Curated by Daniela Mayer

In the mid-1960s, Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) began embracing joyously transgressive modes of performance, film, and installation that championed marginalized persons and their culture. Created while Oiticica was self-exiled to New York in the 1970s, the immersive 1973 installation series of Bloco-Experiências in Cosmococa–Programa in Progress, or Cosmococas, operate on multiple levels to transform pop and underground culture into a psychedelic experience. Made in collaboration with the Brazilian filmmaker Neville D’Almeida (b. 1941), for each of the five original Cosmococas the artists crafted two sets of instructions: one for public institutional presentations and, in an anti-elitist effort, another for display in private homes. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Cosmococas, the artist’s nonprofit foundation, the Projeto Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), inspired a year-long celebration for 2023, during which the series has been installed in cities around the world. 

Led by Daniela Mayer, the Hunter College Art Galleries joined the initiative to present Cosmic Shelter: Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s Private Cosmococas at the Leubsdorf Gallery from October 12, 2023–March 30, 2024. This exhibition features the United States premiere of two private Cosmococas—CC2 Onobject (Private Version) and CC3 Maileryn (Private Version)—and includes archival material to provide historical context for the layers of political commentary  imbued into the subversive, playful series. All written exhibition materials, including the “zine” publication with Mayer’s original essay and the in-gallery labels, are available online and translated into English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Cosmic Shelter is based on research conducted for her 2021 master’s thesis, "An Outlaw in Babylon: Hélio Oiticica’s Transgressive Strategies in the Margins of New York, 1970–1978,” which investigates the ways Oiticica utilized aspects of his personal marginal/marginalized identity within the United States to challenge political injustice and social hypocrisy through his art.

As a complement to the exhibition, Mayer led a two-semester curatorial practicum for Hunter College MA Art History students (Thais Bignardi, Rowan Diaz-Toth, and Angelica Pomar). Support for this exhibition was provided by the Hunter College Foundation, with additional support from Lisson Gallery, Leon Tovar Gallery, and Sokoloff + Associates.