Art at Americas Society presents a roundtable with Marajoara artist Ronaldo Guedes, organized in conjunction with the current exhibition Deep Marajó

Join us Thursday, May 4, 2023 from 6:00 to 7:30 pm for a panel conversation featuring artist and activist Ronaldo Guedes, with Michael Heckenberger and Glenn Shepard, moderated by Helena Pinto Lima. The conversation will focus on contemporary ceramics produced by artists collectives from the Marajó archipelago, in connection to the exhibition Deep Marajó on view at our galleries until July 22. 

The panel discussion will take place in person at Americas Society on 680 Park Avenue, New York, NY. 

About the panelists

Ronaldo Guedes is a self-taught artist, activist, and musician from Marajó. Guedes taught himself to sculpt more than twenty years ago, initially working with materials collected from the mangrove and later incorporating wood and clay in his works. Guedes' practice is focused on the research, creation, and dissemination of Marajoara ceramics and its history. In his works Guedes incorporates painting techniques from ancient Indigenous ceramics with oral histories from the extractivist communities in the region. Along with Cilene Andrade, Guedes is one of the founding members of the atelier "Arte Mangue Marajó," a collective space for ceramists in the region to create work, research, and experiment with traditional methods of ceramic production. The workshop functions alongside the Pacoval neighborhood association, which serves the community with environmental education, including the promotion of sustainable extractivist practices in the mangrove region. 

Helena Pinto Lima is an archaeologist at the Goeldi Museum in Belém (Pará-Brazil), where she also serves as a lecturer for the graduate program in sociocultural diversity and curator of the archaeological collection. Employing historical ecology, material culture studies, and a collaborative approach, she runs academic research and outreach projects on managing cultural heritage with indigenous peoples, riverine and quilombola communities in several Amazonian locations including in the Marajo Archipelago, where she first participated in excavations in 1999, and currently partners with communities and local artists.

Michael Heckenberger is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. He initiated participatory cultural heritage mapping and archaeology with the Kuikuro in the Upper Xingu in 1992. This is the longest-running collaborative project with Indigenous peoples in the Amazon, with three generations of Indigenous assistants trained in state-of-the-art archaeological technology, and multidisciplinary and participatory research using cloud-based ArcGIS and real-time data collection and interaction.

Glenn Shepard is an ethnobotanist, medical anthropologist and filmmaker based in the Human Sciences Division at the Goeldi Museum in Belém, Brazil. He has conducted fieldwork with diverse indigenous peoples of the Amazon and other tropical forest regions on traditional medicine and health, participatory resource management, historical ecology and indigenous appropriations of digital media, among other topics.

Funders

This event and the exhibition Deep Marajó are organized in partnership with the Goeldi Museum (Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi) in Belém, Para, Brazil, with support from the Consulate General of Brazil in New York.

Americas Society acknowledges the generous support from the Arts of the Americas Circle contributors: Estrellita B. Brodsky, Virginia Cowles Schroth, Emily A. Engel, Diana Fane, Almeida & Dale Galeria de Arte, Isabella Hutchinson, Carolina Jannicelli, Vivian Pfeiffer, Phillips, Gabriela Pérez Rocchietti, Erica Roberts, Sharon Schultz, Diana López and Herman Sifontes, and Edward J. Sullivan.