RIVERLINES: Chico da Silva, Joseca Yanomami, Kuenan Mayu: Curated by Simon Watson
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Overview
David Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce Riverlines, a three-person exhibition curated by Simon Watson opening June 10. Presenting intergenerational work by Indigenous artists Chico da Silva, Joseca Yanomami, and Kuenan Mayu, the exhibition brings together sustained practices that foreground the living histories, material cultures, and contemporary voices of Amazonian Indigenous communities.
Riverlines traces continuities and transformations across three generations of Amazonian Brazilian artistic practices. Through painting, drawing, and bark-cloth work, the exhibition investigates how knowledge is transmitted across kinship networks and territories, how ceremonial practices are rendered in contemporary forms, and how artists contend with the politics of visibility from positions of deep rootedness.
By foregrounding intergenerational dialogue, Riverlines reveals both continuity and innovation: an elder generation’s anchoring of cosmology, a middle generation’s negotiation of tradition alongside urban and modern frameworks, and a younger generation’s experiments in cross-cultural and cross-gender exchange. Together, Chico da Silva, Joseca Yanomami, and Kuenan Mayu create a layered portrait of the Amazon that refuses simplistic narratives and insists on Indigenous self-determination in artistic representation.
Working across painting, Chico da Silva (1910-1985) —who in 1966 was the first Indigenous artist to be presented at the Venice Biennale— draws on animal lore and Afro-surrealist practice. The exhibition includes works from across his production— including sixteen paintings on paper mounted on wood from 1964 as well as signature works from the 1970s and early 1980s— that map cosmological relations and riverine geographies. Da Silva’s work combines lyrical animal motifs with a refined contemporary visual language, offering a perspective on primordial continuity.
Joseca Yanomami’s (b. 1971) practice engages mixed-media painting on paper that reflects movement between village life. Rooted in Yanomami cosmologies and communal techniques of production, Joseca’s work addresses memory, displacement, and the resilience of ceremonial forms. In Riverlines, Joseca presents a new series of works on paper that collectively document community-based knowledge transmission.
The youngest of the three, Kuenan Mayu (b. 2003) works with natural pigments painted on tree fibers, performance, and photography to extend Indigenous storytelling that links fluid gender position with cosmological storytelling. Kuenan’s works take on themes of human revitalization and ecological futurities.Riverlines was developed in collaborative dialogue with artists Joseca Yanomami and Kuenan Mayu and with members of their communities. The gallery has worked with the artists to ensure culturally appropriate presentation, contextual information, and public programs including artist talks and curator conversations.
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Curator’s Statement
On an early morning in mid‑April 2022, in the private showing area of São Paulo’s MaPa Galeria, I encountered a gold‑red‑and‑blue painting of a writhing water serpent by Chico da Silva. When asked, gallerist Marcelo Pallotta recounted the artist’s dramatic arc: a youth spent as a street painter decorating fishermen’s huts; a middle period celebrated as the first Indigenous artist to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale; two decades of international exhibitions; but following his death in 1985, largely forgotten for decades. I was stunned by the painting’s vibrancy: here was a powerful vision of nature and the planet’s vitality. I thought about that extraordinary work and about Chico’s remarkable, complicated life all day. Six hours after our first encounter, I returned to MaPa and asked whether they would help me stage a solo museum exhibition of his work. Seven months later in November 2022, Chico da Silva: Sacred Connection, Global Vision, a 93‑painting exhibition, opened at the Museu de Arte Sacra de São Paulo, marking the artist’s first major solo exhibition in two decades.
My fascination with Chico da Silva’s work led to deep immersion and the curation of three solo exhibitions of his art. Along the way I engaged with a wide range of Indigenous artists; that engagement has culminated in this Riverlines exhibition.
Riverlines began as a conversation about lineage—how techniques, cosmologies, and commitments travel across time and are reconfigured by each generation. Chico da Silva, Joseca Yanomami, and Kuenan Mayu bring distinct voices from the Amazon; seen here in dialogue, they present to a New York audience the global relevance of their visions of nature. The exhibition seeks to honor intergenerational links while granting full agency to contemporary practices that are neither museum artifacts nor mere illustration. The works we present are forward‑looking and deeply anchored in place, care, and resistance.
— Simon Watson
