Heitor dos Prazeres: First New York Solo Show at Andrew Kreps Gallery

Andrew Kreps Gallery in Chinatown presents an exhibition of works by Heitor dos Prazeres (1898–1966) from November 6 to December 19, 2026. It is the first show devoted to the Brazilian artist in New York, and it brings together works made between 1944 and 1966. The exhibition is spread across the gallery's two addresses, 394 Broadway and 22 Cortlandt Alley.

Prazeres was born and died in Rio de Janeiro. He came into the world a decade after slavery was abolished in Brazil and grew up with music, taught by his father and by his uncle, the musician Hilário Jovino Ferreira. He wrote his first compositions at fourteen and became a fixture of the Rio neighborhood known as Pequena África, or Little Africa. There he helped found samba schools that are now landmarks, including Deixa Falar, Mangueira and Portela. His career ran across painting, fashion and music, and he is regarded as a central figure of twentieth-century Rio culture.

He began to paint in the mid-1930s, drawing on the community around him: popular festivals, Afro-Brazilian religions, samba and bohemian life. The pictures are vivid in color and rhythmic in composition, with flat, energetic figures in motion. They record joy, but also mourning and hardship tied to his experience as a Black man in an unequal society. Capoeira, samba and tenderness appear alongside police repression and the suppressed practices of Afro-Brazilian faith, which gives the work a political edge. Where earlier depictions of Black life in Brazil had been filtered through a colonial gaze, Prazeres looked closely at everyday existence and sought to preserve his subjects' dignity.

Recognition came early. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired a work in 1942, and in 1944 he was the only Black artist in a war relief exhibition of Brazilian art at the Royal Academy in London. His painting Moenda, shown in the first São Paulo Biennial, led to a dedicated presentation in the second edition in 1953. He also took part in the 1952 Venice Biennale and, in 1966, represented Brazil at the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar. After the 1964 coup he was dismissed from Rádio Nacional, where he had performed since 1943, among the first cases of censorship under the new regime. He continued to make art and music until his death two years later.

His work is held by MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, El Museo del Barrio, the Museo Reina Sofía, MASP and Pinacoteca de São Paulo, among others. It was included in the 2025 São Paulo Biennial and a 2025 retrospective at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil. The gallery thanks Almeida & Dale for their collaboration on the exhibition.