, Brazilian modernism and sculpture, and is a founding member of the Women’s Archives Network, dedicated to gender equity in the cultural-heritage field.
