Acelino Huni Kuin lives in a small wooden house in Jordão — a municipality in the western Brazilian state of Acre — with his wife, kids and grandkids. It’s a remote area of Brazil that one can only reach by boat or a small plane.
The flight from Rio Branco, the capital of the state, to Jordão, a town with fewer than 10,000 people, takes almost two hours. By boat, it can take up to three days.
The journey to Italy is obviously much longer. But that’s where Acelino was two years ago, painting a huge mural that covered the façade of the last Venice Biennial with colorful parrots, crocodiles and fish.
He is one of the original members of an Indigenous art group from the Brazilian Amazon called MAHKU, which stands for Movement of the Artists Huni Kuin. It has eight members today, most of them from the same family.
Huni Kuin are native to this area of Brazil, and the group is not only using art to share their Indigenous culture with the rest of the world, but also to gain recognition in their own state in Brazil.
Acelino goes back and forth between Jordão and their village, Chico Curumin, which is three hours away by fast boat. He bought his house with money from his art, and that’s also been one of the goals of MAHKU: to sell art to buy real estate.
“This canvas means we are calling for strength,” he said, showing a painting filled with fish, birds and Indigenous people in bright yellow, pink, orange, blue and green. A snake forms three long waves in the middle.
Art made with ayahuasca
All of MAHKU’s drawings and paintings represent their traditional songs. They create the art after drinking ayahuasca, an infusion prepared with plants from the Amazon. It has hallucinogenic properties, and the Huni Kuin people also use it for rituals and healing.
“My father was a storyteller and musician and I fell in love with the songs, I’m still enchanted with them today,” said Ibã Sales Huni Kuin, Acelino’s uncle and the founder of the group. “We don’t have writing, just memory. The [COVID-19] pandemic took so many of us, we have been killed since the first rubber cycle.”
He was referring to the boom of rubber production in the area in the late 1800s that killed many native people.
Today, there are about 1.7 million Indigenous people in Brazil — less than 1% of the country’s population. Since 1996, their land has been demarcated, but they don’t own it — the federal government does.
Ibã is 62 years old and he started researching the songs of the Huni Kuin people in the 1980s.
“Ibã was very worried about the loss of their language,” said Kássia Borges, Ibã’s wife. “He thought that with the songs he would recover the language, and he has succeeded.”
Borges is Karajá, another Indigenous group, but she’s been part of MAHKU for the past eight years. Since 2018, Borges and Ibã have lived mostly in Uberlândia, in the state of Minas Gerais, where she is an art professor at the federal university.
YouTube videos
Iba’s songs and drawings first grabbed international attention thanks to his work with anthropologist Amilton de Mattos.
Mattos, who is a professor at the Federal University of Acre, met Ibã in a training program for Indigenous educators in the late 2000s, and he started filming him.
“They were little videos, Ibã would sing and explain the song showing his drawings,” Mattos said.
Mattos ended up organizing a drawing workshop and then an exhibition with those illustrations in 2011. That was their first show.
Mattos posted images of the exhibit on his blog, and it got the attention of the Cartier Foundation, a contemporary art museum in Paris.
They came to Jordão and bought around 15 drawings for less than $5,000, according to Mattos. Today, each of MAHKU’s paintings sells for anywhere between $10,000 and $30,000.
“As you can imagine, it was a revolution in our lives,” Mattos said.
After the drawings were shown in Paris, Ibã, Acelino and others formalized MAHKU as a group in 2013.
Marc Pottier, an independent art curator who works in Brazil, saw MAHKU’s drawings at the Cartier Foundation. “I thought it was absolutely superb. I loved it,” he said.
In 2014, Pottier commissioned the group to paint the walls of an old hospital in the city of São Paulo. They made huge snakes walking through the room in their very first mural.
Pottier believes that, despite MAHKU’s success, Indigenous culture is still under-valued in Brazil.
“They don’t realize how important it is to preserve such a culture, to preserve people who are taking care of nature,” he said.
Pottier explained that the art world can also bring a lot of pressure for native people as they are exposed to greedy collectors and an opaque market.
“It’s very frightening, because you enter the worst of civilization. It’s something you feel like you’re trapped in. It’s another sort of prison,” he said.
Inside museums in São Paulo and alongside cattle in Acre
The Museum of Art of São Paulo has brought the members of MAHKU to the institution around 10 times over the past years, and today, it owns around 70 of their pieces.
Guilherme Giufrida, a MASP curator, said that, at first glance, people might see MAHKU’s work as simple: They draw and paint colorful figures. But he explained that it is just an entry-point.
“It’s like the tip of the iceberg. But there’s a whole iceberg for you to discover. And then you’ll dive into a philosophical, mythical and very fascinating universe,” he said.
Giufrida said the art market can be greedy and exploitative, and he believes a museum needs to think in a different way.
“The museum is dealing with what we expect to be a collection that will last for centuries — even longer. So, we have a responsibility that goes beyond the immediate demands of the market,” he said.
Despite MAHKU’s success inside museums in Brazil and abroad, they are not very well-known in their own state.
“There’s a denial of Indigenous culture as the basis for local traditions,” said Fabiana Chaves, a culture producer at the Federal University of Acre. “On the other hand, there’s a lot of appreciation for country culture from the cattle industry that was brought here.”
Cattle were brought to Acre in the 1970s during the military dictatorship years and it’s now the largest industry there.
Art as advocacy, at home and abroad
In the past few years, two of Ibã’s daughters have been more active with MAHKU: Rita Huni Kuin and Yaka Huni Kuin. They both see a strong connection between their art and advocacy.
“My voice is not only to speak about my culture, but it’s a form of protest, because we Indigenous people are seen as invisible,” said Rita, who is also a leader for Indigenous women.
“We want our work to get as far as possible, to bring respect for Indigenous people, so that we can hold on to our native land with our art,” Yaka said.
Their father, Ibã, shares their sentiment. He’s currently looking for a bigger gallery that can represent them abroad.
“Lately we are not selling a lot of work, our canvases are gathering dust and our members need the money,” he said.
MAHKU will paint a mural at a museum in Denver in November — it will be their first in the US.
Ibã said he hopes international collectors will understand that what they do is not just art, it’s much more than that.
Support for this project was provided by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.
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