The curator, art critic, researcher and professor, Ivo Mesquita served 12 years as the art director at the Pinacoteca do Estado [State Art Gallery] of São Paulo. He was also curator of the 2008 round of the São Paulo Biennial; before that, he worked as technical director at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP). Since the 1980s, Mesquita has stood out as one of the main international[ist] voices discussing Brazilian art.
Mônica [Panizza] Nador (b. 1955) is a painter, draftsman and printmaker who trained at the Faculdade de Artes Plásticas of the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP), São Paulo, in 1983. Years later, she often attended the courses on lithography and silkscreen given by Regina Silveira (b. 1939) at Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo (ECA/USP). In 1983, Nador held her first individual exhibition at MAC-USP. In 1994, she traveled through the United States on a scholarship from the Mid-America Alliance. In Brazil, she was given a scholarship by the Bolsa Vitae de Artes in the field of visual arts with her project Paredes Pinturas (1999)—designs using acetate stencils painted on houses in a working-class neighborhood in São José dos Campos (São Paulo). She turned that same project into the master’s dissertation she submitted to ECA/USP. Since then, she has been working with low-income communities, and, in 2004, she founded the Jardim Miriam Arte Clube (JAMAC), a workshop open to the community in a poor neighborhood in south São Paulo. From that base, she has promoted visual arts-related activities designed for that population.
For additional information on the artist, Professor Walter Zanini comments on the new phase in the work of Mônica Nador, which entails a “fundamental involvement in the decorative element” [see doc. no. 1111277].
