Brazil’s Minas Gerais will soon see another museum thanks to mining magnate Bernardo Paz, the megacollector behind the Inhotim museum and nature complex. The Museu Bernardo Paz will turn 311 acres of countryside into a new landscape for “art, nature and community.” The first phase will open in September 2027.
“Museu Bernardo Paz is taking root and flourishing from a belief in the creative potential of unexpected encounters,” said Paz in press materials. “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 museum will encompass more than 20 galleries and pavilions, with commissioned outdoor installations and sculptures, all set in a landscape that includes a lush botanical park and a forest. Locals will be able to take advantage of a community center with a library and art studios. One of the pavilions in development will be devoted to music and dancing, “essential elements of Brazilian culture and identity,” according to the organizers.
Rendering of the Michael Heizer Gallery.
PMCKM Architects
The first phase will include pavilions dedicated to the work of Laura Belém, Sandra Gamarra, Sonia Gomes, Michael Heizer, Anna Maria Maiolino, and Pedro Moraleida, as well as major large-scale sculptures and environments by Torkwase Dyson, Frida Orupabo, Giuseppe Penone, and Mario Garcia Torres. Heizer’s pavilion, the first permanent installation in Latin America, is in progress, and will be dedicated to two large-scale 1993 installations, Displaced Replaced Mass #3 and Negative Wall Sculpture #1.
“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,” said Paulo Miyada, artistic director, in the press release. “In a landscape full of conjunctions that challenge established notions of museum and landscape, intense opportunities emerge for creation, inspiration, and transformation.”
Paz, who has frequently ranked on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, co-founded Inhotim in 2006 with New York art advisor Allan Schwartzman, who is also chief curatorial advisor on the new museum. Residing on a 700-acre campus, the museum mixed art, some of it new commissions, with nature preserves and imported flora. It features major pieces by a who’s-who of contemporary art, including international figures such as Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney, Chris Burden, Yayoi Kusama and David Lamelas, as well as Brazilian artists including Cildo Meireles, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Valeska Soares, and Adriana Varejão.
Bernardo Paz’s new museum will open on some 311 acres of land in the Brumadinho region.
Niin Content / Debora Guimarães
The new museum complex in the Brumadinho region will also feature some 15,000 trees and a million shrubs, cacti, and flowering plants in a design inspired by Paz’s relationship with 20th-century landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. Striking arrangements of fruit trees and flowering trees are promised for a space that borders the Inhotim Private Natural Heritage Reserve and the Paz Environmental Protection Area.
“Bernardo Paz opened up unprecedented possibilities for contemporary art museums when he founded Inhotim 20 years ago,” said Schwartzman. “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.”
In 2017, Paz was sentenced to nine years in jail for money laundering related to Inhotim, but the decision was reversed in 2020.
