As 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair returns to New York for its twelfth edition, the fair once again positions itself at the center of global conversations surrounding contemporary African and diasporic art. Taking place at Chelsea’s Starrett-Lehigh Building from May 13–17, 2026, this year’s edition brings together more than twenty galleries and exhibitors from across Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, reaffirming the fair’s growing role as one of the most important international platforms dedicated to artistic practices emerging from Africa and its diasporas.
Among the most significant curatorial interventions within this year’s edition is 1-54 Presents: Brazil Beyond Brazil, a special presentation curated by Brazilian curator, professor, and researcher Igor Simões. Focused on Afro-Brazilian artistic production and its place within broader diasporic histories, the exhibition arrives at a moment when institutions across the world are increasingly grappling with questions around representation, colonial legacies, Black modernities, and the rewriting of dominant art historical narratives. Yet rather than merely inserting Afro-Brazilian artists into existing frameworks, Simões proposes something more ambitious: a structural rethinking of how Black artistic production itself is understood globally.
For Simões, whose research and curatorial practice center on Afro-Brazilian art, Amefricanity, and the intellectual histories of the African diaspora, curating functions not simply as exhibition-making, but as a form of art historical writing. Over the past years, his work has steadily emerged as one of the most intellectually rigorous voices reshaping conversations around Black artistic production in Latin America and beyond. From serving as general curator of Dos Brasis: Black Art and Thought in São Paulo to curating major exhibitions at Instituto Inhotim and contributing to broader global conversations around diaspora and decoloniality, Simões has consistently challenged the racialized assumptions that historically shaped Brazilian art history and international understandings of Afro-diasporic art.
At 1-54 New York, Brazil Beyond Brazil expands those concerns into the context of one of the world’s leading fairs dedicated to contemporary African and diasporic art. Bringing together artists including Mônica Ventura, Jaime Lauriano, Luana Vitra, Diego Mouro, No Martins, Lidia Lisbôa, Rebeca Carapiá, and others, the presentation resists reductive readings of Afro-Brazilian artistic production as merely folkloric, spiritual, exotic, or ethnographic. Instead, the exhibition foregrounds abstraction, archives, material experimentation, conceptual rigor, and historical reconstruction as central strategies through which Black Brazilian artists engage both local histories and wider transnational conversations across the Black Atlantic. In this conversation with Africans Column, Igor Simões reflects on curating as a political and intellectual practice, the limits of dominant Afro-diasporic discourse, the importance of building horizontal relationships between Black experiences across geographies, and why Afro-Brazilian artistic production remains essential to understanding the future of contemporary art itself.
Africans Column: For readers encountering your work for the first time, how would you describe your journey into curating, and what first drew you toward researching Afro-Brazilian art and the intellectual histories of the African diaspora?
Igor Simões: I like to introduce myself by saying that I am an art historian, a university professor, and a researcher. And because of that, I am also a curator.
My journey into curating is completely tied to my work as an art historian. It emerges from a practice of intervening in the ways art history is constructed at different levels, beginning with the ways canonical art historical narratives were built upon assumptions deeply connected to imperial processes and colonization, grounded in a modernity erected through enslavement.
When I look at questions surrounding Afro-Brazilian art, it is through this lens that I approach my curatorial practice. I believe that curating, and exhibitions themselves, are ways of making public debates that might otherwise remain confined to academic spaces. When we work with art produced by Black people, particularly with the intention of reaching Black audiences, the exhibition becomes a much broader platform.
But I also understand that the narratives constructed through curatorial processes are themselves valid forms of art historical writing. So when I create exhibitions, I am also writing art history, while simultaneously focusing on what most interests me: imagining other forms of writing beyond those already established.
For me, looking at diaspora and looking at Brazilian art are almost simultaneous gestures. I was born in the largest Black country outside the African continent. And yet, throughout my entire education, the art that surrounded me was not art produced by Black people. It was what I later came to name, through my own research, as white Brazilian art—that is, art produced by white people in Brazil, exhibited by white people in Brazil, collected by white people, curated by white people in white institutions.
My question was never what Afro-Brazilian art is, or what Afro-diasporic art is. Afro-Brazilian or Afro-diasporic art is art produced by Black people, regardless of subject matter. It is a category that is far more political than aesthetic.
What constantly interests me is asking: what is this white art that established itself as the norm while simulating a distance from its own racialized character, one fundamentally rooted in white privilege?
Africans Column: Your work often engages ideas around Amefricanity, diaspora, and the Black Atlantic. How have these frameworks shaped your curatorial language and understanding of contemporary art today?
Igor Simões: My engagement with these frameworks emerged directly from research.
During a period of research in the United States, I became increasingly interested in understanding why Black Brazilian artists were largely absent from global conversations around Afro-diasporic art.
Brazil is the largest country in the African diaspora. More than 57% of Brazil’s population identifies as Black, in a country of over 203 million people. Brazil was also the principal destination of the transatlantic slave trade. This made me ask a fundamental question: how was it possible to build a discourse around Afro-diasporic art without the largest Black country in the diaspora?
That question became central during my fellowships at the Clark Art Institute and later through the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories program.
What became clear was that the discourse around Afro-diasporic art had largely been consolidated within an Anglophone intellectual framework, particularly centered on the United States and the United Kingdom. In many ways, Afro-diasporic art had come to function almost as a synonym for art produced within English-speaking Black contexts, with only limited openings elsewhere.
It was precisely at that point that Lélia Gonzalez’s concept of Amefricanity became crucial for me.
What Amefricanity offers is a way of recognizing that Black experience in the Americas cannot be fully contained by the centrality of Black North American culture. This is not about dismissing that production, but about creating horizontal connections between Black experiences across the Americas and beyond.
That has deeply shaped my curatorial language. It has pushed me to think beyond the Black Atlantic as a singular organizing paradigm and toward a broader, more plural understanding of Black artistic production—one that includes Latin America, the Caribbean, Central America, and other Black geographies often left outside dominant frameworks.
When I think about contemporary art today, I am interested in building horizontal relationships between Black experiences, understanding both their shared conditions and their specific historical differences, rather than reproducing geopolitical hierarchies that determine whose Blackness becomes legible globally.
Africans Column: Brazil Beyond Brazil arrives at a moment when global institutions are increasingly paying attention to diasporic narratives. What was the central curatorial impulse behind the presentation, and what conversations were you hoping to open through it?
Igor Simões: I both agree and disagree with the premise.
On one hand, it is true that global institutions have increasingly paid attention to diasporic, and particularly Afro-diasporic, narratives in recent years. Some of this reflects systemic transformations, but it is also the result of the extraordinary vitality and intellectual force of art being produced by Black artists across the world.
At the same time, when I look at recent political and institutional shifts, alongside the rise of far-right movements attempting to recover nostalgic ideas of heritage and legacy, and the ongoing backlash against what has been labeled “woke culture,” I wonder how deep these transformations actually are.
In many ways, what is dismissed under that label is simply the result of long struggles by historically excluded communities to make their presence visible and heard.
So I find myself asking whether these recent changes have produced deep enough roots to guarantee permanence.
I often describe what we may be witnessing as a kind of new return to order—the feeling that institutions are saying: we have already done the Afro-diasporic exhibitions, we have already exhibited Black artists, women artists, Indigenous artists, queer artists, and now perhaps we can return to our normal programming.
That is why vigilance remains necessary.
In that sense, Brazil Beyond Brazil is also part of this debate.
The central curatorial impulse was to move beyond folkloric and exoticized expectations that have historically shaped the international reception of Afro-Brazilian art. Too often, when Black Brazilian artistic production has appeared internationally, it has done so through highly specific expectations about spirituality, sensuality, folklore, or racial authenticity.
What I wanted to open was a different conversation—one about complexity, formal sophistication, plurality, and the global legibility of Black Brazilian artistic production beyond those imposed frameworks.
Africans Column: You’ve spoken about moving beyond “exoticized” or “folkloric” framings of Afro-Brazilian art. In the context of Brazil Beyond Brazil, how do these artists use strategies such as archival research, abstraction, material experimentation, and historical reconstruction to dismantle those reductive readings and challenge dominant definitions of “Brazilian Art”?
Igor Simões: What interests me in this exhibition is precisely the diversity of artistic strategies.
What we see are artists whose practices intersect at certain points, but who also move in radically different directions, each with highly sophisticated poetic programs.
Some artists engage questions related to Black life, memory, and Afro-diasporic experience through representation, sometimes through figuration. Others do not feel compelled to explicitly represent Black identity or Black political struggle.
And that distinction is important.
Some artists work through abstraction. Others through archival investigation, material experimentation, historical reconstruction, or through a dialogue with inherited legacies of modern and contemporary art.
What matters to me is that these artists are constructing deeply particular responses to Black Brazilian experience while also producing work with global conceptual legibility.
This connects to something I often call the right to form.
By that, I mean the possibility for Black artists to discuss whatever they wish, without being continually required to speak only about themselves, their identities, or their lived experiences as Black subjects in the world.
Of course, they may choose to do precisely that. But that should emerge from artistic choice, not institutional expectation.
That, to me, is one of the most important ways these artists dismantle reductive readings—not simply by rejecting representation, but by asserting full formal and conceptual autonomy.
Africans Column: Brazil is home to the largest Black population outside the African continent, yet Afro-Brazilian artistic production has historically remained underrepresented within dominant art historical narratives and international exhibition platforms. What do you think still prevents Afro-Brazilian artists from being fully understood within global contemporary art conversations, and how does Brazil Beyond Brazil attempt to shift that condition?
Igor Simões: When we discuss this absence, we need to think structurally.
Brazil was the principal destination of the African diaspora through the transatlantic slave trade, but it also built itself as a structurally racist society based on the accumulation of power by a white minority.
For many decades, white elites occupied the principal spaces of cultural mediation and became responsible for translating Brazilian experience—including what they understood as Black Brazilian experience—to international audiences.
That matters deeply.
Because the image of Brazil that circulated globally was filtered through those racialized perspectives.
At the same time, we also need to understand this globally.
The Anglophone centrality of Afro-diasporic discourse has often left aside Black Latin American and Black Central American experiences.
This created barriers for Afro-Brazilian artists, while also producing expectations for certain kinds of artistic legibility—particularly works that could fit racialized notions of discovery, primitivism, or authenticity.
Brazil Beyond Brazil attempts to shift that condition by insisting on a much broader understanding of Black Brazilian artistic production.
It seeks to demonstrate that this production cannot be reduced to externally imposed expectations, and that Black Brazilian artists are participating in some of the most urgent formal, conceptual, and historical conversations in contemporary art today.
Africans Column: What do you hope audiences in New York — particularly African and diasporic audiences encountering these works within the context of 1-54 — take away from the presentation, especially in relation to broader conversations around the Black Atlantic and transnational cultural exchange?
Igor Simões: What I hope, first and foremost, is that this Brazilian presence helps expand dialogue between Brazil, Africa, and African art.
Brazil is a descendant of Africa. Brazilian culture has been profoundly shaped by African presence.
And this is not just any fair. This is a fair rooted in African artistic experience.
So one of my primary expectations is that this exhibition helps generate more collaborations, curatorial projects, exhibitions, publications, artistic residencies, and spaces of discussion between Brazil and the African continent.
That is, for me, one of the most powerful dimensions of presenting this exhibition here at 1-54 in New York.
More broadly, I hope it expands the interest of collectors, curators, and institutions in Black artistic production coming from the largest Black country in the African diaspora.
I often say that thinking about Afro-diasporic art without Brazil is like trying to think about the Italian Renaissance without Italy.
But beyond Brazil itself, my hope is that we begin imagining more horizontal relationships between Black experiences across the world.
Between Black Brazilian experience, Black American experience, Caribbean experience, Black Latin American experience, Black Central American experience—but also Black experiences beyond the Atlantic altogether.
Those shaped by the Indian Ocean, by the Pacific, by other geographies that have too often remained outside dominant conversations.
I hope this helps us expand the field we currently call Afro-diasporic art.
Africans Column: Looking ahead, what future do you envision for Afro-Brazilian artistic production within biennials, museums, fairs, and global institutional spaces, and what kinds of structural shifts do you hope still need to happen?
Igor Simões: I believe the central question is permanence.
While there has been increased visibility for Black artistic production in recent years, I do not think we can assume that these transformations are stable.
In fact, I think we may be witnessing what I describe as a new return to order—a moment in which institutions begin to suggest that enough has already been done, that Black artists have already been exhibited, that certain historical debts have already been addressed.
That is a dangerous illusion.
So when I think about the future of Afro-Brazilian artistic production in global institutions, I am not simply thinking about visibility, but about structural transformation.
What needs to happen is not occasional inclusion, but a real reconfiguration of how art history is written, how institutions build collections, how exhibitions are conceived, how research is funded, and how global conversations are geographically structured.
I also hope for a future in which Afro-Brazilian artists are not expected to perform predetermined versions of Blackness in order to be legible internationally.
This is where the right to form becomes crucial.
Black artists must have the freedom to engage any formal, conceptual, historical, or political terrain they wish—not because institutions have granted permission, but because that autonomy should be understood as fundamental.
And ultimately, I hope Brazilian participation can contribute to expanding the field itself.
Not simply by inserting Brazil into existing frameworks, but by helping transform the frameworks through which Black artistic production is understood globally.
At 1-54 New York 2026, Brazil Beyond Brazil emerges as more than a curatorial presentation — it becomes a wider intervention into how Afro-diasporic artistic production is framed, historicized, and understood globally. Through Igor Simões’s curatorial approach, the exhibition expands the geography of Black contemporary art beyond familiar Anglophone centers while positioning Brazil as an essential site within the broader histories of the African diaspora, the Black Atlantic, and contemporary global culture.
More importantly, the presentation insists on complexity. Rather than reducing Afro-Brazilian art to folkloric, spiritual, or exoticized readings, Brazil Beyond Brazil foregrounds artistic autonomy, conceptual rigor, abstraction, archives, experimentation, and historical inquiry as central to contemporary Black artistic production. In doing so, the exhibition opens new possibilities for dialogue between Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and wider diasporic geographies, while reaffirming 1-54’s growing role as one of the most important global platforms for contemporary African and diasporic art today.
