As a child, the Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes would cut, rip, twist, layer, stitch, and adorn her own clothing and jewelry, creating wearable works of art. “My body was my first canvas,” Gomes, now 77 and with punk-rock blueberry hair, tells me as we sit in her São Paulo studio this past January. On the studio’s second floor, a clothing rack displays some of these deconstructed knits. With glee, she points out a threadbare yellow T-shirt embellished with strings, beads, and patchworks of other fabrics. An open zipper below the neckline produces a cheeky cutout, one of the few I’ve ever liked on a garment. “I’ve always been an artist, even if I didn’t have a name for it,” she says.
The same sly spirit of rebellion permeates Gomes’s sculptures, which range from bulbous pendulums that dangle from the ceiling to gnarled, wire-frame cages that sprout from the ground or cling to walls. It’s work that rewards close looking: a cluster of sequins or shells here, a knot of wax print or hundred-year-old lace there. Tapping into the Afro-Brazilian tradition of craftwork, she manipulates by hand fabrics that were mostly found or donated. “Everything I receive, I keep,” she says. Each swatch brings with it a backstory. Memory—both personal and cultural—is as much a material to her as cotton, silk, or wool.
Gomes is a star in Brazil, all the more impressive considering she didn’t pursue her art full-time until age 45, when she left behind her legal career. “Sonia’s a goddess there…a legend,” says the Ghanaian American curator Larry Ossei-Mensah, who has collaborated with her on several projects in recent years. Gomes has exhibited at museums around the country (in 2018 she had not one but two solo shows, at the São Paulo Art Museum and the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro) and at such internationally prestigious venues as the Venice Biennale.
Gomes and Ossei-Mensah’s latest joint effort, and one that will surely raise her profile in the US, is a new commission for Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley, set to open May 7. Titled “Sonia Gomes: Ó Abre Alas!,” the exhibition, co-curated by Ossei-Mensah and Storm King executive director Nora Lawrence, comprises 13 of Gomes’s signature pendulums hanging like lanterns from an oak tree on Museum Hill, which Lawrence calls the “beating heart” of the sculpture park’s 500 acres. Gomes will also take over the first-floor galleries of the indoor museum with sculptural work from the last two decades.
“Ó Abre Alas!” is a show of firsts: Gomes’s first outdoor presentation (also her first solo institutional show in the US) and Storm King’s first exhibition of a Brazilian artist. The former presented new challenges for Gomes. Out in the elements, her sculptures will face sun, rain, wind—whatever the weather concocts from May through November. “I realized I’d need to use different fabrics than the ones I’m used to,” she says. “It was the first time I actually had to go out and buy something.”
What has resulted is a mesmerizing mash-up: of old and new, earth tones and neon, and a scale that shifts from grand to granular. While Gomes did turn to outdoor-supplies stores to source things like nautical ropes and nylon mesh to weatherproof her pendants, it wouldn’t be a Sonia Gomes installation without a smattering of eclectic embellishments she already had. There’s an old padlock, a string of cowrie shells, and a blue fishnet “that was donated a long time ago,” she says.
With its bright color palette, the tone of the work is joyful. “The first idea was to call it A Symphony for Nature,” Gomes explains, like her earlier hanging-pendants works that have had the word symphony in the title. “But when it was ready, I realized it was much more related to Carnival than the symphony.”
Accordingly, the title she went with, Ó Abre Alas—the outdoor artwork and the larger exhibition, which includes the indoor presentation, have identical titles save the exclamation point—is a nod to the opening float of a Carnival parade (a rough translation is Open Wings) and to the 1899 song “Ô Abre Alas!” by the pioneering Brazilian composer Chiquinha Gonzaga.
“Outside looking in, Carnival just kind of looks like a big party,” says Ossei-Mensah. “But what it represents, particularly for Afro-Brazilians but also across the Global South, is an act of resistance, an act of celebration. There is a cultural history that she wants to celebrate.”
Gomes’s sculptures have a biomorphic feel to them, even while being fully abstract. With each knotted protrusion there is a suggestion of a body, or at least a body part, not unlike the work of Senga Nengudi. The organic shapes, even when laced with neon ropes and synthetic sequins, have a softness to them that offers a welcome contrast to the often hulking, metal-based (read: masculine) sculptures scattered throughout Storm King’s grounds.
Though she hasn’t had work installed outdoors before, Gomes is hardly new to bringing the natural world into her practice. “Her relationship with the land really has come to the fore with this particular project,” says Ossei-Mensah. Wood, for example, has served almost like a canvas, a base upon which she paints and sews.
And she has long held a fascination with ratios found in nature, namely the Fibonacci sequence. That’s how she chose 13 for the number of pendants in her Storm King installation and 34 for a breathtaking installation in the atrium of São Paulo’s Pinacoteca museum I was lucky enough to see in 2023.
For her work to live outside feels correct—even overdue—for Gomes. “You can’t put something on view here that is separate from the environment, separate from the trees and the green and the sky above,” Lawrence says.
Sonia Gomes was born in 1948 in Caetanopolis, a former textile hub in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, to a Black mother and a white father. After her mother died when Gomes was three, she was sent to be raised by her father’s family in an environment that was more bourgeois, but where, she has said, she was deprived of affection and a connection to her African ancestry. In this context, her early efforts at self-expression through clothing take on deeper meaning: They were a lifeline, a way of finding herself.
She went to law school, a practical choice encouraged by those around her, but she never stopped making things. By the time she was in her 40s, she was exhausted by the double act; she soon quit law to take classes at the Guignard University of Art in Belo Horizonte. “There, for the first time, I found freedom. I could make anything I wanted,” Gomes tells me. It was also where she finally felt able to call herself an artist, a label she previously thought only applied to those who could draw.
While she believed in her own creative vision, that confidence was not immediately shared by the art world around Gomes. Given her medium, plus her identity as a Black woman, her work was often described as craft. Yet her persistence—“I didn’t care about the name, whether it’s art or craft. I just kept on making it”—paid off, and in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, she started having smaller gallery shows in Minas Gerais. In 2012 she had her first solo show with Mendes Wood DM, the São Paulo gallery with global outposts that still represents her alongside Pace and BLUM.
Gomes has lived in São Paulo, a city of nearly 12 million people “where everything happens,” as she describes it, for about a decade now. The city is home to the Museu Afro Brasil, where founding director Emanoel Araújo put Gomes in his pivotal 2013 show “A Nova Mão Afro-Brasileira” (“The New Afro-Brazilian Hand”)—a turning point.
Two years later, Gomes was chosen by Okwui Enwezor to appear in the 56th Venice Biennale. The honor came as a shock. “I felt like that was the absolute pinnacle. In the airplane on the way home, I thought, It can crash, I don’t care!” she tells me, grinning as she throws up her hands.
Though she has been in a handful of group shows in US museums, and her work is in the collections of New York’s MoMA and the Guggenheim (currently showing the work of another contemporary Brazilian artist, Beatriz Milhazes), Storm King’s is the first solo museum show of Gomes’s work in this country. “It was important to be able to bring the practice of an established female artist who people in the United States don’t necessarily know as much about to a place like Storm King, where they can really push on some boundaries,” says Lawrence.
Ó Abre Alas will change from morning to night, from May to November. Some of the fabrics might hold up just fine, but, like a tree, they will evolve with the seasons. It’s an experiment, three years in the making. “What I love about Sonia is she’s excited for the risk, the adventure of trying to do something different,” says Ossei-Mensah. “She could just as easily rest on her laurels and make what she makes. But that’s not the impetus of the practice.”
Gomes is happy that more people will see her work outside of the white walls of a gallery. She doesn’t prescribe what her sculptures are about, or how audiences should interpret them. “My only concern is about the beauty of the work,” she says. It isn’t explicitly political or about identity—except of course it is, at least a little, because she’s the one making it. The reverence with which she treats each material she encounters is radical, especially for someone who was born in a place where working with textiles was labor, often performed by marginalized women.
She has called her practice a necessity, something that’s been in her sangue, her blood, since childhood. In her studio, as we snack on freshly made pão de queijo, I ask Gomes if such a thing as a perfect day of making art exists for her. What might that look like? “Every day,” she says. “I need to make art to be alive.”
“Sonia Gomes: Ó Abre Alas!” will be on view at Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York, from May 7 to November 10, 2025.