Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets
In a major first, the American Folk Art Museum in New York presents Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets, showing now until May 25, 2025. It's the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work ever staged, and the first solo museum show for Santos Reinbolt outside Brazil. Featuring 42 textile pieces and oil paintings, the exhibition highlights more than half of the artist’s known works and explores them through lenses of race, gender, and class.
Best known for her vivid embroideries on coarse burlap sacks (known as quadros de lã, or 'wool paintings') Santos Reinbolt brought together hundreds of brightly coloured threads to create layered, highly expressive scenes. These embroidered works sit alongside earlier oil paintings, revealing the full arc of her textile practice and narrative imagination. “She seemed to enjoy the irregular mesh of the burlap,” says curator Valérie Rousseau. “It’s less confining, and she really took advantage of that.”
Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Untitled, 1965–1976. Collection Edmar Pinto Costa, São Paulo, Brazil.
Born into a farming family in rural Bahia, Santos Reinbolt moved south in adulthood to work as a domestic labourer. In the 1950s, she became a live-in cook for architect Lota de Macedo Soares and the American poet Elizabeth Bishop in Petrópolis, a mountain town favoured by the elite. The household was steeped in Brazilian modernism, with works by Tarsila do Amaral and Alexander Calder on the walls. Santos Reinbolt likely absorbed much from this artistic milieu, and may have met key figures such as Roberto Burle Marx.
Madalena Santos Reinbolt (ca. 1974–1975). Photo ©Lélia Coelho Frota. Attributed to Pedro Oswaldo Cruz and Cristina Oswaldo Cruz.
Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Untitled (Salvador) (ca. 1950–60). Collection Rafael Moraes, São Paulo, Brazil.
But, her artistic pursuits were not encouraged. “The family was very annoyed that she was spending too much time creating her own work, instead of taking care of the cooking,” says Rousseau. Bishop later admitted in a letter that they let her go because “it finally got to be a choice between art and peace, and tranquility seemed more important than a masterpiece every afternoon.”
Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Untitled, 1965–1976. Acrylic wool on burlap. Collection Edmar Pinto Costa, São Paulo, Brazil.
Despite such barriers, Santos Reinbolt remained dedicated to her craft. Most of her works are undated, but her transition to yarn as her primary material occurred in the mid-1960s. She also made her own clothes and would occasionally incorporate those fabrics into her embroideries - further entwining the personal, domestic, and creative.
Originally organised by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), the exhibition has been expanded in New York with newly written wall texts and research into the context of each work. Rousseau and curatorial assistant Dylan Blau Edelstein contacted collectors to gather stories behind the pieces, some of which depict known family scenes, rituals, or life milestones. Other themes come entirely from the artist’s imagination, featuring recurring motifs such as a mountain range and a lake shaped like an eye.
Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Untitled, 1965–1976. Acrylic wool on burlap, 35 7/8 x 46 in. Collection Renan Quevedo, São Paulo, Brazil.
The exhibition’s title comes from a rare recorded interview with Santos Reinbolt, in which she describes her inner life as uma cabeça cheia de planetas—“a head full of planets.” These recordings, originally conducted by anthropologist Lélia Coelho Frota, are performed in the exhibition by poet and feminist scholar Luana Reis, herself from Bahia.
Together, the works offer a richly textured world - part memory, part invention - stitched together by a woman whose needlework defied the boundaries of class, labour, and recognition.
-
Further Information:
Talks and Events:
Tuesday, May 20, 2025 – To Speak In Threads: Hellen Ascoli, Anna Burckhardt Pérez and Siu Vásquez in Conversation (Online)
American Folk Art Museum
-
Image Credits:
Lead Image: Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Untitled, 1969–1976. Wool on burlap, 32 7/8 x 40 1/2 in. Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil, gift of Edmar Pinto Costa, 2021, MASP.11309
All other images as credited in photo captions.