Today is opening day for one of the most pointed art shows in New York this fall. Rosana Paulino: ¿História Natural? opens Friday, October 9, at the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries at Parsons School of Design, and it puts a rarely shown artist book, all eighteen folios of it, in a room built for close reading.
What is in the room
Paulino is a Brazilian artist and educator, and she is the recipient of the 2025 to 2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. The show is anchored by her 2016 artist book ¿História Natural?, which questions the scientific, religious and political ideas that were used to justify slavery in Brazil and to shape the country's national project in the early nineteenth century.
The book is built from multimedia collage: linocut, drypoint and digital prints, hand-applied watercolor and charcoal, all stitched together with red thread. Paulino layers colonial-era imagery, including faceless Indigenous figures and portraits of enslaved Black women, with textile fragments, stained Portuguese tiles and anatomical sketches. The curator Diane Lima, who nominated Paulino for the prize, calls the result "epistemic resistance."
Here the book is staged as a study room. Alongside the folios are notebooks and sketches from the period when it was made, plus newer works and rarely seen materials from the artist's studio. The exhibition also has a publication, with an essay on the book by Lima and a conversation with the artist.
Opening night and the study group
The opening is part of the Vera List Center Forum 2026: Matter of Intelligence. Tonight at 6:30 pm ET in Tishman Auditorium, the center presents Paulino with the prize object, a limited edition sculpture by Yoko Ono called The Third Eye, then follows with a conversation between Paulino, Lima and the philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva. A free community dinner and party follows. Lima is also the curator of the Brazilian Pavilion at the current Venice Biennale, which features Paulino.
The show also hosts a weekly Black Feminist Study Group. The first session coincides with the opening on October 9, and the next ones are on Saturdays, October 17, 24 and 31.
Visiting
The exhibition runs through November 1, 2026, at 66 Fifth Avenue in New York, in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center. It is open daily from 12 to 6 pm, with late hours until 8 pm on Thursdays.
Culture that makes you look twice is what we are here for. If you want more shows worth planning a trip around, read about RM x SFMOMA, the Duchamp retrospective in Philadelphia and Es Devlin's Other Worlds. For the reading list, see our best design books.
