Mosaico tropical: arte brasileira e estéticas da coexistência em Miami

Abstract

This doctoral thesis investigates how Brazilian visual art is inscribed, circulates, and is reinterpreted within the cultural landscape of Miami—a global city shaped by migratory flows, symbolic consumption, and urban aestheticization. Although Miami hosts a significant contingent of Brazilian artists and cultural institutions, their presence often manifests more as a sign of cosmopolitanism than as an expression of the Brazilian diaspora itself. The research examines how Brazilian art is appropriated by market circuits and cultural tourism, becoming an instrument of urban valorization and symbolic distinction while remaining detached from the everyday experiences of local communities. Through an ethnographic and interpretative approach, the study observed artworks and artistic interventions in public spaces—such as Wynwood Walls, museums, galleries, and commercial centers—and conducted interviews with artists and Brazilian residents. The analysis reveals that aesthetic commodification, by transforming art into a sign-commodity, redefines its role in the city: from poetic gesture to symbolic asset. Yet, within the fissures of this visual economy, moments of aesthetic experience and belonging emerge, restoring to art a sensorial dimension even under the dominance of spectacle. The observations suggest that Brazilian art in Miami operates within a field of tension between visibility and erasure, globalization and identity, consumption and experience. In this context, the city unfolds as a space where the ephemeral and the permanent, the institutional and the spontaneous, the local and the global coexist in continuous symbolic negotiation. These findings point to emerging aesthetics of coexistence that traverse contemporary art and urban life. Rather than diagnosing cultural loss, this research seeks to understand how art, even within a commodified aesthetic environment, continues to generate meaning, belonging, and collective memory within the Brazilian diaspora.