Southern exposure.

The Brazilian contemporary art world seems to be experiencing something of a boom. Over the last five years Rio de Janeiro has become a hotbed of museums and alternative spaces, and, despite the lack of market support, now boasts two new art galleries - run by Paulo Fernandes and Joel Edelstein - which have revitalized an art scene pronounced dead not so long ago, as gallery after gallery either moved, or threatened to move, to Sao Paulo. This upswing is less the result of the recently stabilized Brazilian currency than of a newly awakened desire in artistic circles to stimulate artistic production on the home front. Admittedly, the rising interest on the part of European and North American dealers and curators in Latin American art has not been without its effect either - particularly in Sao Paulo. Conscious of the shifting tide, Marcantonio Vilaca and his partner Karla Camargo, opened a Sao Paulo gallery in May of 1992, and immediately put into place an aggressive program directed at the art world inside and outside Brazil. Vilaca's agenda is to show emerging American, European, and Latin American artists as well as Brazilian ones: his roster includes Doris Salcedo (Colombia), Rosangela Renno (Brazil), Jose Antonio Hernandez-Diez (Venezuela), and Matthew Weinstein (U.S.A.).

Such a program is not, however, without precedent. Luisa Strina, who established her blue-chip Sao Paulo gallery in 1974, also began looking beyond Brazil in 1990, by participating in art fairs from Cologne to Basel. And in Rio, the now more than decade-old Thomas Cohn gallery featured exhibits of works by Latin American artists such as the internationally prominent Argentinean Guillermo Kuitca, throughout the '80s. The Sao Paulo galleries Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud (which continues to exhibit work in the Concrete tradition such as that of Sergio Camargo, whose traveling retrospective is now on view at the Oxford MOMA in the U.K.) and Galeria Milan (dedicated to launching a number of new artists each year) are also key players. Like Andre Milan, Ricardo Trevisan, head of Casa Triangulo, likes to take risks by mounting solo shows of emerging artists each season. Two more recent additions - Galeria Adriana Penteado, which specializes in drawings, and Valu Oria, which opened in November of last year - testify to the vitality of the burgeoning Sao Paulo art scene.

Just two years ago, Strina, in conjunction with art consultant Isabella Prata, initiated a multipart project "DasAmericas" (The Americas/Of the Americas) which attempts to address questions that inform contemporary visual production throughout America - North and South. Curated by Argentinean critic Carlos Basualdo, the exhibition was held in Strina's gallery and brought Roni Horn, Mike Kelley, and Meyer Vaisman to Sao Paulo for the first time. In the fall of '95, the second part of "DasAmericas," put together by Brazilian curator Ivo Mesquita, examined the representation of the body in works by Robert Gober, Gabriel Orozco, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Matthew Barney, and Edgard de Souza. Sao Paulo audiences were treated not only to a screening of Barney's Cremaster IV but to Barney himself, who came down for the opening.

This fall, Strina and Isabella Prata are planning to bring Nan Goldin's visions of New York's demimonde to Sao Paulo; Robert Mapplethorpe's classically composed, ever-controversial photographs as well as Jenny Holzer's more acidly political work will follow. In addition to these projects, Prata is now working on what may turn out to be one of the most innovative shows of this coming season: an exhibition put together by five young curators who were asked to investigate artistic production across the country - including those cities from the north and northeast of Brazil normally ignored in such surveys, Porto Alegre, Recife, Fortaleza, and Sao Luis - and to focus only on artists who have never shown in galleries.

In Rio, things have also been heating up on an institutional level. Recently, the Paco Imperial, whose activities had been severely curtailed for several years due to government cuts, regained its central position in the Rio art scene with a pro gram that aims to examine the relationship between contemporary work and the history of Brazilian art. In 1994, the Paco organized an important show, "Escultura Carioca" (Sculpture from Rio), featuring the sculptures and installations of a number of Rio's most interesting artists: Ernesto Neto, Jose Damasceno, Marcia Thompson, Mauricio Ruiz, and Carlos Bevilacqua. The Museum of Modern Art in Rio, a fundamental center for the dissemination of art in Brazil in the '60s whose exhibition halls, along with much of its collection, were destroyed by fire in 1978, has been fully refurbished and has reassumed its central role in the Rio art scene. Several other spaces on an institutional scale have also stepped up their efforts, such as the gallery of the Espaco Cultural Sergio Porto, which since opening its doors in 1980 with a show of Lygia Pape has become an almost obligatory exhibition site for emerging artists: most of the Brazilian artists successful both at home and abroad have exhibited here at one time or another. Take, for example, Valeska Scares and Fernanda Gomes, who both had pieces in the Sao Paulo Bienal in '94 and showed in New York in January of '95. Attempting to launch young artists while maintaining an exhibition program that presents significant contemporary works, the gallery of Sergio Porto exhibited videos on contemporary artists in conjunction with Arma Falica (Phallic weapon), a magazine version of a television soap opera that was realized by Antonio Manuel and Helio Oiticica in 1970; the 24 photos that comprised this project were exhibited here for the first time. Another institution essential to the Rio art scene is the School of Visual Arts at Parque Lage. The center of resistance to the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, it was the site of irreverent, antigovernment demonstrations that often took an abstract, conceptual form. It was here that the artists who came of age in the '80s - Beatriz Milhazes, Daniel Senise, and Rodrigo Andrade, to name a few - studied, and today many of those same artists have returned to teach the next generation.

The presence of so many institutional spaces in Rio favors a level of experimentation in cultural production not normally found in Sao Paulo. In fact, it is common for artists from Rio to exhibit audacious work first in their native city, thereby attracting the attention of Sao Paulo dealers who can develop these artists' careers on an international scale. But there are a few noncommercial spaces in Sao Paulo that play a significant role in disseminating contemporary art. Affording an overview of artistic production across the country, the now biannual "Panorama da Arte Brasileira" could be seen last fall at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Sao Paulo. Since 1994, the MAM has been inviting outside curators to mount shows, a practice that has resulted in a number of ambitious exhibitions. This year's "Panorama" included works by firmly established artists such as Carlos Fajardo, Cildo Meireles, and Jose Resende as well as photo-based pieces by newcomers Rubens Mano, Paula Trope, Rochelle Costi, and Vik Muniz and sculptures by last year's big sensation, Eliane Prolik. The group show, curated by Lisette Lagnado, which also took place at MAM in June of '95, traced the erasure of the boundary between sculpture and drawing in the work of Artur Lescher, Mira Schendel, Tunga, Iole de Freitas, and Elisa Bracher.

At the SESI Art Gallery, a noncommercial space that shows contemporary art, the first retrospective of Leonilson's work was held just two years after the artist's death from AIDs-related complications. This show, also curated by Lagnado, brought together more than one hundred pieces from various stages of Leonilson's career. One of the most important of the generation of artists that came of age in the '80s, Leonilson made autobiographically based drawings, paintings, and embroideries (which usually contained textual fragments or poems) that poignantly addressed his identity as a gay man, and traced the progress of his illness. His embroidered dresses, shopping bags, and pillowcases, made from translucent, softly colored material, possess the texture and chromaticism of painting.

As the new season begins, one of the most anticipated events is the opening of the Centro Cultural Helio Oiticica in Rio, scheduled for this fall. In keeping with this artist's intense concern for the massive social inequalities in Brazil, the structure will be located in the bairro of Botafogo on the site of a former waste-treatment facility, and will include artists' studios, exhibition halls, and an auditorium. Back in Sao Paulo, this month marks the third stage of the "Arte Cidade" (Art city) project, inaugurated in '94. Meant to integrate various artistic arenas - theater, photography, cinema, music, dance, architecture, and video - "Arte Cidade," curated by the philosopher Nelson Brissac Peixoto, transformed sectors of Sao Paulo's urban sprawl during two separate periods last year. This time, the urban intervention will take place in a long-abandoned building that once served a major rail line; here, the 19 artists chosen for the project will install work that, like the project itself, reflects on memory - the collective memory of the city. But if things are off to a good start, they're guaranteed to end with a bang: from October to December the Bienal de Sao Paulo will once again take over Oscar Niemeyer's Modernist masterpiece, the Pavilhao Ciccillo Matarazzo, and this, the biennial's 23rd incarnation (complete with its own version of Venice's " Aperto"), promises to stir things up more than usual.

Georgia Lobacheff is a Sao Paulo-based art critic who writes regularly for the newspaper Jornal da Tarde.