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A Meeting of Places and Minds

The MAM Garden at Sesc

The MAM Sculpture Garden is one of the most striking features of Ibirapuera Park, an iconic space for leisure activities and social gatherings in the city of São Paulo. A transitional zone between the MAM and its urban surroundings, the garden extends beyond the conventional boundaries of the museum space. It invites visitors to share and enjoy the space through art without obstructing those who simply wish to stroll in the park. Officially opened in 1993, the MAM Garden has played a significant role in the museum’s history during its time in Ibirapuera Park. Documents show that soon after the inauguration of the museum’s main building in 1969, MAM began to take an interest in maintaining the artworks scattered throughout the area and set about creating a “Sculpture Garden” using pieces from its own collection. Following renovations in 1980, which gave the museum its iconic glass façade and redefined its connection to the park and the city, the Garden received still greater attention. The curatorial approach came together in 1993, when the artworks were repositioned and the area between the Oca, the Bienal Pavilion, and MAM was landscaped by the firm of Roberto Burle Marx, in partnership with Haruyoshi Ono.

Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) was one of Brazil’s greatest modern artists. His work across multiple media has made lasting contributions to the fields of landscape architecture, urban design, and ecology. In particular, Burle Marx played a vital role in establishing gardens as a form of artistic expression capable of conferring new meaning on open spaces, especially those of public importance. Between 1992 and 1993, Burle Marx produced a landscape design project for Ibirapuera Park, highlighting the area outside the MAM and the artworks from its collection installed there. The Sculpture Garden had already been included in two previous versions of Burle Marx’s project for the Park, in 1953 and 1974, but it was only in the 1990s that these plans fully came to fruition. Intended by Burle Marx as “a space to foster artistic coexistence in the community,” the landscaping of the MAM Garden introduced new species of vegetation—grouped in such a way as to highlight their common features and, at the same time, exploit the different textures and colors. He also created a network of gravel, pebble, and grassy paths to direct visitors to the artworks.

Now that renovation work being done on the Ibirapuera Park canopy has obliged the MAM to operate elsewhere, we are proposing a kind of recreation of the MAM Garden at Sesc Vila Mariana, but with no intention of literally reconstructing its vegetation or displaying the same works installed in the original space. Influenced by Burle Marx’s prolific work, especially the drawings and paintings that he produced for many of his landscaping projects, we have put together an exhibition whose architecture is based on the spaces, colors, lines, and shapes of two important projects: the MAM Sculpture Garden, in Ibirapuera Park, and the garden of the Gustavo Capanema Palace, in Rio de Janeiro, which was formerly home to Brazil’s Ministry of Health and Education. The first inspired the “island-like” groupings of exhibited works and the different elevations of these “islands” reflecting the varied topography of the MAM Garden. The colors and designs of the bases were inspired by a painting Burle Marx produced in 1938 as a study for the garden of the Gustavo Capanema Palace, showing an area marked off by gentle curves with a variety of plant species arranged in blocks of color, likewise gently curved.

The Sesc Vila Mariana exhibition includes works that are part of—or were once included in—the Ibirapuera Park Sculpture Garden exhibition, along with others works from the MAM’s collection that relate in different ways to nature, the body, the city, and materiality, with traits and techniques that express unavoidable social tensions. As with the Sculpture Garden activities routinely organized by the MAM’s Education team, the museum’s educators will carry out educational proposals throughout the exhibition period to draw the visitors’ attention to the various ways they can interact with the Burle Marx landscape that we have reinterpreted here.

curators
Cauê Alves
Gabriela Gotoda

The MAM Garden at Sesc

Welcome

A Meeting of Places and Minds

The MAM Garden at Sesc

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