A DANCE FOR MADALENA
Ana Pi Responds to the Exhibition
Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets
FRIDAY, MARCH 7, 5:00 PM
Motif 1: EYES CLOSING
SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 2:00 PM
Motif 2: FINAL CLEANING
SUNDAY, MARCH 9, 2:00 PM
Motif 3: INLAND EXPANDING
Look! The figure is raising her arm. It looks like she’s dancing,” observed Ana Pi after examining one of Madalena Santos Reinbolt’s quadros de lã (“wool paintings”).1
Santos Reinbolt’s figures are restless. They wave at us, turn, tilt, and float in a state of impossible balance; they drift, swing, swim, or fly. Their dynamic postures create a vibrant and interconnected multiverse.
It is to this buzzing world that Pi attunes herself in A Dance for Madalena. The choreographer and performer pays tribute to Santos Reinbolt’s life and vision by drawing from her gestures. Her performance can be considered an “exercise in positionality”—a search for the right posture within the picture, body, and space to reveal the many layers and threads embedded in the work. Identifying and performing gestures offers an opportunity to reposition Santos Reinbolt and her creations, opening new possibilities of interpretation.
Commissioning a contemporary artist like Pi to respond to works on view in the gallery is a first for the American Folk Art Museum. In the context of Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets, an exhibition dedicated to a Black painter and embroiderer who had little public exposure during her lifetime, it is important to explore the work beyond the confines of institutional discourse and carve out a space for creative speculation. Pi approaches the depth and breadth of Santos Reinbolt’s artistry through an act of imagination.
This intergenerational dialogue extends beyond movement, encompassing voice, sound, and texture. It features a unique sound system—20 mini radios, each tuned to a pirated station, and wrapped in a colorful knitting—which plays a variety of songs, ranging from Bahian traditional drum music and popular Brazilian melodies (some dedicated to “Madalena”) to recent vocal recordings. This alternative, DIY soundscape speaks to the mutability and fluidity of Afro-Brazilian life, moving at the margins of institutional space and resisting the persistent forces of racial exclusion.2
Within this fluid and expansive performative structure, Pi unfolds three distinct dances, each integrating a specific motif drawn from Santos Reinbolt’s work.
1 Conversation between the artist and AFAM’s Curator of Programs and Engagement, November 2025.
2 Vivian A Crockett, “A Place to Call Home,” in Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo, eds., Afro-Atlantic Histories, 2021, p. 56.
3 Statement of the artist in an interview in 1974–1975. See the exhibition text of Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets, curated by Valérie Rousseau with the assistance of Dylan Blau Edelstein, on view at AFAM through May 25, 2025.
4 Ibid.
5 See the exhibition text for more details about this episode.
6 Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo, eds., Afro-Atlantic Histories, 2021, p.292.
Motif 1: EYES CLOSING
Pi’s first dance activates the discernible presence and influence of Black spirituality in Santos Reinbolt’s visual world. Many landscapes on view are populated with religious symbols and mystical figures such as angels, birds, and butterflies. A Catholic, the artist publicly claimed to not identify with Candomblé or spiritism. This rejection may be interpreted as a form of self-censorship and self-protection, as African diasporic traditions were stigmatized during her lifetime—especially under the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985).3
Using a visual, gestural, and sonic vocabulary rooted in Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices, including her own Candomblé education, Pi conjures Santos Reinbolt’s spiritual attitude—a vision inhabited by divinities, celestial bodies, and mythological beliefs. Through rhythm and movement, Pi reflects on the rich crossings of ancestral African cosmogonies in Bahian culture while celebrating the historic role of Black spirituality in Brazilian art, both past and present.
Motif 2: FINAL CLEANING
When Santos Reinbolt stated that her employers saw her “not [as] a cook but a great artist,” she spoke to the tension between her daily occupation and her artistic practice.4 In fact this conflict led to her dismissal by her first employers in Petrópolis in 1952, who claimed that she dedicated too much time to art and not enough time to her household duties.5 Two existing photographs of the artist (included in the exhibition) also capture this tension: one portrays her staring directly into the camera in an elegantly tailored ensemble, surrounded by her lush embroideries; the other depicts her gazing into the distance, wearing a headscarf—a visual marker of her working-class status.
With a generous touch of humor and tenderness, Pi’s second dance seeks to dismantle this constructed duality. The performer envisions Santos Reinbolt’s last and final “cleaning” as a moment of liberation—one that allows her to break free from the rigid image of a Black domestic worker, and emerge as a multidimensional and multitemporal subject, both close and distant.6
7 Nicole Smythe-Johnson, “Rethinking John Dunkley: The Black Geographies of a Subaltern Modernism” in Margarita Sánchez Urdaneta and Mathilde Walker-Billaud, eds., Unexpected Partners: Self-Taught Artists and Modernism in Interwar America, American Folk Art Museum, 2022, p.70.
8 Jota Mombaça, “Darkness as a Non-representational Field in Ana Pi’s NoirBLUE,” in Contemporary And, November 30, 2017. https://contemporaryand.com/magazines/darkness-as-a-non-representational-field-inana-pis-noirblue/
9 Richard Meyer, Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, MIT Press, 2022, p.39.
10 Exhibition text of What That Quilt Knows About Me, curated by Emelie Gevalt and Sadé Ayorinde, on view at AFAM from March 17 to October 29, 2023.