About Carmo Johnson Projects

Carmo Johnson Projects is a gallery dedicated to the promotion of Brazilian Contemporary Art. Founded in 2021, it has established its trajectory through a nomadic model, conceiving the exhibition space as a living organism—constantly evolving and in dialogue with architecture, territory, and the artists it represents. By transforming each occupation into a unique context for encounter, experimentation, and production, the gallery continues to inhabit new spaces, adapting to different environments and understanding each site as an active component of its curatorial and institutional practice.

Since its founding, the gallery has championed the work of emerging artists from across Brazil. With a focus on the institutional and strategic development of the careers of its represented artists, Carmo Johnson Projects reinforces their fundamental role as agents who foster critical reflections on Brazil's cultural heritage and its magical, symbolic, poetic, and political power within contemporary art. Believing in art as a tool for resistance and sociopolitical transformation, the gallery's mission aligns with ancestral knowledge while celebrating the diversity of cosmogonies, technologies, and systems of knowledge, fostering connections with nature and the environment through the support of sustainable practices and ecological relationships.

Through strong institutional partnerships, the gallery's represented artists have participated in major international exhibitions, including the 60th Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque (Foreigners Everywhere), as well as Les Vivants (2022) and Siamo Foresta (2023) at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. At the invitation of the United Nations, the gallery also collaborated on the public art initiative The Future Ours, bringing together artists from different parts of the world to respond to the Summit of the Future and imagine new ways of protecting the planet.

In Brazil, notable highlights include participation in the 35th São Paulo Biennial, Coreografias do Impossível (Choreographies of the Impossible) (2023), and the major retrospective exhibition MAHKU – Mirações, presented at MASP in 2023. The gallery also maintains a strong network of relationships with leading cultural institutions throughout the country. Works by its represented artists are held in important public collections, including the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo, and the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, as well as in significant private collections such as that of Andréa and José Olympio Pereira.

I studied Art History at the University of Rome - La Sapienza. Later I deepened my interests in art and the art market in London, at the ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, and after at Sotheby’s, where I internshiped in the Contemporary Art Department.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles where I had professional experiences inside and outside the Contemporary Art world. I am currently living in Brazil and the mother of a 18 year old girl. In São Paulo, my projects have always sprung from the open gaps within diversity as was the case with Galeria Logo, which was opened in partnership with Marcelo Secaff and Lucas Ribeiro (Pexão) in 2012.

Between worlds I realize that the itinerant characteristic of my current project has a lot to do with the itinerary of life that I embrace to lead. Back in Brazil, in the pandemic, a relevant factor, to realize that technology would offer us much more flexibility, as long as human relationships and connections are cultivated, so I felt the urge to start over, as I continue to believe in Art as an object of transformation, at all levels and human scales.