New documentary chronicles the late Brazilian artist Amélia Toledo’s boundary-pushing work

The documentary Amelia Toledo: Lembrar de Não Esquecer (Don’t Forget to Remember) surveys the five-decade career of Brazilian artist Amélia Toledo (born 1926 in São Paulo; died 2017 in Cotia), featuring testimonials, archival footage, and photographs from exhibitions, workshops, and interviews. Toledo’s practice blended geometric abstraction with organic materials such as crystals, shells, and stones, which she displayed on concrete or steel pedestals, in water, or in mosaic-like arrangements, and she also made photographs and hard-edge paintings inspired by natural forms. The film notes her training with Anita Malfatti, Yoshiya Takaoka, and Waldemar da Costa, her work for architect João Batista Vilanova Artigas, and her late-1950s studies in London under William Turnbull at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. It also recounts her teaching at the University of Brasília (founded 1962) and her relocation to Portugal in 1965 after Brazil’s 1964 military coup, alongside renewed attention to her work including a 2024 exhibition at Mube and her inclusion in the 2017 exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985.

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