BRA Belo Horizonte Inhotim

Instituto Inhotim is home to a museological complex featuring a series of pavilions and galleries with works of art and sculptures on display in the open air. Since the outset, Inhotim’s rise on the scene of the Brazilian cultural institutions has been marked by the mission to create an artistic collection and to define new museological strategies that provide the community with access to cultural assets. In this sense, it seeks to bring the public into contact with a relevant set of artworks, produced by artists from different parts of the world, providing an up-to-date reflection on the questions of contemporaneity.

Inhotim is the only Brazilian Institute institution with a world-class collection of contemporary art continuously on display.

Thanks to a series of specific contexts, Inhotim offers a new model far removed from that of the urban museums. The Inhotim experience mainly involves a spatial relationship between art and nature that allows the artists to create and show their works in unique conditions. The spectator is invited to stroll through gardens, forest landscapes and rural settings, roaming among lakes, trails, mountains and valleys, actively experiencing the space.

New projects are rolled out periodically, including site-specific artworks as well as monographic and thematic selections from the collection, making Inhotim a place in continuous transformation.

The Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim is a museum and contemporary art museum located in Brumadinho in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, founded by former mining magnate Bernardo Paz.

In the 1980s, Paz began buying tracts of land surrounding his modest farmhouse as developers threatened to destroy the natural landscape. The farm had been named by locals after a former owner, a British engineer known as Senhor Tim — Nhô Tim in Minas Gerais's dialect.

Paz soon converted the then 3,000-acre ranch into a sprawling, 5,000-acre botanical garden designed by his friend, the late landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx. The project began when Brazilian contemporary artist Tunga persuaded Paz to start collecting contemporary art. Eventually, he allowed artists all the space and resources they needed to create larger-than-life works. The garden, which boasts two dozen art “pavilions”, opened to the public in 2006. The pavilions include more than 500 works by noted Brazilian and international artists, such as Hélio Oiticica, Yayoi Kusama, Anish Kapoor, Thomas Hirschhorn, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Steve McQueen, Cildo Meireles and Vik Muniz.One pavilion is devoted to one of Paz′s ex-wives, the Brazilian artist Adriana Varejăo.

In 2008, a geodesic dome designed by Paula Zasnicoff Cardoso of the Brazilian architectural practice Arquitetos Associados, was constructed within a eucalyptus forest and now contains Matthew Barney's installation De Lama Lâmina [From Mud, a Blade] (2004–08), which shows a vehicle uprooting a tree. Chris Burden’s Beam Drop (1984/2008) is made of 72 steel beams dropped 45 meters from 150-foot-high cranes into a pit filled with wet cement. Sonic Pavilion by Doug Aitken was realized in 2009 and consists of a circular building of frosted glass on top of a hill which contains a well. This goes down 200 meters into the ground and at its bottom microphones capture the sounds of the earth which are then amplified and played live in the gallery above. Vegetation Room (2012), by Cristina Iglesias, is a cube of polished stainless steel reflecting the surrounding forest. Visitors slip into crevices where the walls are sculpted foliage, entering a labyrinth within the labyrinth; at the cube's heart, torrents of water periodically rush.

In 2011, Inhotim joined the Brazilian government's official botanical garden association, and the staff has begun an inventory of its 4,500 plant species, including 1,300 types of palm alone. There are greenhouses for unusually rare plants.

In 2008, Inhotim's status was changed from a private museum to a public institute, with an annual budget and a board of directors. Although the plan is for the place eventually to be self-funding, at the moment it is largely financed by Paz. Inhotim costs about $10 million to run a year, with about 15% of this coming from ticket receipts.

Inhotim, now at 5,000 acres, is vast enough to require 1,000 employees. Jochen Volz has been the artistic director since 2004. Paz has plans to expand Inhotim with 10 or more new hotels, an 15,000-capacity amphitheater, and even a complex of “lofts” for those who want to live amid the collection.

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