Latest news with #LuanaVitra
New York Times
14 hours ago
- Health
- New York Times
Corrections: June 28, 2025
An article on Friday about the impact that Republican efforts to reduce federal funding flowing to schools has had on Johns Hopkins University misstated the source of a Trump administration plan to cut about 40 percent of the budget for the National Institutes of Health. It is contained in a budget proposal, not in the Trump policy bill under consideration in Congress. An article on Thursday about U.S. rivals celebrating the Trump administration's decision to cut its support for Voice of America and Radio Free stations referred incompletely to the number of followers on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Instagram accounts. It has 44,500 followers on its English-language account and a total of 17.4 million followers across the network's various language services. It does not have a total of 44,500 followers. An article this weekend on Page 12 about the Brazilian artist Luana Vitra includes outdated information. Hélio Menezes is no longer the director of the Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo. Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions. To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, please email nytnews@ To share feedback, please visit Comments on opinion articles may be emailed to letters@ For newspaper delivery questions: 1-800-NYTIMES (1-800-698-4637) or email customercare@
New York Times
a day ago
- General
- New York Times
The Brazilian Artist Who Listens to Minerals
The car sped southward from Belo Horizonte, the highway climbing out from Brazil's third-largest city into the surrounding hills. Red dust from oncoming convoys of heavy trucks drifted onto the windshield. On board, Luana Vitra — one of Brazil's fastest-rising young artists and the offspring of a long lineage of manual workers in this rugged, iron-mining region in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais — was offering a quick précis of the land and local temperament. 'We have a culture that is made from iron,' Vitra said. 'What our ancestors lived inside the mines made us the way we are now.' People in Minas Gerais, she said, were shaped by a legacy of watching out for others and forming survival strategies in mines where labor was exploited and collapses were frequent. Her grandfather, she added, attributed his longevity to the prayer to Saint George — who is associated in Afro-Brazilian religion with Ogun, the spirit of iron and metallurgy — that he kept tucked in his helmet. 'Iron is very much in my history,' she said. The daughter of a carpenter and a teacher, Vitra grew up in Contagem, a city in the Belo Horizonte agglomeration known for its concentration of heavy industry. Now, at 30, she has emerged as one of the most visible and distinctive — in Brazil and abroad — of a wave of young Black Brazilian artists who are finding new languages with which to explore their histories and connect to the world. She places her region's materials — particularly iron ore and copper — at the heart of elegant, often room-scaled installations, their characteristic reddish tones set against deep blue fabric or painted backgrounds. The compositions extend to beads, ceramics, glass and clean-drawn lines on various surfaces. They favor symmetry, with a ritual feel that nods to Afro-Brazilian religion — the metal arrows, the talismans — but also to broader and nonspecific sacred geometries. Shaping every installation, she said, is an 'equation' — not mathematical but metaphorical, calibrating the emotional architecture that results from particular material combinations, as if working from 'a periodic table with feelings connected to minerals.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
