Expo del MOCAA en Brasil. Caminos de Viento y Tierra
MoCAA Leadership Visits the Museu de Arte de Goiânia to Architect a 2026 Exhibition and a Durable Inter-Institutional Framework
By Rodriguez Collection Team
In Goiânia, senior leadership from the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas (MoCAA, Miami–Kendall) met with their counterparts at the Museu de Arte de Goiânia (MAG) to advance a joint exhibition slated for 2026 and to outline a broader framework for research, collection exchange, and public programs. The conversations were anchored in a shared premise: that the Americas constitute not a periphery of multiple centers but a single, interdependent field in which artistic languages circulate with reciprocal consequence.
Beyond the immediate horizon of an exhibition, the parties discussed a phased collaboration: co-curated projects drawing on each institution’s holdings; residency exchanges for curators, educators, and conservators; and a bilingual publication program attentive to archival gaps and to the methodological specificities of the region. Crucially, the partnership imagines pedagogy not as an ancillary service but as curatorial method—embedding mediation, community listening, and teacher resources into the very architecture of the shows.
For Miami, MoCAA’s involvement consolidates a mandate it has pursued since its evolution from the Kendall Art Center: to operate as a hemispheric interlocutor for Caribbean and Latin American contemporary art, serving local diasporas while convening regional discourse. For Goiânia, the alliance strengthens a cultural corridor between Brazil’s Center-West and South Florida—two scenes often read separately but linked by shared questions of territory, memory, and migration.
The historical ballast on the Brazilian side is clear. Established by municipal law in 1969 and inaugurated in 1970, MAG emerged as the first public museum dedicated to the visual arts in Goiás and has, since its relocation to the Bosque dos Buritis in 1981, developed a program that balances stewardship of a regional collection with a consistent rhythm of temporary exhibitions. That dual commitment—to custodianship and experiment—makes MAG an apt counterpart for collaboration at continental scale.
Both institutions emphasized the civic and educational dividends of the exchange. Circulating works and knowledges between Goiânia and Miami activates a grammar of cultural citizenship: visual literacy for school groups and families; perspective-taking and translation in multilingual publics; and research opportunities that treat community history as a living archive. Workshops, teachers’ guides, and open studios will be designed as coextensive with the exhibitions, not as afterthoughts, so that making, reading, and debate remain in continuous feedback.
From a curatorial standpoint, the forthcoming project will resist a touristic logic of “imported” spectacle. Instead, it proposes an ecology of situated displays—works installed with sensitivity to local histories, climatic materialities, and audience habits—paired with discursive formats (seminars, reading rooms, field notes) that make process legible. The wager is that form and method can travel without flattening difference, and that institutional collaboration can model the ethics it seeks to narrate.
If successful, the 2026 exhibition will serve both as milestone and prototype: a visible moment in a longer choreography of co-production, shared conservation priorities, and joint authorship of interpretive materials. In this sense, the visit to Goiânia is less a preface than a first chapter. It affirms that, for museums on this continent, working “transnationally” is no longer an exception but the condition of relevance—an ongoing practice of co-creation, circulation, and care.
