Brazilian Art Show Sets Off Dispute That Mirrors Political Battles
13, 2017
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — A controversy has erupted in Brazil after organizers of an art exhibition on gender and sexual diversity caved to pressure from conservative groups and canceled the show — rekindling a political firestorm
that gripped the country last year when the country’s first female president was impeached.
The offending images in the display — Queermuseu, or Queer Museum — included a baby monkey snuggling in the Virgin Mary’s arms, sacramental wafers with the words "vagina"
and "tongue" written on them and naïve-style portraits of smiling children spray-painted with tags like "transvestite" and "gay child." Critics — some of whom had also demanded the impeachment of the president — accused the artists of promoting pedophilia and child pornography.
The goal of this work is just the opposite." The curator said the exhibition was the first in Brazil to embrace the "queer perspective." It might
still find a new home in the city of Belo Horizonte, where the secretary of culture is a former minister from Ms. Rousseff’s government.
The country’s top artists were already wary of Mr. Temer’s close ties to the evangelical lobby in Brazil’s Congress,
and one of his early actions — to appoint an all-male, all-white cabinet, and to eliminate the Culture Ministry — did not help, even though the ministry was quickly reinstated.
The Free Brazil Movement — one of the same groups that organized huge demonstrations demanding Ms. Rousseff’s impeachment — declared victory.