Mário Pedrosa's chilean exile: solidarity, popular art and community vocation

Abstract

Based on extensive research of primary sources in archives of institutions in Brazil and Chile, this article presents an overview of Mário Pedrosa's Chilean exile during the government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973). It seeks to analyze the main cultural initiatives promoted by the Popular Unity, a coalition of left-wing parties, in order to understand the situation in which the Brazilian author was summoned. Pedrosa was part of a contingent of exiled Latin American intellectuals who actively collaborated in the academic field and, even more directly, in Chilean cultural policy, when he was invited to create the Museum of Solidarity. Certainly, this institution, formed exclusively by donated works, was the most important enterprise of the popular government. However, this museum was part of a broader cultural and political program, and it is necessary to understand the general context in which Pedrosa joined. Despite being directly involved in the creation of the Museum, it was in the handicraft cooperatives that Pedrosa saw the greatest community potential of art, whose revolutionary character the critic exalted in the article "Arte Culta e Arte Popular", written in 1975.