Form and Feeling: The Making of Concretism in Brazil

Antonio Sergio Bessa holds a Ph.D. from the Steinhardt School of Education, New York University. For sixteen years he worked as the Director of Curatorial and Education Programs at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, in addition to teaching at the School of Visual Arts and Columbia University’s Teachers College. A scholar of concrete poetry, Bessa is the author of Öyvind Fahlström―The Art of Writing, co-editor of Novas―Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos, and editor of Mary Ellen Solt―Towards a Theory of Concrete Poetry and Paulo Bruscky: Poesia Viva.

Michael Asbury is a London-based art historian, art critic, and curator. He is Reader of Art History and Theory at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London (UAL) and founding member of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN). Over the last twenty years he has written extensively on themes involving modern and contemporary art with a particular emphasis on Brazilian culture. His work has been published internationally by Americas Society, Art in America, Astrup Fearnley, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Cosac Naify, Documenta Kassel (12), Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Flash Art, Fundação Iberê Camargo, Liverpool University Press, MIT Press, Perspectiva, Rodopi, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Tate Publishing, Third Text, Turner Contemporary, and Wilhelm/Fink, among others. He has curated a number of exhibitions on artists such as Alfredo Volpi, Anna Maria Maiolino, Antonio Manuel, Cao Guimaraes, Cildo Meireles, Detanico and Lain, Ibere Camargo, Jose Oiticica Filho, José Patricio, and Rosangela Rennó as well as on themes such as Brazilian photography and architecture, concrete and neoconcrete art, and the monochrome in contemporary art.

Claudia Calirman is associate professor in the Department of Art and Music at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York. Her areas of study are Latin American, modern, and contemporary art. She is the author of Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (2012), which analyzes the intersection of politics and the visual arts during the most repressive years of Brazil’s military regime from 1968 to 1975. The book received the 2013 Arvey Award by the Association for Latin American Art. Calirman is a recipient of the Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation and was a Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). Calirman has curated several exhibitions in New York, including Berna Reale: While You Laugh (2019); Basta! Art and Violence in Latin America (2016); and Antonio Manuel: I Want to Act, not Represent! (2011).

Frederico Coelho is a researcher, essayist, and professor of Brazilian literature and performing arts in the Department of Literature at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). He has an MA in history from Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and a PhD in literature from PUC-Rio. He was a researcher for the exhibitions Tropicália―A Revolution in Brazilian Culture (2006) and Hélio Oiticica―To Organize Delirium (2018). His publications include Livro ou livro-me: os escritos babilônicos de Hélio Oiticica (2010), Eu, brasileiro, confesso minha culpa e meu pecado: cultura marginal no Brasil 1960/1970 (2010), and (with César Oiticica Filho) Hélio Oiticica: Conglomerado/Newyorkaises (2013).

Simone Homem de Mello is a poet and translator. Her poems are collected in Périplos (São Paulo, 2005), Extravio Marinho (São Paulo, 2010), and Terminal, à escrita (São Paulo, 2015), as well as in anthologies of Brazilian contemporary poetry. She has written libretti for operas, including Orpheus Kristall (composed by Manfred Stahnke, Munich, 2002), Keine Stille außer der des Windes (composed by Sidney Corbett, Bremen, 2007) and UBU―Eine musikalische Groteske (composed by Sidney Corbett, Gelsenkirchen, 2012). She has translated into Portuguese novels by Peter Handke and several modern and contemporary German poets (including Arno Holz, Thomas Kling, Ulf Stolterfoht, and Barbara Köhler). She has also translated Augusto de Campos’s poems into German (Augusto de Campos: Poesie, 2019). Mello studied German literature at the University of São Paulo and at the University of Cologne. Her PhD thesis in translation studies the University of Santa Catarina is about the translation of avant-garde poetry. From 2012 to 2014, she coordinated the Centro de Referência Haroldo de Campos (Casa das Rosas, São Paulo). Since 2011 she has directed the Center for Literary Translation Studies at the museum Casa Guilherme de Almeida in São Paulo.