Véxoa: We Know (Nós sabemos) is a survey exhibition of Brazilian Indigenous artists informed by the role of art as an activist tool. Aiming to challenge the prejudice and erasure that have long disenfranchised Indigenous communities, Véxoa demonstrates the plurality of Indigenous artistic production through indigenous aesthetic manifestations from around Brazil, including paintings, performances, objects, videos, photographs and ceramics. 

Presented non-chronologically, the exhibition defies ethnographic classification and the boundaries of artifact or handicraft toward new forms of cultural preservation and knowledge transmission. Organized by curator and educator Naine Terena, a member of the Terena Indigenous people of the Brazilian State of Mato Grosso, Véxoa was first presented at Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil in 2020. It became a milestone exhibition, and accompanied some of Pinacoteca’s first acquisitions of Indigenous art in its 100-plus-year history. 

Along with such internationally recognized artists as Denilson Baniwa, Jaider Esbell, and the collective MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin/Huni Kuin Artists’ Movement), the exhibition features artists who have emerged more recently in the contemporary art scene, like Gustavo Caboco, Yakunã Tuxá, and Tamikuã Txihi. Also included are artists dedicated to filmmaking, such as Olinda Muniz Tupinambá and the collective ASCURI (Associação Cultural dos Realizadores Indígenas/Cultural Association of Indigenous Filmmakers).

Naine Terena, who in 2023 was appointed to her new position in the Ministry of Culture, Brazil, is now reconstituting the exhibition at Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) with Guest Co-Curator Claudia Mattos Avolese, alongside TUAG Director and Chief Curator Dina Deitsch. The curatorial team will make connections across the diaspora, engaging with the large Brazilian community of Boston, while also intersecting with North American Indigenous sovereignty and culture. They will incorporate information about the social and political circumstances of Indigenous life and history in Brazil and attend to differences between Boston’s Brazilian-American culture and the diversity of Brazil’s population. In addition, TUAG public programs will focus on the rich history of literature and cinema as tools for autonomy and self-representation in Brazilian Indigenous communities, and dialogues with Indigenous artists from other Latin American and North American lineages.

Claudia Mattos Avolese is the Guest Co-Curator of Véxoa at Tufts University Art Galleries as Senior Lecturer in Visual, Material Studies at SMFA at Tufts University. A native of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Avolese obtained her PhD in art history from the Free University in Berlin, Germany, and was an associate fellow at the Courtauld Institute in London for a year. In 2003 she became a professor for the history of art at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in Brazil, where she taught visual arts and art history until moving to the United States in 2019. At the University of Campinas, her courses focused on various topics, including image theory, 19th century landscape traditions, ecology, German Avantgarde and Brazilian Modernism, among others. In 2017, she was a visiting professor at Harvard University. Her scholarly work has appeared in The Art Bulletin, Perspective, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Journal of Art Historiography.

Dina Deitsch is Director and Chief Curator of the Tufts University Art Galleries, located in Medford and at the SMFA at Tufts in Boston. Since arriving at Tufts she founded the university’s public art committee, has organized exhibitions with artists Sanford Biggers, Harry Dodge, Joanne Greenbaum, and Jibade-Khalil Huffman alongside group exhibitions on the themes of artists’ books and contemporary figuration, and produced numerous public programs with artists, writers, and thinkers. Previously, she was the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Interim Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, guest curator for the City of Cambridge’s Public Art Program, and from 2008 - 2015, held the position of Curator of Contemporary Art at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Thierry Fonseca de Freitas Jr. is the Junior Curator at Pinacoteca de São Paulo. He organized the exhibition Chico da Silva e o ateliê do Pirambu (2023). He received a degree in art history from the Federal University of São Paulo. 

Naine Terena, Claudia Mattos Avolese, Dina Deitsch, Thierry Fonseca de Freitas, Jr.

Tufts University Art Galleries

• Pinacoteca de São Paulo
• Véxoa: We Know (Nós sabemos)
• Tufts University Art Galleries: September 7 – December 10, 2023
• $50,000

Touring