Um poema desenhado (A Drawn Poem) is an artist’s book by Sonia Gomes, published by the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art. The project draws on the Brazilian artist’s longtime fascination with fabrics, collage, and the narrative form of the book.
As a sculptor, Gomes binds, knots, drapes, and otherwise transforms secondhand textiles to make powerful artworks. Often rendered from fabrics found by or gifted to the artist, these works evoke the presence, as well as the absence, of lives once lived in close association with articles of clothing and other domestic materials.
For this project, Gomes assembled 17 multilayered drawn, painted, and cut collages she made in the spring and summer of 2023. Her artworks have been re-created for this edition by silkscreen and fine offset printing, hand-stitching, and both hand and machine paper-cutting, with the results sewn into a hand-bound volume covered in a Brazilian cloth.
The project represents an extended collaboration among Gomes and her staff at Ateliê Sonia Gomes in São Paulo; Trifolio, a fine printer and binder in Verona, Italy; and MoMA’s Library Council. The finished book includes transparent overlays and hidden chambers enclosing handwritten poems and fragments of text selected or written by the artist.
Edition and sales Um poema desenhado is published for MoMA’s Library Council in an edition of 120 copies, numbered 1 through 120. One hundred copies are reserved for the members of the Library Council and institutions, and 20 copies for the artist and collaborators.
Um poema desenhado is also published in a deluxe edition of 35 copies. This edition includes handmade lace, additional cloth, and other collage elements supplied by Ateliê Sonia Gomes. It features an unbound, signed silkscreen and offset print by Gomes. Twenty copies, available for sale to support the Museum’s research collections, are lettered A through T. Fifteen artist and collaborator copies are lettered aa/zz through oo/zz.
Twenty copies of the deluxe edition of Sonia Gomes’s Um poema desenhado were made available for purchase with the price upon request. A few copies of the main edition published for the Library Council available for purchase by libraries and museums.
To purchase a copy, or for more information, please contact [email protected]. All sales benefit the Archives, Library, and Research Collections of The Museum of Modern Art.
Each book measures 16.5 × 12.8 inches (42.1 × 32.5 cm). Each copy is signed and numbered.
Text The text for Um poema desenhado consists of poems and short prose passages that suggest an endurance of the artistic spirit and an almost animistic power of art and inspiration. Translator Elizabeth Zuba assembled the English renderings and original texts that Gomes handwrote into the body of the book. Zuba also translated the Portuguese source texts into English.
A pamphlet at the back of the book includes a poem by the artist herself, as well as a poem from the Brazilian poet Hilda Hilst, “Ode XXII.,” in Da poesia (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2017); an appreciation of Gomes by the artist’s friend Wilson de Avellar; excerpts from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1954); Friedrich Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); a quotation from Gaston Roupnel, as found in Gaston Bachelard’s Intuition of the Instant (Roupnel, Gaston. Siloë. Paris: Stock, 1927, quoted in Intuition of the Instant (Northwestern University Press, 2013); and two lines from Maya Angelou’s And Still I Rise in And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems (New York: Random House, 1978). Additionally, the book includes the text from a personal letter to the artist from the psychoanalyst Mônica Martins de Godoy Fonseca.
Collaborators The publication was organized by May Castleberry, editor, Contemporary Editions, for the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art. Joanna Mendes, studio manager at Ateliê Sonia Gomes, oversaw and contributed to every aspect of the project, working closely with Sonia Gomes. Trifolio deftly captured Gomes’s designs and textural artwork with an exceptional deployment of printing and binding techniques.
Cayque Castro, Eliana de Oliveira, Juliana dos Santos, Marcelo Marques, and Regina Marques of Ateliê Sonia Gomes sewed and attached cloth and other materials to the book by hand. Printmaker Ivana Almeida printed the silkscreen image on banana paper made by hand by Moinho Brasil Papéis Artesanais. The Associação das Rendeiras Bilro de Ouro, a group of lacemakers in Raposa, Maranhão, Brazil, made traditional lace for the project. The colophon page and the typeset brochure with text and translations were designed by Leslie Miller at the Grenfell Press, who also consulted on production.
About the artist Sonia Gomes has received international recognition over the past 15 years. She has participated in multiple international exhibitions, among them the 56th Venice Biennale, All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor, in 2015, and the 35th São Paulo Biennial, Choreographies of the Impossible, in 2023; she is included in the 60th Venice Biennale, Stranieri ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere, in the exhibition for the Holy See, With My Eyes, in 2024. In 2018, she became the first living Black Brazilian woman to have a one-person show at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand.
Gomes’s work has been acquired and exhibited in recent years by a range of institutions, among them The Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires; the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand; and the Tate Modern, London.
Acknowledgments An enormous debt of gratitude is owed to the members of the Library Council. The project could not have been realized without the generous support of Frances Reynolds, co-chair of MoMA’s Library Council. Sincere thanks to Michelle Elligott, chief of MoMA’s Archives, Library, and Research Collections; Inés Katzenstein, curator of Latin American Art at MoMA and director of the Museum’s Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute; artist Beatriz Milhazes; and Frances Reynolds for their encouragement. For their kind assistance within the Museum, thanks to Glenn Lowry, MoMA director; Sarah Suzuki, MoMA associate director; and Suzi Villiger, department manager in Archives, Library, and Research Collections. Outside the Museum, the same thanks go to Anna Jardine for editorial support. Thanks also to Pedro Mendes, Ana Varella, and the staff at the Mendes Wood DM gallery for advice that allowed us to produce this book on three continents.
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