Maria Thereza Alves

Maria Thereza Alves is a Brazilian artist living in Europe. She moved to New York with her family as a child to escape the military dictatorship in Brazil. Always active in the intersections between art and politics, Alves began working for the International Indian Treaty Council in New York City in 1979, and remained politically active throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1979 she founded the Brazilian Information Center, which lobbied for human rights of indigenous peoples, and co-founded the Partido Verde (Green Party) in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1981. Alves received her artistic training at Cooper Union, New York, and has exhibited widely in North America and Europe. She sees her political work as informing her artistic practice, which is centred on creating artist books, texts, drawings, photographs and videos which reframe local histories. She is best known for her multi-year project Seeds of Change, which explores the social history of plant seeds in different port cities throughout Europe. Recent exhibitions of her work include the San Paulo Biennial, Guangzhou Triennal, Manifesta 7, Trento, the Prague Biennal, the Athens Biennal, and the Lyon Biennal, where she received the inaugural Francophonie prize.

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