Brazilian Art Show Sets Off Dispute That Mirrors Political Battles<br />13, 2017<br />SÃO PAULO, Brazil — A controversy has erupted in Brazil after organizers of an art exhibition on gender and sexual diversity caved to pressure from conservative groups and canceled the show — rekindling a political firestorm<br />that gripped the country last year when the country’s first female president was impeached.<br />The offending images in the display — Queermuseu, or Queer Museum — included a baby monkey snuggling in the Virgin Mary’s arms, sacramental wafers with the words "vagina"<br />and "tongue" written on them and naïve-style portraits of smiling children spray-painted with tags like "transvestite" and "gay child." Critics — some of whom had also demanded the impeachment of the president — accused the artists of promoting pedophilia and child pornography.<br />The goal of this work is just the opposite." The curator said the exhibition was the first in Brazil to embrace the "queer perspective." It might<br />still find a new home in the city of Belo Horizonte, where the secretary of culture is a former minister from Ms. Rousseff’s government.<br />The country’s top artists were already wary of Mr. Temer’s close ties to the evangelical lobby in Brazil’s Congress,<br />and one of his early actions — to appoint an all-male, all-white cabinet, and to eliminate the Culture Ministry — did not help, even though the ministry was quickly reinstated.<br />The Free Brazil Movement — one of the same groups that organized huge demonstrations demanding Ms. Rousseff’s impeachment — declared victory.
