Sônia Salzstein Goldberg

Sônia Salzstein is Full-Professor at Universidade de São Paulo, where she teaches History of Modern Art and Theory of Art. She has written extensively on Brazilian modern and contemporary art, including comprehensive essays on such artists as Alfredo Volpi, Antonio Dias, Iole de Freitas, Mira Schendel and Waltercio Caldas, as well as on cultural issues connected with modernization in peripheral contexts, a key theme in her doctoral dissertation presented in 2001 at the Department of Philosophy of The University of São Paulo. In the last seven years her researches have been mostly concerned with the reexamining of Modernism in light of a comprehensive approach, aimed at grasping the global intertwinements between "cosmopolitan" and "provincial" cultures, erudite and vernacular traditions, universalizing and communal cultures. By the same period, the author has also written essays and done lectures about the predicament of art criticism today. She has worked as curator for more than fifteen years in cultural public institutions in Brazil, and in 1989 founded in the Secretary of Cultural Affairs of the State of São Paulo a space dedicated mainly to works of young artists. The several projects in contemporary art she curated then involved publications and theoretical art courses and workshops, as well as exhibitions and the installation of works in the urban environment of São Paulo. She published, amongst others, several studies focusing on Brazilian modernist and contemporary artists such as Alfredo Volpi (Rio de Janeiro; Sílvia Roesler/Campos Gerais, 2000), Franz Weissman (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2001), Mira Schendel/In the Void of the World (São Paulo: Galeria de Arte do Sesi/ Marca D?Água, 1997), Antonio Dias/The Inventented Country (Rio de Janeiro: AML, 2001) and organised Dialogues with Iberê Camargo (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2003). Between 2006 and 2010 she worked as editor at Cosac Naify Publishers, where she directed a collection dedicated to modern and contemporary art, having in 2008 edited, amidst other titles, the first Portuguese version of Leo Steinberg?s Other Criteria/Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art. In the following year, she organized the book Matisse/Imaginação, erotismo, visão decorativa, in which she appears, alongside other writers, as the author of a comprehensive text focusing the ?theme? of the ?atelier? in Matisses?s oeuvre. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)