FAD NEWS: Bernardo Paz announces major new contemporary art museum for Brazil
Art collector and philanthropist Bernardo Paz, the founder of Inhotim, has announced plans for a vast new contemporary art museum in Brazil, transforming 126 hectares of the Minas Gerais countryside with more than 20 galleries and pavilions, major outdoor installations and an extensively planted landscape.
Museu Bernardo Paz, located in Brumadinho, is being developed in phases, with the first pavilions and installations expected to be unveiled in September 2027.
The scale of the project is considerable. Covering 126 hectares (311 acres), the museum will combine contemporary art with a botanical park and forest, presenting works from Paz’s 3,000-piece collection alongside new commissions and permanent installations by Brazilian, South American and international artists.
The first phase will include dedicated pavilions for Michael Heizer, Anna Maria Maiolino, Sonia Gomes, Pedro Moraleida, Sandra Gamarra and Laura Belém, alongside large-scale sculptures and artistic environments by Frida Orupabo, Mario Garcia Torres, Torkwase Dyson and Giuseppe Penone.
For Heizer, a foundational figure in American Land Art, the museum will create his first permanent installation in Latin America. A purpose-built pavilion is currently being constructed to house the monumental Displaced Replaced Mass #3 (1993) and Negative Wall Sculpture #1 (1993), with the building designed around the artist’s specifications.
Art will be embedded within a landscape of hills and valleys bordering the Inhotim Private Natural Heritage Reserve and the Paz Environmental Protection Area. Some 15,000 trees and one million shrubs, cacti and flowering plants are being planted as part of a landscape designed by Paz and inspired by his friendship and longstanding collaboration with Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx.
The project will also extend beyond the conventional museum model. A community centre at its entrance will include a library and art studios dedicated to residents of Brumadinho, while plans for a future pavilion will focus on music and dance and their role within Brazilian culture and identity.
Paz said:
“Museu Bernardo Paz is taking root and flourishing from a belief in the creative potential of unexpected encounters. This is a place to discover new relationships between art and landscapes of different kinds, between artists and audiences that have not yet met one another, and between the community of Brumadinho and visitors from all over the world. All of this is coming together here, and all of it is for the people.”
The announcement inevitably invites comparisons with Inhotim, the extraordinary museum and botanical garden Paz began developing in 2004 and opened in 2006. In 2022, he donated the cultural property to the nonprofit association responsible for Instituto Inhotim, which now operates independently with its own leadership and governance.
Now 76, Paz is funding Museu Bernardo Paz with his own resources and establishing it as a separate nonprofit institution with its own governance, management and programming.
Paulo Miyada, artistic director of Museu Bernardo Paz, said:
“At a moment when there is a prevailing global sense of ever-narrowing possibilities—whether in culture, society, the environment, or politics—we hope that Museu Bernardo Paz will be a place that renews the imagination. In a landscape full of conjunctions that challenge established notions of museum and landscape, intense opportunities emerge for creation, inspiration, and transformation.”
The museum’s chief curatorial advisor is Allan Schwartzman, who co-founded Inhotim and sees the new project as an opportunity for Paz to push the model he established there into different territory.
Schwartzman said:
“Bernardo Paz opened up unprecedented possibilities for contemporary art museums when he founded Inhotim 20 years ago. With that landmark institution now established, he is moving beyond it into new experimental territory. There is a creative abundance at Museu Bernardo Paz—a distinctive and radical sense of discovery—that will be astonishing in both scope and imaginative force.”
Other members of the leadership team include Sofia Paz, vice president; Paulo Soares, director of collection and projects; Fernanda Arruda, curatorial advisor; and Arthur Castro, director of operations.
Although Museu Bernardo Paz and Instituto Inhotim will remain independent in their funding, management and programming, the two organisations are developing protocols for future collaboration. Both institutions say they will maintain a focus on Brumadinho through education, employment, cultural programmes and tourism.
With more than 20 galleries and pavilions planned, a 126-hectare landscape and permanent installations from artists including Heizer, Maiolino and Penone, Museu Bernardo Paz looks set to become a significant new addition to Brazil’s contemporary art landscape when its first phase is unveiled in September 2027.
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Mark Westall has spent over thirty years creating platforms for culture. Since founding FAD Magazine in 2006, he’s dedicated his career to documenting, championing and questioning contemporary art through publishing, criticism and conversation. As founder and editorial director of one of the UK’s leading independent contemporary art publications, he has interviewed artists, reviewed exhibitions and covered the ideas shaping contemporary visual culture for more than two decades. He also founded Art of Conversation, Despoke and FAD Bazaar, and regularly serves as a judge for international art and photography awards.