Exhibition celebrates African art in Paraná city

A selection of approximately 2,000 donated works
Starting October 21st, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON) will open the exhibition "Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent" to the public at the Japanese Immigration Memorial in Assaí, northern Paraná. Curated by Renato Araújo da Silva, the exhibition features approximately 30 works.
The event is a selection of the donation of approximately 2,000 African works of art, resulting from a partnership between the Oscar Niemeyer Museum and the Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection (CIJY) in São Paulo. Since 2021, the collection has belonged to the State of Paraná.

"The initiative is part of Paraná's cultural policy to promote and encourage the democratization of art and culture, taking the collection outside the institution," says the Museum's director-president, Juliana Vosnika. "This initiative is fully aligned with the MON's vision of becoming increasingly accessible to all audiences."

The MON is the largest art museum in Latin America, with over 35,000 square meters of built area, a state-owned museum linked to the State Secretariat of Culture. With its natural focus on visual arts, architecture, and design, it boasts Asian and African collections.

The MON was chosen to house the donation due to its technical capabilities, management capabilities, and the institution's credibility. Other large collections have been donated to the Museum in recent years for the same reasons, such as more than four thousand works by artist Poty Lazzarotto in 2022 and approximately three thousand works of Asian art in 2018.

"For all these reasons, the MON's collection has recently quintupled in size and now boasts over 14,000 pieces, consolidating it as one of the most important in South America," says Juliana. AFRICAN EXHIBITION

The exhibition "Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent" can be seen in Room 4 of the Museum of African Art (MON) in Curitiba. A selection is now traveling to Assaí.

According to the exhibition's curator, Renato Araújo da Silva, the works donated to the MON were acquired over more than 50 years by the couple Ivani and Jorge Yunes, owners of one of the largest art collections in Brazil.

"By exhibiting objects from such distinct cultural heritages at the MON, we find an important common ground: within the Museum, they are elevated to the same artistic platform, bringing African art into line with world art," he says. "This is a way to honor the visual ancestry of the past and to open up new avenues, routes, and perspectives for this art in the future."

The works in the collection originate from countries such as Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mozambique, among others.

Renato Araújo da Silva holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo (USP) and co-authored, among other published works, the book "África em Artes" (Africa in Arts). A curator and researcher, he worked at the Afro Museum and held other exhibitions at museums, such as the São Paulo Museum of Sacred Art.

The incorporation of the African art collection was part of a process of consolidating the MON's benchmark, which establishes as a distinctive feature of the institution the priority collection of art from Paraná and Brazil and the expansion of its non-Eurocentric perspective to Latin American, Asian, and African art.
ABOUT THE MON

The Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON) is a state heritage site linked to the State Secretariat of Culture. The institution houses important references in national and international artistic production in the areas of visual arts, architecture, and design, as well as extensive Asian and African collections. In total, the collection includes approximately 14,000 works of art, housed in a space exceeding 35,000 square meters, making the MON the largest art museum in Latin America. Service

Exhibition "Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent"

Opening: Tuesday, October 21, at 11 a.m.

Exhibition period: until January 25, 2026

Location: Japanese Immigration Memorial (Rua Presidente Kennedy, 480, Assaí – PR)

Presented by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON)
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