Jaider Esbell valuation
Macuxi painter, writer and curator whose teeming, brilliant canvases put Indigenous cosmology at the centre of Brazilian art.
Jaider Esbell (1979–2021) was born in Normandia, in the Brazilian state of Roraima, in a Macuxi village in the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous territory.
What a work by Jaider Esbell is worth
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Bio
Jaider Esbell (1979–2021) was born in Normandia, in the Brazilian state of Roraima, in a Macuxi village in the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous territory. He took a degree in geography at the Federal University of Roraima in 2007, and in 2012 published his first book, Terreiro de Makunaima, of myths, legends and stories. He worked as a painter, writer, curator, educator and activist, and his paintings — acrylic and paint marker on canvas, dense with interlocking figures, spirits, animals and patterns in vivid colour — draw on the Macuxi cosmology in which Makunaima is creator and trickster, and on the conflicts over Indigenous land. In 2013 he organised a gathering of Indigenous peoples in Roraima that helped to establish contemporary Indigenous art in Brazil. He won the PIPA Prize in 2016, was one of the central artists of the 34th São Paulo Bienal in 2021, and curated Moquém_Surarî, an exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art, at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo the same year. His work was in the Venice Biennale of 2022.
His paintings are unique and the number in circulation is small. Provenance through Galeria Millan in São Paulo, which showed him, or from the artist directly, and the exhibition history are the first questions; works on paper and his books come up as well.
Normandia, Makunaima and the 34th Bienal
He was raised and taught at home by his adoptive mother, Bernaldina José Pedro, a Macuxi elder.
At the 34th Bienal his Entidades, a pair of giant inflatable serpents, floated on the lake in Ibirapuera Park, figures of abundance and protection for the Macuxi.
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