Museum of Art and MozArte

We headed down Avenida de Ho Chi Minh to the small, but impressive National Museum of Art the other day. On the bottom floor were a collection of permanent holdings, some very nice Makonde carvings, and a few other worthwhile paintings and sculptures, including a nice head mask made out of 2M cans (the national beer pronounced Doj-eM). More exciting was a well-curated contemporary art exhibit that featured artists from Mozambique, Angola, and Cuba. There were sculptures and paintings, but also some very nice installations and photographs, and even a dvd-ROM (which sadly was not working when we were there & my request to the attendant was met with a shrug). There was a catalogue and a very nice collection of postcards from the exhibit which was working around the themes of tradition, truth and pleasure.



We exited the musem and started walking east (into new territory), and a few large uninteresting sculptures made me turn my head into an overgrown lot next door. Down below the lot, I saw what looked to be an open-air atelier, and sure enough when we turned the corner there was a series of studios for a craft & design cooperative called MozArte. They were very nicely appointed, and in one, we found a painter who had just taken down a show of his that I had seen across town & admired. We talked to the young artist Domingos Matsambe for about 30 minutes in broken portuguese/spanish/english. Hung took a picture of him with his latest painting - a very colorful portrait of a military general transformed into a rat.