The panel that accompanies the Curated Sector of the Outsider Art Fair aims to discuss how the dynamics, movements and systems of art and education in Brazil are guided by non-hegemonic currents, consolidating itself as a vibrant multicultural organism whose complexity is not encompassed by Eurocentric and chronologically linear historiographies. Participating in the discussion are Dr. Mateus Nunes, curator of the project; Dr. Luis Pérez-Oramas, art curator and art historian; Dr. Edward J. Sullivan, professor of art history at NYU; and Dr. Bruno Pinheiro, postdoctoral fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The discussions explore theoretical and conceptual themes, such as the significance of the terms “outsider” and “autodidact” in relation to the production of the featured artists; cultural hybridisms of colonial origin that persist in Latin modernity and contemporaneity; and transdisciplinary historiographical models that more effectively address the complexity of these artists' multivalent production. The analyses also examine specific aspects, including parallels between Brazilian and Venezuelan artistic production; the transit of ideas on art and race in Black Modernism throughout the Americas; and intersections among painting, geography, and education between Brazil and the United States.

Bruno Pinheiro is an Art Historian specializing in the Arts and Visual Culture of the African Diaspora in the Americas. He holds a Ph.D. from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), where he analyzed the trajectories of artists of African descent who were active during the mid-twentieth century in Salvador (Brazil) and their circulation in local and international art institutions. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Leonard A. Lauder Center for Modern Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Edward J. Sullivan is an art historian and Professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a scholar of the arts of the Americas with a focus on Mexico, Brazil and the Caribbean, as well as the region’s diasporas in relation to modern and contemporary Latinx art. Edward has also served as curator for some thirty exhibitions in the U.S., Latin America and Europe including, most recently, “Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx” at the New York Botanical Garden. Sullivan has just completed a memoir entitled “Latino New York: Art & Experience, 1970-2001” which will be published later this year by Yale University Press.

Luis Pérez-Oramas is an essayist and poet with a PhD in art history (EHESS, Paris, 1994). He was curator of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros collection in Caracas (1994-2002). Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2003-2017) and of the 30th São Paulo Art Biennial (2012-2013). Professor of art history and theory at the Universities of Upper Brittany, at the School of Fine Arts in the city of Nantes (France) and at the Armando Reverón University Institute of Higher Studies in Plastic Arts (Caracas). He has published the following volumes of essays: Armando Reverón: de los prodigios de la luz a los trabajos del arte (Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas, 1990); Mirar Furtivo (National Council of Culture, Caracas, 1995), La década impensable y otros escritos fechados (Jacobo Borges Museum, Caracas, 1996), La Cocina de Jurassic Park y otros Ensayos Visuales ual Essays (Polar Foundation, Caracas, 1997), Gego-Anudamientos (Mendoza Foundation, Caracas, 2004), La República Baldía. Crónica de una falacia revolucionaria [1995-2014] (La Hoja del Norte, Caracas, 2015), Olvidar la Muerte. Pensamiento del toreo desde América (Pre-textos, Valencia, 2015), La (in) actualidad de la pintura y vericuetos de la imagen (Pre-textos, Valencia, 2021). In the process of publication by the Diego Portales University of Santiago de Chile, Libelo sobre una modernidad residual (2025) and by Fundación Pro-Arte, Caracas: Bárbaro Rivas, la pintura a voces vivas (2025), about the Venezuelan spontaneous artist. Pérez Oramas is also the author of eleven poetry titles, including, recently: Animal vesperal (Editorial Pre-textos, Valencia, 2022). He lives and works in New York.

Mateus Nunes (b. 1997, Belém, Brazil) is a curator, art critic, and researcher from the Brazilian Amazon, based in São Paulo. Nunes holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Lisbon and is a postdoctoral fellow on History of Art and Architecture at Universidade de São Paulo, with previous postdoctoral fellowships at the Getty Foundation and Universidad San Francisco de Quito. In the intersections of text and image, he is interested in non-hegemonic systems of organizing, perceiving and understanding time, history, and influence. Having collaborated with galleries and museums worldwide as coordinating courses at Museu de Arte de São Paulo, his writings are published in Artforum, ArtReview, Carla, Flash Art, Frieze, Terremoto, and academic journals.

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For more information visit the Outsider Art Fair website.