Inhotim at 20: Record Crowds, a Founder Gone, and a Rival Next Door

Inhotim, the contemporary art museum and botanical garden spread across 346 acres in the Brazilian mining town of Brumadinho, recorded its highest annual attendance in 2025, welcoming 365,000 visitors — twenty years after it opened to the public.

Yet the institution is passing through one of the most decisive transitions in its history. Collector Bernardo Paz, who imagined the museum on an unprecedented scale, donated the land, galleries and 326 works to Inhotim in 2022 and is no longer involved in its operations. Earlier this year he announced he is building another museum right next door, on land Inhotim had planned to expand into.

Adviser Allan Schwartzman, a cofounder of Inhotim and now chief curatorial adviser to the forthcoming Museu Bernardo Paz, described the two projects as "two halves of a body." They share a founder, a border and a similar ambition: creating experiences around artworks that could not be presented the same way inside a conventional museum.

When Inhotim was taking shape before its public opening in 2006, even its founders doubted whether people would travel roughly 37 miles southeast from Belo Horizonte to visit. "We thought maybe if a couple hundred people came a week, we would be successful," Schwartzman told ARTnews in a Zoom interview. "Well, now you get up to 10,000 people on a nice weekend day."

For more than a decade Paz, a former mining magnate, funded acquisitions, large-scale commissions and pavilions dedicated to individual artists. The challenge of sustaining the institution led to the creation of a board in 2012 to handle decision-making, donating and fundraising, according to Schwartzman. The separation came gradually and was not free of controversy. Paz stepped down as board chair in 2017, the same year a lower court convicted him of money laundering; an appeals court acquitted him in 2020. In 2022 he donated Inhotim to Inhotim, including all the art and its lush 140-hectare botanical garden.

Today the museum counts 19 galleries displaying more than 900 works: 12 spaces are permanently dedicated to individual artists, among them Yayoi Kusama, Adriana Varejão, Hélio Oiticica, Doug Aitken and Tunga, while seven host temporary exhibitions. Alongside the mining companies, Inhotim is one of the area's main employers, with nearly 70 percent of staff living in Brumadinho. Since opening, it has welcomed nearly 5 million visitors from around the world.

The 20th-anniversary program, launched with three exhibitions in April, signals a widening horizon. "Brazilian artists will always be part of our curatorial program, but we are also turning our attention to Latin America," Inhotim curator Deri Andrade told ARTnews. "I would say we are looking at the world as a whole, with a very diverse program."

The most high-profile opening is a major survey of Dalton Paula. Curated by Beatriz Lemos, "Dupla Cura" spans works from 1999 to the present across painting, installation, photography and video, exploring Black memory, Afro-Brazilian spirituality, childhood and healing.

Outdoors, Laís Myrrha's "Contraplano" takes the form of a concrete structure inspired by an Oscar Niemeyer building in Belo Horizonte, bringing Brazilian modernism and structures of power into dialogue with a landscape shaped by mining. In a renovated gallery, davi de jesus do nascimento's "Tororoma" — a Tupí term evoking a river in full flow — combines paintings, video, carved riverboat figureheads known as carrancas, and a sprawling network of roots cast from molds taken from trees in his hometown of Pirapora, in northern Minas Gerais.

The program continues on November 14 with "À Céu Aberto," an exhibition based on archival research and works from the collection, and the reopening of Janet Cardiff's "The Murder of Crows."

For Andrade, the museum's future rests on both new commissions and a renewed focus on what it already owns. "The next step will be to revisit our own collection," he said. "If you compare Inhotim with other museums, you will find that our collection is small. We have fewer than 1,000 works."

Asked whether Paz's departure had cost the museum sponsors, Andrade replied: "On the contrary, with his departure, we began to raise money through cultural incentive laws to maintain the museum, at the municipal, state, and federal levels." Inhotim is now a private nonprofit benefiting from Brazil's federal Rouanet Law and Minas Gerais's state cultural incentive law, along with donations from private individuals and foundations.

What is being built at Inhotim's edge remains inseparable from the established institution's future. Two projects planned for the Museu Bernardo Paz, opening next September — a Michael Heizer commission and a home for a major work by Anish Kapoor — were initially intended for Inhotim. "I think it becomes a kind of part two in [his] thinking," Schwartzman said. "Institutionally, how these two entities end up functioning, of course, needs to necessarily remain different."

Schwartzman said there have not yet been formal conversations between Paz and Inhotim's administration, though he could imagine the two museums coming together one day. Inhotim declined to comment on a possible future collaboration.

"The challenge from 2026 onward," Júlia Rebouças, Inhotim's artistic director, wrote in an email to ARTnews, "is to build a lasting Inhotim that continues to be innovative and relevant."