Virtual Insights: Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets

February 14, 2025

Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets is the first American retrospective of the work of Madalena Santos Reinbolt (Vitória da Conquista, 1912–Petrópolis, 1976, Brazil). Devoted to a trailblazer but underrecognized figure of Brazilian art, it features over 40 densely-composed paintings and intricate embroideries representing scenes of pastoral life, urban landscapes as well as human, celestial and ornamental figures.

AFAM’s Curatorial Chair for Exhibitions and Senior Curator of Self-Taught Art & Art Brut Valérie Rousseau will walk us through the galleries in dialogue with Dylan Blau Edelstein, Curatorial Assistant on the project. Together they will share their research and field-work findings while discussing the artworks and the themes included in the exhibition.

This curatorial walkthrough will be a unique opportunity to grasp the full extent of the artist's creativity and singularity. Looking at her process through a plurality of lenses and situating her work in a larger historical, socio-economical, gender and racial context, speakers will consider Santos Reinbolt’s art as an expression of creative freedom as much as of resistance for a Black woman living and working as a domestic worker in 20th century Brazil.

About the speakers

Dylan Blau Edelstein is a PhD Candidate at Princeton University in Spanish and Portuguese. His research broadly investigates marginalized centers of modernist production and the intersections of cultural, artistic, and psychiatric practices in 20th-century Brazil. His writings have appeared in academic journals in both Brazil and the United States, and he has presented his work at venues such as Weill Cornell Medicine’s Richardson Seminar on the History of Psychiatry, Princeton’s BrazilLAB, and UFRJ’s Núcleo de Pensamento Social. Blau Edelstein teaches courses on language and culture at Princeton University and Rutgers University, and is currently a Curatorial Fellow at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, where he is Curatorial Assistant on the exhibition Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets.

Valérie Rousseau, Ph.D., is Curatorial Chair for Exhibitions & Senior Curator at the American Folk Art Museum, New York. She overviewed critically acclaimed exhibitions, notably Willem van Genk: Mind Traffic(2014), When the Curtain Never Comes Down (AAMC award, 2015), Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet (2015), Photo|Brut (2021), Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered (2022), as well as projects on the legacy of Francesc Tosquelles, the concomitance of psychiatric and artistic avant-gardes (FACE Foundation Curatorial Fellowship “Étant Donnés,” 2019), neurodiversity (IMLS, 2023–2025), art brut literature, art environments, and artists like William Edmondson, Eugen Gabritschevsky, and Madalena Santos Reinbolt.She authored Bill Traylor (FILAF award, 2018), “Regarder par les failles de ce monde: Intersections de l’art brut et de l’art populaire” (Les cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, 2024), and guest edited the issue “The Fate of Self-Taught Art” (The Brooklyn Rail, 2018). In 2022, she participated in the seminar “Showing/Searching: art brut and its archival impulse” of the Bibliothèque Kandinsky Summer University (Centre Pompidou, Paris).