Join us for this intimate edition of MoAD Mix | A Spirited Discussion on Art & Culture, which invites the audience into a shared space of reflection with Brazilian artist Gustavo Nazareno, whose work explores spirituality, mythology, and the enduring presence of the African diaspora.

Together, we will move through images, stories, and cultural memory prompts that ask us to consider how art carries ritual and resistance across time and geography. The conversation begins with a simple cultural offering—a meaningful food or drink—opening a doorway into the customs, gestures, and shared moments that connect communities across oceans.

Through dialogue, audience reflection, and musical reference, we’ll explore a guiding question:

“How can art, memory, ritual, and resistance become forms of diasporic exchange that erase time and continental boundaries?”

MoAD Mix creates a salon-like space where artists and community gather to look closely, think deeply, and connect through culture.

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About Gustavo Nazareno

Gustavo Nazareno is known for the range of sources that his work draws on from personal and cultural histories, fables and religious tales to Renaissance painting and fashion photography. His output mostly comprises oil paintings and charcoal drawings, both notable for the artist’s deft manipulation of light and dark that recalls chiaroscuro, a technique of rendering illumination and shadow dating back to the fourth century. At Nazareno’s hand, the dizzying breadth of his reference points, encompassing the cultural and spiritual histories of Africa, Europe and his home of South America, is distilled into enigmatic images that cannot be consigned to a single artistic category or movement.

Nazareno has been the subject of numerous institutional solo exhibitions in Brazil, most recently at the Museum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhã es in Recife (2024) and the Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araú jo in São Paulo (2023). His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB) in São Paulo, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in New York and the Inhotim Institute in Brumadinho, among others. He will be the subject of a forthcoming solo exhibition curated by Danny Dunson at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center in Chicago, scheduled for 2026.

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