Acervo em Transformação: Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) - São Paulo, SP
![Maria Auxiliadora, da série Artistas no Ateliê [Artists in the Studio series], 2022 Oil on linen 210 x 140 x 08 cm / 82.68 x 55.12 x 3.15 in](https://artlogic-res.cloudinary.com/w_600,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto/artlogicstorage/panmelacastro/images/view/ad960132355ece6791d7210580f15d28j/panmelacastro-panmela-castro-maria-auxiliadora-da-s-rie-artistas-no-ateli-artists-in-the-studio-series-2022.jpg)
Collection in Transformation is the title of the long-term exhibition of the MASP collection. The artworks are installed on crystal easels — glass panels fitted into concrete blocks — arranged in rows without partitions on the museum’s spacious second floor. The open, fluid, and permeable space of the gallery offers multiple possibilities for access and interpretation, eliminating hierarchies and predetermined paths. Removing the paintings from the walls and placing them on the easels allows visitors to walk among them, like in a forest of artworks that seem to float in the air.
The crystal easels, designed by Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) — who also designed the MASP building — were introduced in 1968, when the museum opened its headquarters on Avenida Paulista. Replaced in 1996 by partition walls, these display devices were reintroduced in 2015. Since then, the exhibition has remained in constant flux, as its title suggests, with works rotating in and out due to loans, new acquisitions, and curatorial decisions. The labels are placed on the back of the easels, in line with Bo Bardi’s original intention that visitors’ first encounter with the artworks should be direct, free from contextual information such as authorship, title, and date.
Today, the works are organized chronologically, with the most recent in the front rows and the oldest in the back. However, this rigid timeline is occasionally disrupted by contemporary artists, such as Carla Zaccagnini, Sofia Borges, Dora Longo Bahia, and Waltercio Caldas, whose works create frictions between historical periods or articulate thematic dialogues, as seen in the row dedicated to landscapes.
One of MASP’s main acquisition criteria is to collect works that have been exhibited at the museum; thus, many pieces come from past shows, such as Afro-Atlantic Histories (2018), Histories of Women, Feminist Histories (2019), and Brazilian Histories (2021–22). Within this context, the first row is entirely dedicated to works by Black artists, and the second to women artists, advancing MASP’s mission as a diverse, inclusive, and plural institution. The iconic poster by the Guerrilla Girls, created in 2017 and on display here, critiques the low number of women artists represented in the collection — a percentage that was once 6% and now exceeds 20%. Much work remains to be done.
