Ana Maria Tavares, born in Brazil, 1958.
Looking to the legacies of modernist architecture in Brazil, Ana Maria Tavares creates futuristic non-places, and meditations on institutions, systems, and information. Her intricate installations are fantastically urban in their visual vocabulary, suggesting parallels with not only Oscar Niemeyer, but also with Giovanni Piranesi–the 18th-century Italian artist who created fictitious architectural landscapes–and with the labrynthine world of M. C. Escher.
Writing about her work, curator Dan Cameron notes, “Tavares has not set out to critique the situation in which she finds herself, so much as to suggest that within each collectively understood interpretation of a public space, there is always another possibility, often contradictory and sometimes filled with wonder, waiting to be explored. Sometimes, the only thing required to draw out this hidden reality is the simple act of treating all public spaces like empty sets, waiting to be filled with actors whose parts have not yet been written.”
Tavares earned her bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1982 from the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation in São Paulo. She completed her MFA in 1986 from the Art Institute of Chicago, and PhD in Art from the University of São Paulo in 2000. She was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. She is currently Professor of Art at the University of São Paulo. In 2005, she was artist-lecturer at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and she was the Ida Ely Rubin Artist-in-Residence at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006-2007. In 2014, she was the Lynette Autrey Visiting Professor at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University.
