Portrait of Julia Csekö. Courtesy of the artist.
Julia Csekö’s work reminds us of what it means to approach the visual arts as a form of education and social engagement. As a multidisciplinary artist, her practice embraces painting, sculpture, video performance, installation, and most recently, printmaking to comment on social, cultural, and political issues. The serial nature of her artistry allows for exploration and progression. Her Brazilian-American identity informs how she understands symbols of national pride in both countries. For example, words, flags, ribbons, kitchen utensils, food, and heart representations, recur in her work. Csekö’s studio practice and creative thought unfold in the series Speaking Truth to Power. An ode to the literary world, her text-based paintings pay tribute to writers, activists, and political and community leaders, such as Diane di Prima, bell hooks, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Hannah Arendt, and John Lewis to respond to contemporary issues through mathematically-structured color schemes.
Each project starts after she reads a book or public statement. The subsequent phase is staged at the artist’s studio where she selects an excerpt, calculates letter sizes and surface space, and then finally shifts to the bi-dimensional panel. The topics in these paintings are as varied as their colors. The title of the series is indicative of Csekö’s work in solidarity with social justice movements. For instance, influential Brazilian educator Paulo Freire,1 whose radical pedagogies transformed educational methodologies in underserved areas in Brazil and beyond, is referenced in one of her schemes.
Over the past few years, Csekö has been commissioned to paint public murals around Greater Boston-area repeating the processual character of her Speaking Truth to Power canvases. Unquestionably, Csekö develops her Speaking Truth to Power series out of her affective memories of Rio de Janeiro. For its aesthetic and humane purposes, her series evokes messages left by the Gentileza prophet — a popular figure from the 1980s, who left inscriptions in a singular lettering work on the city’s overpass columns. For example, his sentence: Gentileza gera gentileza (Kindness Generates Kindness) became a well-known carioca2 jargon. The writings of Gentileza are still resonating with passersby every day. What better place than in the city and its enduring communities to learn about the relationship between art and life? Despite Gentileza being a direct influence in Csekö’s work, her paintings convey a broader connection with collective and personal stories by emphasizing statements created to repair cultural and historical erasures, political violence, and environmental damage.
An example of Csekö’s public murals. Courtesy of the artist.
The artist’s interest in 3D objects and installations can be traced back to her undergraduate years at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and later as an MFA student in the SMFA at Tufts University, where she graduated in sculpture. In Pauca Paucis, Csekö elaborates on the functionality of kitchen utensils by producing collective eating devices that challenge the individual act of food consumption. For instance, the material presence of a long table covered in red cloth with no chairs or dinner set or individual sitting signals that everyone should be welcome to enjoy the feast. Yet, not everybody is.
Julia Csekö, Pauca Paucis Still. Image credit: Aaron John Bourque.
“What was possible to say was already in print on a banner that repeated a couple of promises from the Declaration of Independence,” says a fragment from Toni Morrison’s Jazz . Csekö’s oeuvre acknowledges enjoyment and experimentation, and it places you where Carnaval meets Boston’s Fourth of July.
1 Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), one of the 25 most cited publications according to Google Scholar, delves into.
*2 Carioca is a person who was born in or who lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Csekö checking the silkscreen prints of the Speaking Truth to Power series, words by Paulo Freire. Photo Credit: Beacon Gallery.
In This is Where My Heart Is (2023), the artist repurposes her heart-shaped soft sculptures to comment on gift-giving and alternative economic arrangements — other than market-based transactions. The heart sculptures in pink to red plush and velvet are individually mounted on small-sized canvases coated with textiles in myriad pop designs, individual pieces show animal prints, tie-dye, and metallic tons. This is where my heart is pieces are meant to be placed on the wall surrounding birthday bunting-like flags with the phrase Post Capitalist Dreams printed on them. The wall-based series was derived from a previous art installation consisting of a hanging structure full of these hearts — which resembles a ripe banana bunch hanging from a tree. Its first iteration was presented to the public in the solo show You/Me (Você/Eu) in Csekö’s hometown of Rio de Janeiro. The public was invited to take an object of sentimental value — a dog leash, a child’s drawing, dolls, jewelry, and books — and leave it at the gallery in exchange for a heart. At a given time, the exhibition space was populated by objects brought by visitors. Object by object and memory by memory, You/Me became Julia Csekö’s museum of kindness. Csekö’s humorous critique of market-induced inequalities, which can restrain how we access goods and services, invokes a logic of affection before monetary value.
Csekö’ and her plush hearts. Photo Credit Joana Traub Csekö
In the video performance — that evolved from the installation — 20 performers, dressed in formal attire, devour a banquet that lasted four hours in a critique of class inequalities channeling a materialistic presence. It continued until it reached a point of collective exhaustion. Csekö’s visual narrative touches on how societal structures concede, and often determine, generational overabundance or resource deprivation depending on the social hierarchy of wealth accumulation.
— My performances are inspired by the notion of the ancient Greek Agora, where performer and viewer, creation and consumption occupy the same space. — JC
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Michaela Blanc (ela/she/hers) is a Brazilian contemporary art researcher. She works across archives and museum collections investigating diverse issues. Currently, she is the Wikimedian in Residence at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM); Curatorial Fellow in Contemporary Art at MassArt Art Museum (MAAM); and the Art+Feminism Regional Ambassador for New York and Brazil. She holds an MA in Museum Studies/Education from Tufts University and a BA in Art History from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
2016
Julia Csekö: „Myths are Made for the Imagination. “[i]
by Joseph D. Ketner II Foster Chair in Contemporary Art, Emerson College, Boston
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Artist
Straight From The Heart, The Rant Series
Piano Craft Gallery Boston MA
Walter Feldman FellowshipAdministered by the Arts and Business Council of Greater Boston
Julia Csekö has been making two bodies of artwork that are visually distinct, but conceptually interconnected, for over a decade since she experienced her moment of revelation in art school in Rio de Janeiro. On the one hand, she has painted excerpts from the texts of famous writers, editing phrases to share with her audience. On the other hand, she has knitted soft sculptures, fashioning mysterious forms that pierce through the mundane material life. Beneficiary of her first solo exhibition in the United States as a recipient of the 2016 Walter Feldman Fellowship for Emerging Artists, she has created a new series of text paintings. This time, however, Csekö’s written her own texts. Here we witness the artist indulging in “the pleasure of thinking one’s own thoughts…with its own little plot.”[ii]
For the platform of her narrative, Csekö chose painting as the medium of her message. She reduced the format and colors of her canvases to triptychs painted in non-colors: three sets: one black, one silver, and one gold. The delivery of her artistic statement is direct, forcing the viewer to confront her words without the seduction of color. Yet her choice of format—the triptych—carries the inescapable metaphorical significance of the spiritual: the religious significance of the altarpiece, the sanctity of the holy trinity.
The things that we now call art have been a magical medium of myth and metaphor since the Paleolithic Era, when it appears simultaneously with religion, their futures inextricably linked. Cultural anthropologists have theorized that art has served homo spiritualis as a “projection onto the world…of a strong mental image that colors reality before taking shape and transfiguring or recreating it.” To do so, the first artists transcended the physical reality of existence through material form to provide meaning to the chaos of existence.[iii] With the development of the painted, two-dimensional image, early hominids (35,000 BP) made a significant cognitive leap into abstract, visual thought, which is the foundation of articulating shared metaphors and meaning. Csekö is acutely aware that prehistoric painting was predicated on the “choice of rare and exotic materials…and metaphorical reference to valued or sacred subjects…in constructing meaning and communicating social identity.” [iv]
The prehistoric sacrality of painting is the basis of modern culture’s reverence of the painted image as the material for conveying metaphor and meaning. Since the first decades of the twentieth century, painting has been much disparaged as the standard (hallmark) of modern culture that led society to the precipice of its own extinction. Painting has died a thousand deaths over the past century as moderns attempt to divorce themselves from that culture and the vestiges of the primal need for metaphor and myth through the painted image. Certainly the art market allure for Zombie Abstraction has faded quickly in the recognition of its shallow contributions to communicating meaning to a contemporary audience. Csekö joins a cadre of contemporary painters who ignore the self-indulgence of art about itself, reject the mechanism of irony that only provides cursory meaning, and develop new metaphorical structures to ask: How can visual art advance crucial cultural, social, and philosophical ideas?[v]
Csekö’s paintings assume a personality and speak directly to the viewer. She communicates in the vernacular and, through the sequence of paintings–from black to silver to gold–evolves from her “rant” on the artistic struggle to deeper spiritual thoughts, a trajectory that is paralleled by her visual means. She cleverly contrives to attract the attention of the digital era denizen. Through the poignancy of text and the stark visual presence of the paintings, she asks each person to devote time to a visual and cognitive experience. Julia coyly posits a deception that transcends the attention deficiency of the 140-character thought and delves into deeper questions. The paintings scream, “Please Pay Attention, Please!”[vi]
In the stark reality of black and white, the first triptych commands the viewer away from their personal digital device to confront the physical world they inhabit. It draws attention to its own physical presence as a pigmented surface, diverting the reader from the seduction of their marketed desires and asks them to consider, Why are we here? What are we doing? The hollow letters sink into the black darkness, asking, “Is this really necessary? Why bother?” The disconcerting confrontation with the reality of existence would turn some viewers away, but the artist astutely provides comic relief and invites the viewer to “Take a selfie with me.”
The shimmering silver of the second triptych shifts endlessly with light and motion, evoking an elusive presence. The voice of the painting changes to that of the artist. She tells the story of her mercurial wanderings embracing two seemingly irreconcilable paths: that of the Brazilian outsider artist Bispo do Rosario and his exploration of the archetypal myth; and the primordial meaning of materials espoused by Italian Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro. Thus charged, Csekö works through the Sisyphean toil of the artist’s ceaseless practice to forge a meaning from the unknowable in order to reconcile these polarities, explain the existence that she experiences, and provide sign posts for the contemporary wanderer. She understands Albert Camus’s statement that, “Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.” And, Csekö accepts this task.
In the third triptych, glistening in golden luxury, Csekö acknowledges that she revels in “existence and that alone is fascinating.” She confesses that she reveres ritual, magic and the unexplainable. Terror and love are as close as pain and pleasure. When she confronts the unknown, she immerses herself in the irreconcilable folly of the human condition. Yet, she also demonstrates a profound appreciation for Camus’s proposition that the Sisyphean struggle is not a futile suffering, but the “hour of consciousness” when the sentient person recognizes that there is no higher destiny than to negate the absurdity, reject the sterility, and that “one’s burden…. is enough to fill a man’s heart.” In these paintings Julia Csekö speaks Straight from the Heart.
[i] Camus, Albert, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” 1946.
[ii] Luciano Fabro, 1969.
[iii] Clottes, Jean. What is Paleolithic Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, pp. 32, 28, 29.
[iv] White, Randall. “Beyond Art: Toward an Understanding of the Origins of Material Representation in Europe,” Annual Review of Anthropology, v. 21 (1992), p. 560.
[v] Viveros-Faune, Christian. “Roxy Paine will Warp your brain,” Village Voice, (Wednesday, September 17, 2014). www.villagevoice.com/2014-09-17/roxy-paine-denuded-lens-review/
[vi] Bruce Nauman, 1973.
In Memorian - Thank you for your friendship Joe.
Joseph D. Ketner II is Foster Chair in Contemporary Art and Distinguished Curator in Residence at Emerson College, Boston, USA. A curator and art historian for over thirty years, Ketner has curated exhibitions and publishing on a range of topics from nineteenth century African American art, particularly Robert S. Duncanson, and modern and contemporary European and American art. His recent publications include books on Warhol; as well as essays on Heinz Mack and Otto Piene for Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York.
2015
More LOVe please
By Daniela Name
Photo Credit: Joana Traub Csekö and Stefanie Ferraz
MUV Gallery, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
"More love please". The phrase circulated for more than two years on the walls and streets of Rio de Janeiro. A calling, almost a cry for help, in banners and posters of the demonstrations of June 2013 that turned into a viral hashtag on social networks. If we could think of "More love, please" as a mantra, it would be a muttered soundtrack for YOU ME, Julia Csekö’s solo exhibition. "When love is most dangerous / is when it is sincere," Cacaso wrote in “Love love” (Amor Amor). There is a baffling and powerful sincerity in Julia’s proposal for this solo exhibition: the artist is willing to hand over her heart to whomever gives their own in return. Oh, and we're talking about abundance. Julia's heart comes in bunches, literally. A showy bunch of objects in shades of pink and red, handmade by the artist, takes the Gallery. O Only the bunch occupies the space, a plantation of love, the allegorical fabric hearts are available to those who bring something representing their own affection, their heart. Julia will hear who comes with the offer, and from the dialogue between hearts may appear a material exchange. Whomever has the heart-object accepted by the artist - the applicant must say why the object represented his affection, be it a box of candy, a notebook or something else - takes home a heart made by her. Thus, the exhibition at MUV Gallery will be constantly remade along its course, the public's affections will accumulate in the Gallery; and at the same time, the show will disintegrate, by means of the hearts being dispersed into the houses of the visitors to whom Julia has given her hearts to.
To love is to die a little, to dilute oneself in another and thus be enriched with the shock of differences. The wane of the original cluster and the occupation of the gallery with new objects, foreign to the initial design of the show, will demonstrate this constant instability that comes from experiences and encounters. Voilà mon coeur (Behold My Heart) is the name of an important work by Leonilson. This work of 1989 marks the passage of the artist into embroidery, crystals are stitched with gold thread in an ordinary canvas with fraying edges. The use of crystal and gold, alchemical raw materials, becomes a metaphor for the battered body - by then Leonilson already suffered complications arising from AIDS - a heart with regenerative capabilities, a way of transformation. The title, reference to the Catholic ritual of the Eucharist (This is my body, which shall be delivered for you; this is my blood which is given for you) also makes the heart a kind of communion. The affection for food. Communion is one of the forms proposed by the religare in religion. The first communion, the Supper of Christ and his disciples, the bread was distributed among them. From the breaking of bread came a word that today sounds anachronistic, but perhaps more than necessary these days: companion.
Julia symbolically divides the bread, willing to distribute the results of her work, sharing affection. Open to become the companion of every visitor that invests in the same direction, the artist confers materiality and physicality to these interactions, in midst of fleeting virtuality of these days. To exchange hearts magnetizes the exhibition space with this flood of emotion, with an energy exchange. It is crucial to remember the work of Ernesto Neto as a powerful engine of this work. Affiliated to the family of Naves and Neto’s fabric bodies, YOU ME transforms the Gallery itself into a heart: the flow of exchanges emulates circulation, with the back-and-forth of the blood irrigating every area of the body with energy.
Julia was interested in The Banquet, by Plato, when she began to think of this show. In the text, Eros, the god of love, appears not as the embodiment of what is good and well meaning, but as the movement that can lead to good. And is not that which Julia is proposing in this exchange of affections? In bartering objects there is the traffic that can bring change, reinventing places, time and practices from experiences. YOU ME is an anti-inertia reminder, so the cocoon of certainties and solitude that accompany our virtual existence may give rise to real encounters. Life can only radiate from an active heart.
Daniela Name
I am an art critic, editor and curator, journalist, art history teacher and content producer. I am the general curator of Caju Content and Projects, a curatorial platform that since 2017 maintains the Caju Magazine, a line of courses and a bank of projects. I'm a columnist for Veja Rio online in the visual arts area. Culture Advisor at Redes da Maré, an NGO that works in the Set of Favelas da Maré. PhD in Art History and Criticism, Master in Art History and Criticism, I wrote the books "Espelho do Brasil" (2008), about Brazilian popular art; "Norte - Marcelo Moscheta" (2012); "Almir Mavignier" (2013); and "Amélia Toledo - Forma fluida" (2015). I have worked as an independent curator, in Brazil and other countries, since 2004. My first training was in journalism, and I worked at the newspaper O Globo between 2004 and 2015 as a cultural reporter.
2012
A Coney Island for the Mind
By Fernando Cochiarale
Photo Credit Joana Traub Csekö
She paints these excerpts sensibly on multiple colored bars that cover the canvas’ entire surface. The chromatic and textual surfaces the artist builds conjure more confrontation than harmonization. Text and paint do not illuminate each other, nor do they justify a necessary relationship. Word and image coexist juxtaposed. These paintings don’t allow for a clear reading of the authors quoted, such as Guy Debord, Hakim Bey, Henri Lefebvre and Luciano Fabro; nor do they represent a purely formal chromatic exercise, as commonly expected of painting. In this successful fitting of parts that would not usually fit together, Csekö creates a systemic pattern that guides her pictorial production: the words point to a sensitive spatial order, but suffer the corrosive action of their meaning when presented as painting.
In an accompanying performance by Csekö, the corrosion of the power of words is explored literally, as the artist dissolves a series of edible letters spelling out phrases such as "A part of me is everyone". Soaked in vodka, the letters melt into a colored liquid pool to be ingested by visitors.
The written word is expected to be a guiding principle for understanding. Csekö meets this expectation, only to challenge it, returning the expectation to the viewer as a confounding dissolution, negating the clarification between what is seen and what can be read.
A Coney Island of the Mind solo show
Oscar Cruz Gallery, São Paulo, Brazil
Unlike historical painting of the Renaissance, Baroque and Modernism, contemporary painting has no common ground, and is therefore free to define itself. In the past, artists observed a strict series of principals around perspective, the compositional power of light and shadow, and later, planarity, which came to define common aesthetic judgment. Conversely, the contemporary artist must create their own systems in order to qualify and singularize their production in comparison to others.
In this series of paintings, Julia Csekö responds to this need and expectation, establishing a relationship between her work and the general ideas it references. Csekö appropriates excerpts from texts by authors and artists whose ideas attract her attention, and integrates them into her work.
Fernando Cochiarale lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Member of the Nominating Committees PIPA 2011 and 2013.
Art critic, curator and professor of art philosophy in the Philosophy Department of PUC-RJ since 1978. Also teaches at the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage. Author, with Anna Bella Geiger, of the book “Abstracionismo Geométrico e Informal ( Funarte) and of hundreds of articles, texts and essays published in books, catalogues, newspapers and art magazines in Brazil and abroad. Curated and coordinated the Rumos Itaú Cultural Artes Visuais program (1999 / 2000 and 2001 / 2002) and was Funarte’s visual arts coordinator from 1991 to 1999; independent curator of exhibitions such as O Moderno e o Contemporâneo, Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand, MAM-RJ, 1981 (with Wilson Coutinho); Rio de Janeiro 1959 / 1960, Experiência Neoconcreta, MAM, RJ, 1991; O Corpo na Arte Contemporânea Brasileira, Itaú Cultural, SP, 2005 (with Viviane Matesco); É Hoje na Arte Contemporânea Brasileira, Santander Cultural, RS, 2006 (with Franz Manata), Filmes de Artista, Oi Futuro, RJ (2007), Hélio Oiticica: Museu é o Mundo(with César Oiticica Filho) ItaúCultural, SP; Paço Imperial and Casa França-Brasil , RJ; Museu Nacional do Centro Cultural da República, DF (2010). From November, 2000 to August, 2007 was the curator of Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art (MAM). Doctor in Communication and Aesthetic Technologies by the School of Communications of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Curator of the cultural centre Casa de Cultura Laura Alvim, in Rio de Janeiro (2011/2012).
2010
sweet monsters
By Paulo Sergio Duarte
Photo Credit: Wilton Montenegro
TAC Gallery, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Many Medusas populate our myths. Some still walk around with snakes for hair, like the only mortal of the three Gorgons—she who purged the sin of being seduced by Poseidon. A beautiful woman turned into a monster, her gaze petrified those who crossed her path. Killed by Perseus, her spectra can be found in legends throughout the Middle Ages.
In some bars today, we can still find Medusas. However, the strands and braids of these women’s hair no longer frighten us mere mortals of the twenty-first century. We’ve seen green hair, red and blue, spiky and shaved. We’ve seen freaks, hippies, funkies, grungies, punkies, and even yuppies. What would a Gorgon look like to us today?
In Julia Csekö’s soft sculptures, snakes occupy not only heads, but compose entire bodies. Tentacles spread out around the gallery, like velvet octopi asking to be caressed. They have a feminine quality, even when clad in men’s suits. Resembling dolls reminiscent of our childhood, their appearance is strange, yet sweet.
In Csekö’s metamorphosis of the myth, the Gorgon no longer threatens us. The only remnant of the Medusa is her hair, which is transformed into numerous arms reaching across the gallery floor. No longer flickering electrically atop a head, rather than scaring us away, these corporeal forms invite touch. A tactile dimension inhabits them—a texture that can be felt with the eyes. It’s as if we can stroke them with our gaze.
In addition to the velvety texture, there is crimson color. Scattered, the work presents an intense chromatic energy. The paradox is obvious: the meeting of sweetness—or the almost sweet—with strangeness and monstrosity. But these are gentle monsters, which share nothing with the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Although costumed in human vestments, they are not presented as human deformities. Instead, they are invented beings embodying the two contrary forces of strangeness and sweetness. Csekö embraces both a refusal of the world as it is given to us, and a naive desire to commune with the world, to be accepted in it. The vitality of these works derives from the tension between denial and desire for communion.
These beings also have an awareness of their anomie. The exhibition’s title, “Velvet Screw," references Man Ray’s piece "Cadeau," a clothing iron rendered dysfunctional by virtue of nails mounted to its surface. Csekö’s velvet screws cannot hold anything, yet they curl their way into receptive places.
This critical dimension of Csekö’s work is disguised by the affections expressed in shapes and colors. In comparing contemporary works by younger artists with those of two or three generations past, we notice the disappearance of a certain asceticism or bitterness. The desire to present oneself naively and sweetly with humor and irony is a quasi manifestation of a refusal of the world as it presents itself—cynical, hypocritical— too serious for it’s own good. On one hand, the desire for communion combined with art creates another form of entertainment, even when it is held in the solitude of the studio. When released into the world it becomes just as another cog in the gears of a very powerful machine, lubricated by billions of dollars. The disparity of this world, as defined by the interior of the studio versus the exterior, inhabited by dreams and aesthetic investigations of an artist who still demands a degree of strangeness to their work, produces an enormous abyss.
Plunging into the abyss, Csekö attempts to link these two increasingly interdependent worlds: the world of art as commodity, and the desire to preserve a certain level of strangeness in order to avoid a promiscuous relationship. Indeed, one only has to attend an international art fair to realize that the world of money stormed the studios of creation long ago. It’s no accident when certain collectors hear the word "poetic" they immediately reach for their checkbook, or rather their credit card. Some dealers shamelessly share in interviews the ways in which they interfere with artists’ creative processes in order to garner the artwork most appropriate for the market. This is in stark contrast to the art world post-World War II. Consider Rothko, who refused to let his paintings commissioned by a New York restaurant be displayed there, and instead chose to donate them to the Tate in London, because he felt the restaurant was not suitable for the enjoyment of his art.
This is the situation that Csekö and other artists of her generation are faced with. On the one hand, the studio remains preserved. On the other, the widespread commercialization of all social relations, in which fictitious capital is channeled through the art market, produces higher record prices for living artists each year.
It is the reservation of an artist who doesn’t identify with the current state of affairs to create poetic niches, moving around the edges of this huge market in which there is a place for everything. Are there poetic dimensions that can be presented to preserve future memory? Who knows? Perhaps it will not always be this way. If we let them, Csekö’s strange tentacled sculptures can embrace us and, just for a moment—with the caress of their velvet and strength of their colors—take us away from this world of numbers, figures and graphs, where there is little distance between a work of art and soybeans and oil.
Paulo Sergio Duarte
Paulo Sergio Duarte é crítico, professor de história da arte e curador. Até março de 2020 foi pesquisador do Centro de Estudos Sociais Aplicados – CESAP – da Universidade Candido Mendes onde dirigiu oCentro Cultural Candido Mendes. Exerceu diversos cargos públicos na direção de instituições da educação e da cultura, entre outros implantou o Núcleo de Arte Contemporânea – NAC (com Antonio Dias e Francisco Pereira) da Universidade Federal da Paraíba – UFPb (1978-1979); projetou e implantou o programa Espaço Arte Brasileira Contemporânea – Espaço ABC – da Funarte (com Glória Ferreira) (1979-1983); dirigiu o Instituto Nacional de Artes Plásticas da Funarte – INAP (1981-1983); Assessor-Chefe do Rioarte, na Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro (1983-84); Assessor de Modernização Administrativa da Secretaria Municipal de Educação e Cultura do Rio de Janeiro (1984); Chefe de Gabinete da Secretaria Municipal de Educação e Cultura do Rio de Janeiro (1985-86); Diretor Geral do Paço Imperial – IPHAN/Pró-Memória (1986-1990); Subsecretário de Educação do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (1991-93) e membro do grupo de implantação da Universidade Estadual Norte Fluminense – UENF (1991-1995). Foi curador de muitas exposições individuais e coletivas de diferentes portes. Publicou os livros Antonio Dias (com Achille Bonito Oliva) (São Paulo: Cosac Naify / APC, 2015); Arte Brasileira Contemporânea – um prelúdio (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Plajap, 2008); A Trilha da Trama e outros textos sobre arte (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 2004, 2ª edição, 2009); Carlos Vergara (Porto Alegre: Santander Cultural, 2003); Waltercio Caldas (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2001); e Anos 60 – Transformações da arte no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Campos Gerais, 1998); além de diversos textos sobre arte moderna e contemporânea em livros, catálogos e periódicos.