Brazil’s Inhotim Marks 20 Years and Looks to a Future Beyond Its Founder

Twenty years after it opened to the public, Inhotim is going through one of the most decisive transitions in its history. The contemporary art museum and botanical garden, which collector Bernardo Paz imagined on an unprecedented scale in the Brazilian mining town of Brumadinho, with individual pavilions for specific artists, monumental works, and paths stretching across 346 acres, recorded its highest annual attendance in 2025, welcoming 365,000 visitors. But Paz, who donated the land, galleries, and 326 works to Inhotim in 2022, is no longer involved in its operations. (He announced earlier this year that he is building another museum right next door, on land that Inhotim had planned to expand.)

Adviser Allan Schwartzman, a cofounder of Inhotim and now chief curatorial adviser to the forthcoming Museu Bernardo Paz, described the two projects as “two halves of a body.” They share a founder, a border, and a similar ambition: to create experiences around artworks that could not be presented in the same way inside a conventional museum. As Inhotim took shape before its public opening in 2006, even its founders did not know whether people would travel roughly 37 miles southeast from Belo Horizonte to visit. “We thought maybe if a couple hundred people came a week, we would be successful,” Schwartzman told ARTnews in a Zoom interview. “Well, now you get up to 10,000 people on a nice weekend day.”

For more than a decade, Paz, a former mining magnate, provided the funds to acquire artworks, commission large-scale projects, and build pavilions for individual artists. But over time, the challenge of sustaining the institution made it necessary to create a board, which was established in 2012 to handle the decision-making, donating, and fundraising, according to Schwartzman. The separation did not happen all at once, and it was not free of controversy. Paz stepped down as chair of Inhotim’s board in 2017, the same year a lower court convicted him of money laundering. (An appeals court acquitted him in 2020.) Five years later, he donated Inhotim to Inhotim, including all the art and its lush 140-hectare botanical garden.

As Paz starts building again, Inhotim is currently marking its 20th anniversary from a position of strength. The museum now has 19 galleries that display more than 900 works; 12 spaces are permanently dedicated to the work of individual artists, while seven are used for temporary exhibitions. Alongside the mining companies, Inhotim is one of the area’s main employers, with nearly 70 percent of staff living in Brumadinho. Since its opening, Inhotim has welcomed nearly 5 million visitors from around the world.

Among Inhotim’s best-known attractions are the pavilions dedicated to Yayoi Kusama, Adriana Varejão, Hélio Oiticica, Doug Aitken, and Tunga. They include immersive installations, monumental works, and site-specific projects made possible by the museum’s scale, many of which could not be presented in the same way in a conventional museum setting. Together, they reflect Inhotim’s defining idea: artworks conceived in close relationship with architecture and the surrounding landscape.

Speaking about the institution’s future, Inhotim curator Deri Andrade told ARTnews, “Brazilian artists will always be part of our curatorial program, but we are also turning our attention to Latin America. I would say we are looking at the world as a whole, with a very diverse program.”

The 20th anniversary program shows how this vision is already taking shape. Three exhibitions that opened in April focus on Brazilian artists and the museum’s history. The most high-profile is a major survey of Dalton Paula. Curated by Beatriz Lemos, “Dupla Cura” includes works from 1999 to the present, across painting, installation, photography, and video, exploring Black memory, Afro-Brazilian spirituality, childhood, and healing.

Outdoors, Laís Myrrha’s Contraplano takes the form of a concrete structure inspired by an Oscar Niemeyer building in Belo Horizonte. Set in an area shaped by mining, the work brings elements of Brazilian modernism and structures of power into dialogue with Minas Gerais’s landscape.

For his exhibition, titled “Tororoma,” a Tupí term evoking a river in full flow, davi de jesus do nascimento transforms a gallery renovated for the project into an experience inspired by the São Francisco River, to the north of Inhotim. The installation combines paintings, video, carved riverboat figureheads called carrancas, and a sprawling network of roots cast from molds taken from trees in his hometown of Pirapora, in northern Minas Gerais.

The anniversary program will continue on November 14 with “À Céu Aberto,” an exhibition based on archival research and works from Inhotim’s collection, and the reopening of Janet Cardiff’s The Murder of Crows.

For Andrade, Inhotim’s future will be shaped by both new commissions and a renewed focus on what the museum already owns. “The next step will be to revisit our own collection,” he said. “If you compare Inhotim with other museums, you will find that our collection is small. We have fewer than 1,000 works.”

According to Andrade, this renewed emphasis on commissions returns to one of Inhotim’s founding ideas: inviting artists to develop works specifically for the site. Future programs will combine new projects with a reassessment of the collection and the permanent galleries, both structurally and curatorially.

Asked whether Paz’s departure had caused the museum to lose sponsors, Andrade replied: “On the contrary, with his departure, we began to raise money through cultural incentive laws to maintain the museum, at the municipal, state, and federal levels,” he told ARTnews. (Inhotim is now a private nonprofit that benefits from Brazil’s federal Rouanet Law and Minas Gerais’s state cultural incentive law, as well as donations from private individuals and foundations.)

Still, what is being built at Inhotim’s edge cannot be separated from the established institution’s future. According to Schwartzman, Paz was already thinking about what would come next after completing the donation. “And once he did that, Bernardo said, ‘I’m ready for another project,’” the adviser recalled.

As one of the area’s largest landowners, Paz turned to another part of his portfolio, which happened to be directly beside Inhotim. Two of the projects planned for the Museu Bernardo Paz, opening next September, were initially intended for Inhotim: a Michael Heizer commission and a home for a major work by Anish Kapoor.

“I think it becomes a kind of part two in [his] thinking,” Schwartzman said. “Institutionally, how these two entities end up functioning, of course, needs to necessarily remain different.”

Schwartzman said there had not yet been formal conversations between Paz and Inhotim’s administration, but he could imagine the two museums coming together one day. (Inhotim declined to comment on a possible future collaboration with Museu Bernardo Paz.)

“The challenge from 2026 onward,” Júlia Rebouças, Inhotim’s artistic director, wrote in an email to ARTnews, “is to build a lasting Inhotim that continues to be innovative and relevant.”