Shin Gallery is pleased to present Drawing Life: Indigenous Amazonian and the Universal Eye, a compelling exhibition showcasing a survey of drawings by Indigenous artists from the Amazon Basin. The late Amazonian artist Francisco “Chico” da Silva (1910 - 1985) said that “[t]he drawing is what the hand gives and the color is what the details ask for. A house is engineering, while painting is autonomy.” These Amazonian drawings reify an abstract cosmology into legible images. Animistic relationships and motifs are abundant in these works, and the symbolism they contain is deceptively enigmatic, hidden in the seemingly straight-forward compositions. To flesh out these subtle complications, and support the “autonomy” referenced by Chico da Saliva, Shin Gallery will be presenting these works alongside the works of Altamira, CoBrA, Outsider, and other Modernist artists.

These Amazonian drawings come from anthropologist Dr. Nairo Garcia Pinheiro via a private collection. While Dr. Pinheiro was conducting research on uncontacted tribes at the University of Sao Paulo, he decided to furnish the people he met with art materials to stimulate them creatively and gain a deeper insight into their culture, building off of a practice established years earlier by fellow faculty member Dr. Vera Penteado Coelho. This collection highlights the Xikrin, Yanomami, Mehinaku, and Bororó Amazonian tribes, and the themes depicted span geometric patterns, anthropomorphized creatures, everyday objects, maternity scenes, and beyond. The unique cultural sensibilities that are directly related to the Amazon region provide a continuity for these works, as well as an insight into their unique mythologies and world views.

The Amazonian tribes represented in Divine Eyes are animistic, believing that all things are interconnected and have a soul. The Bororó, located in the Western Amazon, are a totemic group, meaning that they believe in a collective representation of life’s relationships. According to Karl von den Steinen, the Bororó believe that “they are now araras (macaws), exactly as if a caterpillar said it was a butterfly.” The Yanomami, located in the Amazon’s northwest, are the most well-researched of the groups on display in this exhibit. They have a complex culture which is, in many ways, built around cycles. Endocannibalism, or the consumption of deceased kinsmen’s bones, is practiced, and they have a ritualized practice of using hallucinogens. The Mehinaku, who live in the central-Western part of Brazil, have a radically open social system. Their domiciles do not have internal walls and are positioned around a central open space so that they can always be in view of one another. The Mehinaku have learned to recognize each other’s footprints like faces so they can track each other down, and rarely do anything alone. The Xikrin’s cosmology is deeply connected to the Northeastern part of the Amazon in which they live. They believe that the earth is metaphysically divided into forest, clearings, sky, the aquatic world, and the subterranean world. For them, the forest is home to enemies and is a site of action, the clearing is a site of kinship and alliances, the aquatic world holds the power of self-betterment and individual growth through renewal, the subterranean world is connected to the anti-social, and the sky, particularly the Eastern sky, represents perfection and origination.

This exhibition pulls exceptional examples from Pinnheiro’s extensive collection of over 300 drawings, and pairs them alongside significant Modern works. The work of Carla Prina, a founding member of the Altamira School, CoBrA co-founder Ernest Mancoba, and visionary Modernist Man Ray all bolster the inherent, though subtle, gestalt nature of these Amazonian drawings. Prina was inspired by the Altamira cave paintings, and her paintings privilege color and dynamism in order to capture an abstracted natural equilibrium. Her paintings are a wonderful compliment to the Amazonian drawings, many of which also communicate complex ideas about nature and balance with open-ended visual language. Mancoba began his artistic career as a sculptor, but took up abstraction in protest after finding colonial prejudice against Africans working in Modernist modes. His approach to abstraction, which mirrors that of the Amazonian artists, was additive, not subtractive, guiding viewers toward a rich, but hidden, network of culture and tradition. Man Ray’s surreal drawing, Corps de Femme (1954), interpolates elements of primitive art and, when compared to the Amazonian drawings, demonstrates the difference that content and approach make in minimalist drawings. Man Ray’s work is built from a different cosmology than the Amazonian drawings, and has a totally different sensibility, the comparison of which allows us to see the Amazonian drawings as deeply engaged with their cultures of origin.

This exhibition seeks to promote the work of Indigenous Amazonian artists and overlooked Modernists by privileging their autonomy. Artworks like these are too often primitivized or patronized, the effect of which is that valuable cultural outlooks are erased or trivialized. There are many revered artists who are lauded for, in essence, working backward from the canon toward a style of art naturally practiced by many people outside of the art world’s spotlight. We hope that this exhibition will inspire people to look more deeply into the cultures and ideologies that form the basis for the artistic styles they are already familiar with.