With bold gestures and bound threads, the Afro-Brazilian artist redefined material memory and monumental scale in her first central U.S. outdoor installation.
Sonia Gomes, ÓAbre Alas, 2025. Installation view at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY. Courtesy the artist, MendesWood DM, and Pace Gallery. Photo: Jacob Vitale
From May to November 2025, Storm King Art Center presented ‘Sonia Gomes: Ó Abre Alas!’, a landmark exhibition by acclaimed Afro-Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes. Best known for her deeply expressive textile sculptures that honour Black Brazilian histories, the exhibition marked a significant evolution in Gomes’s practice—not only bringing a wide selection of her intimate, hand-stitched works into the gallery space, but also expanding her vision into the landscape with her first outdoor installation in the United States.
The title, ‘Ó Abre Alas!’ (“Open Wings!”), evoked the spirit of Brazilian Carnival. As the name of the leading float in a parade, it symbolised joyous movement, collective creativity, and radical celebration. Gomes’s site-specific installation of the same name—suspended from the branches of a tree on Museum Hill—translated these themes into cascading forms made of nautical rope, paracord, and fishing nets. The result was a visually striking gesture of resilience and transformation, grounded in nature and lifted by cultural memory.
“My work has a lot to do with nature, with trees, with the movement of trunks, with branches…,” Gomes reflected. That relationship animated her installation, where each suspended element pulsed with rhythm, colour, and meaning. The outdoor work was also a tribute to Afro-Brazilian composer Chiquinha Gonzaga, whose 1899 song Ó Abre Alas was the first Carnival march ever published, and who, like Gomes, challenged convention through art.
Inside the galleries, the exhibition traced Gomes’s journey from early experiments with fabric and thread to her more recent sculptural assemblages. Made from gifted or discarded materials — linens, wires, bits of wood, and remnants of domestic life — her works carried the tactile imprint of stories often untold. Knot by knot, stitch by stitch, Gomes recast textile art as an act of remembrance, intimacy, and resistance. Her approach to sculpture was one of care and confrontation — a way to honour the lives, labour, and layered identities embedded in overlooked materials.
This gesture of reanimation, of “opening wings” through art, extended across the exhibition. Whether suspended mid-air or arranged in quiet constellations on the ground, Gomes’s pieces held the memory of hands — hands that mended, resisted, and created. There was no separation between the personal and the political in her work. Instead, viewers encountered a form of radical softness, where the vulnerabilities of Black womanhood, the strength of ancestral knowledge, and the poetics of transformation coexisted.
Four years in the making, the exhibition was curated by Nora Lawrence (Executive Director, Storm King Art Center) and Larry Ossei-Mensah (Independent Curator), with Adela Goldsmith (Assistant Curator, Storm King). Their collaborative vision brought Gomes’s sensibility into deep dialogue with the Hudson Valley landscape, reaffirming Storm King’s commitment to site-specific and socially resonant art.
‘Ó Abre Alas!’ was not just a title, but a call to move—through space, through memory, through inherited pain and creative renewal. In her ability to bridge the monumental and the intimate, Gomes gave form to something rare: a sculptural language that spoke not only of what is seen, but of what is felt and remembered.
The exhibition opened on May 5 and will be on view until November 10, 2025. For more information, please visit Storm King Art Center.
