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...
(...)
Want to read more of this article?
We are proud to be a subscriber-funded publication with members in 185 countries. We know our readership is passionate about textiles, so we invite you to help us preserve and promote the stories, memories, and histories that fabric holds. Your support allows us to publish our magazine, and also ‘what's on’ information, and subscription interviews, reviews, and long-read articles in our online blog.
ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? CLICK HERE TO ACCESS CONTENT
OR...to continue reading….
Magazine subscribers automatically get free access to all our online content. We send the access code by email with the publication of each issue. You will also find it on the envelope containing your magazine. Please note the access code changes every issue.
-
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.