Ivo Mesquita

Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries (2012-2013)

The Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries is a unique initiative at the University of Oxford dedicated to examining the crucial role that cultural institutions play in society. Ambitious in its scope, the initiative holds Visiting Professorships that bring individuals of outstanding practical and academic expertise to the University Oxford, which is home to some of the oldest and most important museums, libraries and collections in the Western world.

The initiative enjoys a special relationship with the Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Contemporary Art, often overlapping to provide a dynamic forum for exchange about arts and culture.

The Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries has been made possible by the generous support of Foster + Partners and is hosted by Balliol College, Oxford.

Ivo Mesquita is the Artistic Director of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in Brazil.

Ivo Mesquita opened his series with a lecture titled Museums: Experience Versus Numbers. Reflecting on the power of art to provoke very personal reactions within us, Mesquita explores the transformative and liberatingpower of art and the role of the museum in contemporary society.

By raising the issue of Latin America’s current globalization and its colonial past as part of the collective memory, Mesquita discusses how art institutions should reflect this, rather than shy away from such a fact.

As he underlined, Latin America today is the product of generations of ethnic mixing. It is not a hybrid – with all the connotations of scientific control which come with that; rather, it is the result of clashing and collision of different cultures – something which should be represented and celebrated in its art.

In a final panel discussion Mesquita discusses the process of writing about art in Pictures and Texts with William Kentridge and Estrella de Diego Otero.