This exhibition features thirteen works by women artists recently incorporated into the MASP collection, and reflects the continuous work that has been done in order to strengthen their presence in our collection. In 2019, the programming cycle approached Women’s Histories, Feminist Histories, and during the 2020-21 biennium, which is focused on Brazilian Histories, the year 2021 is once again dedicated to women—this is the context for this exhibition. Historically women appear in smaller numbers than men in museum collections and programming and in art history books. In 2017, the year dedicated to Histories of Sexuality at MASP, the Guerrilla Girls, as American feminist artist collective, were featured in an exhibition at the museum, which included a poster pointing out the disparity between the small number of women artists in comparison to the large number of female nudes present in the MASP collection display: at the time, the exhibition was composed of 6% female artists, while today this percentage has risen to 21%. Since then, the poster has been on view in our Picture Gallery in Transformation, on the museum’s 2nd floor, to remind us that there is still much work to be done.We take this opportunity to extend a very special thanks to the artists who donated their works to the MASP collection featured in this exhibition: Carmézia Emiliano, Habuba Farah Ricetti and Laura Lima. We would also like to express our gratitude to those who gifted the other works exhibited: Edmar Pinto Costa, Miguel Chaia, Monica Andrigo Moreira de Ulhoa Coelho and Fabio Ulhoa Coelho, Lais H. Zogbi Porto and Telmo G. Porto, Neyde Ugolini de Moraes, Rose Setubal and Alfredo Setubal, and Teresa Bracher. With their support and that of many others, we continue to build a museum with a more “inclusive, diverse and plural” program and collection, as our mandates.

The exhibition Picture Gallery in Transformation: Recent Gifts is part of a biennium of programming at MASP dedicated to Brazilian Histories, in 2021-22, coinciding with the bicentennial the country’s independence in 2022. In this first year, all the exhibitions are dedicated to women, and include monographic shows devoted to Conceição dos Bugres, Erika Verzutti, Getrudes Altschul, Maria Martins, Ione Saldanha, and, in the Video Room, works by Ana Pi, the Teto Preto collective, Regina Vater, Zahy Guajajara and Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster.

CURATED BY Adriano Pedrosa, MASP artistic director; Amanda Carneiro, assistant curator