Underground Art

Washington society is full of good neighborliness for Maria Martins Pereira e Souza. Washingtonians missed her last week. The small, dynamically sociable adornment of Brazil’s U.S. Embassy was in Manhattan for the opening of her fourth U.S. sculpture show. With a gay, glistening grin, Senhora Martins—who signs her work “Maria”—told a reporter that “art is the underground of the world, and we will win in the end.”

As an up & coming member of that underground, black-haired Maria is not unknown to the authorities. Her jacaranda wood version of St. Francis is one of the few contemporary sculptures in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum. Some critics are convinced that her more recent, and more abstract, work must be as distinguished as it is difficult to understand.

At first glance Maria’s most startling new effort (titled Impossible—see cut), looked like a disagreement between two anthropomorphic snowstorms, but Maria had a less literal explanation for it. Said she: “The world is complicated and sad—it is nearly impossible to make people understand each other.”