São Paulo’s MASP Museum Dedicates 2026 to Latin American Art Histories

BRAZIL · VISUAL ART

Saturday, May 30, 2026 — 03:00 BRT — By Adele Cardin

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, known internationally as MASP, has dedicated its entire 2026 program to Latin American Histories, the most ambitious year of its decade-long Histórias curatorial series. The MASP 2026 program spans monographic exhibitions, lectures, courses, seminars and publications, with works by artists from Venezuela, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Peru and Mexico all on view through the year.

What the MASP 2026 program covers

The Latin American Histories program approaches the region not as a fixed geographic category but as an identity in continuous construction. The MASP curatorial team has framed the theme around the concept of latinidad, the idea of Latin American belonging across the historical narratives, artistic traditions and visual cultures of the countries that share the region.

The format combines monographic shows of individual artists and activist collectives with a large group exhibition organised across five thematic cores. The year also includes a full program of lectures, courses, workshops and academic seminars, with new publications planned for several of the major exhibitions.

The museum’s Sala de Vídeo will exhibit a rotating selection of video works by Clara Ianni, Oscar Muñoz, Regina José Galindo, Claudia Martínez Garay, and Edgar Calel. The works address memory, violence, identity, and coloniality, themes that recur across the year’s full program.

The MASP 2026 program builds on the Histórias series

The Histórias series has been MASP’s defining curatorial framework since 2016 under artistic director Adriano Pedrosa, who curated the 2024 Venice Biennale. The series re-reads art history through the lens of underrepresented narratives rather than the standard chronological approach.

The previous editions have included Histórias da infância in 2016, Histórias da sexualidade in 2017, Histórias afro-atlânticas in 2018, Histórias das mulheres, histórias feministas in 2019, Histórias da dança in 2020, Histórias brasileiras in 2021-22, and the more recent Histórias da ecologia through early 2026.

The Latin American year is the eleventh edition in the cycle and the most geographically wide-ranging the museum has attempted. The previous Latin American group shows have focused on single countries or single themes, while the 2026 program aims to capture the regional connections directly.

The headline exhibitions in the MASP 2026 program

Damián Ortega, the Mexican sculptor best known for the 2002 piece Cosmic Thing, opens his first solo São Paulo exhibition at MASP in partnership with the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA). The Sol Calero monographic show, of the Caracas-born and Berlin-based painter, takes one of the museum’s central galleries.

The Pablo Delano exhibition Museu da Antiga Colônia revisits Puerto Rico’s colonial history through document and installation work. The retrospective of Rosa Elena Curruchich, the Guatemalan indigenous painter whose work circulated in small format and remained largely unseen outside Central America for decades, is one of the year’s recovery exhibitions.

The program also includes the first Brazilian presentation of the 1982 Venezuelan film TRANS, directed by Manuel Herreros de Lemos and Mateo Manaure Arilla, which documents the lives of trans people in Caracas during the early 1980s.

Why the MASP 2026 program matters for Latin American art

Latin American art has had recurring spotlight moments in major international institutions, but a year-long commitment from a museum of MASP’s scale is unusual. The institution is one of the most-visited art museums in the southern hemisphere, with annual attendance routinely above one million.

The MASP collection itself has expanded its Latin American holdings substantially since 2016 under Pedrosa’s directorship, and the 2026 program draws extensively on works acquired during this period. The acquisition logic has shifted from the historic European canon that defined the museum’s twentieth-century identity to a focus on regional and twentieth-century Latin American art.

For practising artists in the region, the program provides both critical platform and market visibility. MASP exhibitions consistently translate into international interest, with the Afro-Atlantic and Brazilian Histories editions of the series both having traveled to museums in the United States and Europe after their São Paulo runs.

The MASP 2026 program in the wider São Paulo cultural year

The MASP year shares the calendar with several other significant São Paulo institutional programs. The Pinacoteca de São Paulo’s “vitality” theme includes the first Brazilian retrospective of Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou. The Instituto Tomie Ohtake celebrates 25 years of operation with a multi-show program.

The Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo reopens in 2026 after refurbishment, while the Instituto Moreno Salles, IMS São Paulo, hosts a Fernando Lemos exhibition in the spring. Together, the São Paulo museum year is one of the densest single-city visual-art schedules in Latin America for the decade.

The next major São Paulo Bienal is scheduled for 2027 and will arrive against this backdrop of intensified institutional activity. The MASP 2026 program will set much of the curatorial conversation that the Bienal will need to engage with when it opens.

The Rio Times — Saturday, May 30, 2026 — 03:00 BRT — By Adele Cardin