Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni

Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni has been a professor at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, since 2005. She has been a visiting professor at several foreign institutions, including UNAM (Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas) in 2013, at the École Normale Supérieure (rue d'Ulm, Paris) in 2016, where she also completed a PhD fellowship between 2016 and 2017, and, most recently, at the Institut d'Etudes Européennes, Université Paris-8, in 2019. In June, she received a grant from the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, and in 2020 she was selected as a fellow by the Institut d'Études Avancées de Nantes in the member category (2021-2023). She specializes in the sociology of art, focusing on the following themes: gender and art, transfers of artistic models, relations between artistic centers and peripheries, women artists in Brazil (XIX-XXI centuries). She also curated the exhibitions Femmes Artistes: les pionnières (1880-1930) at Pinacoteca Artística do Estado de São Paulo in 2015 and Transbordar: Transgressions of Embroidery in Art at SESC- Pinheiros, São Paulo (November 2020 to May 2021), and was assistant curator of the exhibition “Devenir ORLAN” at SESC Paulista (Sep 2023- Jan 2024).

The project

Title: Exotic, “primitive” and/or modern: two Brazilian artists in Modernist Paris (Tarsila do Amaral and Anita Malfatti)

"The project aims to discuss the presence and visibility of Brazilian artists in France, based on their presence in the CNAP collection. This research is part of a larger project I developed in collaboration with the University of São Paulo and the Institut d'Études Avancées de Nantes, entitled “Consecration and gender inequality in the international art world: peripheral artists, possibilities and strategies of insertion. Seeking to pursue research previously carried out on the musealization of works by Latin American artists in France (1960-2020), I proposed a project to  Nantes Institute of Advanced Studies on the presence of Latin American artists in the collection of the Centre National d'Arts Plastiques. This was the world's first public acquisition policy dedicated to “living artists”, which began at the end of the 18th century, and although it has undergone modifications over time, it continues to this day, making it the most enduring of all known initiatives. And, crucially for this project, from the outset, “foreign” artists foreign” artists had no obstacle to their acquisition. Thus, although they are in the minority, they have been present from the outset in the collection which today belongs to the CNAP, an agency of the French Ministry of Culture."

Institution: Musées du Luxembourg - Centre Allemand d´Histoire de l´ART

Selective Bibliography

• SIMIONI, ANA PAULA C. Mulheres Modernistas : Estratégias de Consagração na Arte Brasileira. São Paulo : EDUSP, 2022 (nouvelle édition 2024)
• Simioni, Ana Paula C.. Artistas latino americanos no CNAP:presenças invisíveis. ANAIS DO MUSEU PAULISTA, v. 32, p. 1-33, 2024
• Simioni, Ana Paula Cavalcanti; MAYAYO, PATRICIA . Feminismos em campo expandido. MODOS: Revista de História da Arte, v. 7, p. 81-92, 2023
• Simioni, Ana Paula Cavalcanti; SILVA, B. F. . Mulheres artistas e feminismo no brasil dos anos 1960 a 1980. ARTELOGIE, p. 1-22, 2023 https://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/12139
• Simioni, Ana Paula C.. Latin American artists in modernist Paris: a difficult consecration. ANAIS DO MUSEU PAULISTA, v. 29, p. 1-39, 2021
• Simioni, Ana Paula Cavalcanti. Primitivisms in Dispute: Production and Reception of the Works of two Brazilian Artists in Paris in the 1920s. Modernism-Modernity, v. 6, p. 1-25, 2021.