Frederic, Lord Leighton by Margot Brandlhuber

The card repeats the police record from December 1938, when Bispo was arrested in Rio de Janeiro and diagnosed with “paranoid schizophrenia.” It was the month of Bispo’s revelation. He is described as “indigent,” a wandering Black beggar bearing no documents. The descendant of Black slaves, Arthur Bispo do Rosario (1909/11–1989) spent forty-one years of his life in mental health institutions while accomplishing his “mission.” On the side of the short exhibition text, another mugshot-like portrait of the artist is displayed on the patient card from Colônia Juliano Moreira, the hospital where Bispo was interned. Its central piece, Manto da apresentação, catches the eye with a multiplicity of details, inscribed with colored threads against a light-brown ground: signs and drawings of objects, names, numbers, abbreviations, and streets of Brazilian cities, utensils, boats and a model of a large sailing ship.Ī photographic portrait of the artist wearing his magnum opus reveals not a fashion designer but a Brazilian psychiatric patient. Ī number of extravagant garments, marked by generous color schemes and complex embroidery, open the first of three luminous rooms in “All Existing Materials on Earth,” curated by Tie Jojima, Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Ricardo Resende, and Javier Téllez. The resulting exhibition successfully calls attention to the ways in which these and other complex histories are embedded within the city’s urban fabric.Ĭounterpublic 2023 feels like a combination of Documenta 15, centered on community and collaboration, and Prospect, a triennial that focuses on the social and political dimensions of New Orleans. Artistic director James McAnally, along with a curatorial ensemble that included Allison Glenn, Risa Puleo, Diya Vij, and the “public secret society” New Red Order, chose artworks in relation to a city that has faced both Indigenous displacement and racial violence, from the 1857 Dred Scott case to the 2014 murder of Michael Brown by Ferguson police. Its second iteration features thirty commissioned artworks spread throughout the city.

Louis–based triennial Counterpublic, founded in 2019.

But as he also points out, the public is a dominant community that excludes subaltern groups who must form “counterpublics” to create alternative forms of community and discourse to survive the onslaught of structural oppression that the public produces. What is a public? According to the literary critic Michael Warner, it is a relation between strangers bound together by law, belief, or shared experience.

Frederic, Lord Leighton by Margot Brandlhuber