RIVERLINES: Chico da Silva, Joseca Yanomami, Kuenan Mayu: Curated by Simon Watson

David Nolan Gallery presents Riverlines, an exhibition of work by three generations of Amazonian Indigenous artists Chico da Silva, Joseca Yanomami, and Kuenan Mayu. The exhibition brings together sustained practices rooted in the living traditions of the Yanomami, Tikuna, Tariana, and Tukano peoples. Through painting, drawing, and bark-cloth, these works examine how knowledge moves across lineage and territories, and how ceremonial practice is reimagined in contemporary form. The works reveal continuity, transformation, and innovation: an elder generation’s interpretation of cosmology, a middle generation’s negotiation of tradition alongside modernity, and a younger generation’s experiments in cross-cultural and cross-gender exchange.

Riverlines makes visible artistic genealogies long underrecognized in global narratives of modern and contemporary art, and positions these works within current discourse on climate, extractivism, and indigenous rights. The Amazon – with its visionary painters and relational cosmologies — can no longer remain at the margins. While the paintings are beautiful, their beauty is political. They offer ways of seeing that refuse a separation of art from life and insist upon integrity as both an aesthetic and an ethical practice. The exhibition features sixteen 1964 paintings on paper mounted on wood by Chico da Silva, alongside signature works from the 1970s and early 1980s that map riverine geographies and cosmologies. It also includes a cycle of Joseca Yanomami paintings embodying the visions of the Yanomami people’s land–forest; and twenty paintings by Kuenan Mayu, who uses natural Amazonian pigments on sacred tururi canvas to create works ranging from intimate ancestral gestures to hallucinatory cosmologies. 

One of Brazil’s most influential and widely exhibited artists, Francisco da Silva (1910–1985), known as Chico, grew up in the state of Acre, in the Amazon rainforest. He related to painting as a form of world-building, his visual language consisting in hybridized animal forms, hypnotic eyes, serpentine lines, and elongated claws drawn from the mythologies and oral traditions of Northern Brazil. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Serpente da serra luminosa (Luminous Mountain Serpent), one of seventeen paintings created for the 1966 Venice Biennale: abundantly textured, multidimensional, surreal, and immersive, it fully expresses the artist’s visual ecosystems. Chico’s work invites comparison with twentieth-century painters who understood the surface as a site of cosmological invention: Joan Miró’s biomorphic constellations, Paul Klee’s pictographic fields, Hilma af Klint’s spiritual abstraction. What makes Chico’s work distinct is that his practice emerged from indigenous cosmology as opposed to European esotericism. As he remarked: “The drawing is what the hand gives and the color is what the details ask for . . . painting is autonomy” — not a formalist claim but an ontological one. The painting is alive because the world it holds is alive. 

Joseca Yanomami (b. 1971) is from a community on the Lobo d’Almada River (Uxiu), a tributary of the upper Catrimani River in Roraima. The son of a shaman – a “great man” (pata thë) — he has spent his life in close attention to the chants of Yanomami shamans, who through dance and song “bring down” and “make dance” the images (utupë) of beings and places from the beginning of time. In a similar gesture, Joseca renders his own dreamed images of the universes comprising the Yanomami “land-forest-world” (urihi) which is not just a collection of trees but a complex multiverse in which humans and spirits (xapiri thë pë) visible only to shamans, coexist. As Joseca describes: “I don’t draw without a reason. I take inspiration in the words I hear from the shamans, those who have the most beautiful chants, those who really know how to make the words of the xapiri pë spirits be heard. When they hold their sessions, I listen to their chants and record all these words in my mind, which I later dream about and transform into drawings.” Working in a figurative-realist style, he makes visible the knowledge and beauty of an ancestral way of thinking and living that is relentlessly destroyed by economic voracity and ignorance.

Kuenan Mayu (b. 2003) is a Magüta (Tikuna), Tariana, and Tukano artist, born in Feijoal on the banks of the Solimões River, at the border of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. She paints on tururi bark with pigments drawn from the surrounding forest. Her beings are hybrids — part human, part tree, part fish, part spirit — inhabiting a world organized not by separation but by the possibility of becoming otherwise. Her work extends Magüta cosmology, whose origin story begins with two spirit beings, Ngutapa and Mapana, who seeded the universe with plants. Unable to bear children, Mapana was tied by the enraged Ngutapa to a tree in the forest, where she suffered until an encantado — an enchanted being in the form of a bird — offered her a beehive as an instrument of revenge. She threw it at Ngutapa; the bees stung his knees, which swelled and finally burst, releasing two sons, Y’pi and Yo’i. Yo’i later fished in the sacred Eware River and drew up, one body at a time, an entire people — the Magüta: “the people fished from the waters.” Each figure emerged as a member of either the clan of “beings with feathers” or the clan of “beings with hair.” The Eware River became home to the encantados: porous, shape-shifting presences resistant to fixed taxonomy, and central to Kuenan Mayu’s visual universe. The body in her work is a conduit between realms; the tururi bark is where that passage becomes material. In Magüta ritual, the tree’s inner bark is prepared, sewn into full-body costume, and painted with urucum, jenipapo, and pacová, so that the wearer comes to embody a particular encantado through song and dance. Mayu’s practice operates under the same logic — highlighting the liminality, the moment of becoming, over the steadiness of a completed form.

Riverlines was developed in collaborative dialogue with Joseca Yanomami, Kuenan Mayu, and members of their communities. The gallery has worked closely with the artists to ensure culturally appropriate presentation, contextual framing, and public programming including artist talks and curator conversations. The exhibition is curated by Simon Watson, independent curator, art advisor, and cultural event specialist, based between New York and São Paulo.

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