Queer Histories Exposition collective

MASP - Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand closes the year dedicated to Queer Histories with a group exhibition that will occupy three of the museum’s exhibition spaces from December 13 to April 13, 2025. The Queer Histories exhibition brings together more than 150 national and international works and documents.

Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, MASP; Julia Bryan-Wilson, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, MASP; André Mesquita, Curator, MASP; Leandro Muniz, Assistant Curator, MASP, and Teo Teotonio, Curatorial Assistant, MASP, the exhibition is divided into eight sections: Love and Desire; Icons and Muses; Spaces and Territories; Ecosexualities and Transcendental Fantasies; Sacred and Profane; Abstractions; Archives; and Cuir Library.

Juxtaposing the past and the present, the exhibition presents works from different periods and artistic currents, highlighting visions of queer histories that transcend time and space, as well as pointing to strategies of resistance. In O beijo 20 (2024), from the series Álbum dos desesquecimentos, Bahian artist Mayara Ferrão uses artificial intelligence to reveal erased narratives and imagine new futures, creating images that simulate old photographs to invent an iconography of Black lesbian histories.

Queer Histories is part of MASP’s annual program dedicated to Histories of LGBTQIA+ Diversity. This year’s program also includes exhibitions by Francis Bacon, Mário de Andrade, Catherine Opie, Lia D Castro, Leonilson, the Gran Fury and Serigrafistas Queer collectives, the MASP Renner collection, as well as shows in the Video Room by Masi Mamani/Bartolina Xixa, Tourmaline, Ventura Profana, Kang Seung Lee, and Manauara Clandestina.

The exhibition is part of a series of projects around the plural notion of “histories,” a word that encompasses fiction and non-fiction, personal and political accounts, private and public narratives, with a speculative, plural, and polyphonic character. These histories have an open, procedural quality, as opposed to the more monolithic and definitive character of traditional historical narratives. In this sense, among the annual programs and previous exhibitions, MASP has organized Histories of Sexuality (2017), Afro-Atlantic Histories (2018), Women’s Histories, Feminist Histories (2019), Dance Histories (2020), Brazilian Histories (2021-22) and Indigenous Histories (2023).