In the Studio: Ernesto Neto

Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto will discuss his work and artistic practice with co curator of Bispo do Rosario: All Existing Materials on Earth, Javier Téllez. This program will be held in conjunction with our current exhibition.

Join us live on Instagram from your cell phone, or watch on YouTube after, for a series of remote visits to artists' studios to bring Americas Society's Visual Arts public programs to your home. Check out the series playlist.

About the artist

Ernesto Neto was born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro where he continues to live and work. Since the mid-1990s, he has produced an influential body of work that explores constructions of social space and the natural world by inviting physical interaction and sensory experience. Drawing from biomorphism and minimalist sculpture, along with neo-concretism and other Brazilian vanguard movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the artist both references and incorporates organic shapes and materials—spices, sand, and shells among them—that engage all five senses, producing a new type of sensory perception that renegotiates boundaries between artwork and viewer, the organic and manmade, and the natural, spiritual and social worlds. Neto’s work is well represented in international museum collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Tate Gallery in London, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Hara Museum in Tokyo, Contemporary Art Center of Inhotim in Brazil, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many others.

About the moderator

Javier Téllez is a Venezuelan-born, NYC-based artist and curator. His work brings peripheral communities and invisible situations to the fore of contemporary art and often involves people diagnosed with mental illness to produce film installations that question the notions of the normal and the pathological. He has had solo exhibitions at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester (2018), San Francisco Art Institute (2014), Kunsthaus Zürich (2014), Stedelijk Museum (2013), Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2011), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (2005), and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2004). He has curated projects such as Los de arriba y los de abajo at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City (2009), Hommage to K.F. Drenthe. Works from the collection of Dr. Guislain Museum at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent (2013), and The Doors of Perception in collaboration with The Outsider Art Fair for Frieze New York (2019). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999 and the Global Mental Health Award for Innovation in the Arts from Columbia University in 2016.

Visit the Americas Society Visual Arts YouTube Channel for recordings of In the Studio Series and other previous events.

Follow the conversation on Instagram: #IntheStudioAS | @americassociety.visualarts

More digital content from Visual Arts at Americas Society:

• Check out the current exhibition: Bispo do Rosario: All Existing Materials on Earth.
• Check out the current iteration of our Flag Series: Raul Mourão
• Read about the previous exhibition Tropical is Political: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime
• Read the exhibition catalogue for This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975.
• Watch videos of recent events:
  • Discussions on Minnie Evans and Arthur Bispo do Rosario
  • Elena Damiani's Zenith
  • Tropical is Political: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime
  • Geles Cabrera: Museo Escultórico
  • Young Filmmakers in New York: Collective Visions Screening
  • This Must Be The Place: An Oral History Book Launch
  • This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975
  • Terence Gower: The Good Neighbor

In the Studio series

Check out previous conversations with artists bringing us to their virtual studios.

• In the Studio: Leda Catunda 
• In the Studio: Jaime Lauriano