Arte Pará reached, in 2022, its 40th edition and arose from the project idealized by the journalist Romulo Maiorana (1922-1986), at the beginning of the 1980s, to create a space to support Para artists and a dialogue between the North region and the country. At a time in history when the Amazon was not generating expectations on a global scale, Maiorana awakened the public’s sensibility through the social function of art, from space for meeting and encouraging artists.
Arte Pará was born with the vocation of establishing the presence of the Amazon on the map of the arts as a salon. Throughout its uninterrupted editions, it has become a national art and education project and a place for intellectual exchange between artists, curators, and cultural agents, as well as a space for reflection and criticism, which legitimises young emerging artists. For over 20 years, Paulo Herkenhoff, one of the country’s most relevant art critics and thinkers, has been leading Arte Pará as the event’s general curator.
With a professional trajectory that articulates institutional work and innovative research, Paulo was assistant curator in the painting and sculpture department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, MoMA (1999-2002), general curator of the São Paulo Biennial and curator of the Brazilian Pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennial. He was a consultant for the IX Kassel Documenta in Germany (1991). For him, Arte Pará has “an important role in the socialization of art, developed through the educational process, much more than the art market”.
The educational project of Arte Pará is one of the most comprehensive in the national context and offers a parameter of the relationship between a complex of communication and the social insertion of art.