Contemporary art museum in Chicago features 'Tropicalia'

CHICAGO -- Visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Art's newest exhibit will leave with sand in their shoes.\n"Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture" is the first major exhibit to examine a nearly 40-year-old cultural movement that affected Brazilian theater, film, architecture, music, fashion, advertising, television and the visual arts.\nThe exhibit, which opened Oct. 22, includes both artwork from the late 1960s and early 1970s -- including one major installation on a bed of sand -- and contemporary work commissioned for the show.\nFundamentally, "Tropicalia" was about a search for an identity in an amazingly diverse country. As a former Portuguese colony, the country has strong ties to Europe, but Brazil also includes an indigenous population and a sizable African population because of the slave trade.\nIn many cases, the artists used local and international influences to create works that were uniquely Brazilian, often highlighting the fringes of society. In others, the artists chose to turn cliches upside down.\nFor instance, a centerpiece of the exhibit are the late 1960s works of Helio Oiticica inspired by the country's shantytowns, or favelas. They are individual rooms made up of wooden poles, vibrantly colored pieces of fabric, plastic tarps and other found materials.\nVisitors can wander through a labrynth-like path made up of sand. Scattered throughout are tropical plants and pebbles.\nThe structures are different shapes and suggest a fluid type of architecture in which rooms can serve multiple purposes. The rooms house various items -- a pile of books, a small cot, a tub of water, a stack of newspapers. One "shanty" features two live blue and yellow parrots. At the end of another path is a television.\n"Tropicalia is very much about cannibalism -- about absorbing everything outside and transforming it into something new," said Carlos Basualdo, who served as the guest curator of the show.\nIn fact, one of Oiticica's installations, called "Tropicalia," actually inspired the name of the cultural movement. The name was suggested to musician Caetano Veloso for a song, who also used it as the title of a 1968 collaborative album with numerous other artists.\nThat album went on to be an overwhelming success and why many people, when they hear "Tropicalia," only think of a melting pot musical style.\nAppropriately, the exhibit is heavy on music, including album covers, instruments that double as sculptures and boxes mounted on the wall that play music when their covers are lifted, allowing museum visitors to create different combinations.\nAnother exhibit theme is that many of the works employ common materials available to all Brazilians, such as Lygia Pape's "Book of Creation," which tells the story of the world using geometric forms on colored paper board. And the sculptural musical instruments, for instance, are created of gourds, plastic, plastic foam and spoons.\nAdditionally, many of the "Tropicalia" artists wanted their pieces of work to invite participation and interactivity. There are masks, clothes and goggles that museum visitors can wear, and several tables feature artworks that beg to be played with, such as a plastic bag filled with water and shells.