Madalena Santos Reinbolt’s woven embroideries are made of commercial, acrylic yarn, an unforgiving medium often associated with grade school weaving kits and resale store afghans. But the artist’s quadros de lã (“wool paintings”) miraculously, almost magically, transcend categories of high and low, craft and painting. Not only is her art powerful and singular, but it holds the cultural residue of a woman adhering to and celebrating her own identity and homeland, despite her marginalized status as a Black woman from rural Brazil.
A Head Full of Planets, organized by the Museum of Art of São Paulo, Brazil, and currently on view at the American Folk Art Museum, is Santos Reinbolt’s first solo exhibition outside of her home country. Born in Bahia, Brazil, in 1919, her father farmed while her mother cared for their 16 children by sewing clothes, making lace, cooking, spinning wool, and firing ceramic bowls and plates in a backyard kiln. It was a hands-on, tactile world. Madalena left home at 20 to secure employment as a domestic servant, eventually living in the mountain home of architect Lota de Macedo Soares and her partner, the US poet Elizabeth Bishop. Here, in the 1950s, she painted in her spare time. The oil paintings are compositionally similar to the later embroideries, both on view in the exhibition. When her employers fired her for devoting too much time to her art, she moved in with a new family and in 1969, a decade before her death, she began to make her wool paintings.
Impressed with Santos Reinbolt’s embroidery on domestic textiles such as towels, the family encouraged her to continue. Using yarn like a paint palette, she would thread 154 needles with different colors and apply them as one might dip a brush, switching colors impulsively and with ease. While living her entire adult life in the homes of more affluent White people, her dense, free-form landscapes, often embedded with childhood memories, seemed to help her hold on to a sense of place, identity, and individuality.
The exhibition’s 40-some textiles and smattering of early oil paintings tell a story of an artist who was able to appreciate and translate the beauty of life. In many works, the sun pulses over scenes that flicker with butterflies, birds, and other animals, ponds, and groups of Black townspeople carrying fish, promenading, going somewhere and nowhere all at once. Like Vincent van Gogh, her multi-angled mark making generates swooning rhythms and patterns. The embroidered threads obey no rules, twisting and swirling into rivulets. This gestural stitching, often executed on coarse burlap, brings a sense of motion to a breeze or heat to the sun.
Class inequality, manual labor, and hints of a lingering Candomblé religion among Brazil’s Black population make gentle appearances in the work. An avowed Catholic, when she depicts the Last Supper in an untitled and undated work, the tablecloth’s textures and drape and the angels hovering above appear more animated than the apostles. Two abstract wool paintings particularly showcase the breadth of Santos Reinbolt’s innovation, introducing tufted textures, fields of pure color, and vividly organic geometric shapes. These larger pieces made me think, if only she had had more time, space, resources, and support to continue to develop her practice.
Madalena Santos Reinbolt never learned to read or write and never received public recognition for her art in her lifetime. But her service as a domestic worker did not overshadow her self-definition as an artist. Like many other women artists, her rise from obscurity to recognition is a triumph as well as a significant insertion in the tale of art history that is indeed woven, as well as painted and sculpted.
Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets continues at the American Folk Art Museum (2 Lincoln Square, Upper West Side, Manhattan) through May 25. The exhibition was curated by Amanda Carneiro and André Mesquita. The American Folk Art Museum presentation was curated by Valérie Rousseau, with curatorial assistance from Dylan Blau Edelstein.
