As a child, Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes would cut, tear, twist, layer, stitch, and decorate her own clothes and jewelry, turning them into wearable art. “My body was my first canvas,” says Gomes, now 77, her hair dyed a punk-rock blueberry shade, as we sit in her São Paulo studio last January. Upstairs in the studio, a clothing rack holds some of these deconstructed knits. With delight, she points to a worn yellow T-shirt adorned with strings, beads, and patches of other fabrics. A zipper left open below the neckline creates a playful cutout—one of the few she’s ever liked on clothing. “I’ve always been an artist, even if I didn’t have a name for it,” she says.

That same rebellious spirit runs through Gomes’s sculptures, which range from bulbous hanging forms to twisted wire cages that sprout from the ground or cling to walls. Her work rewards close inspection—here a cluster of sequins or shells, there a knot of wax-print fabric or century-old lace. Drawing from Afro-Brazilian craft traditions, she handworks mostly found or donated fabrics. “Everything I receive, I keep,” she says. Each scrap carries its own history. Memory—both personal and cultural—is as much a material to her as cotton, silk, or wool.

Gomes is a star in Brazil, an impressive feat considering she didn’t pursue art full-time until age 45, when she left her legal career behind. “Sonia’s a goddess there… a legend,” says Ghanaian-American curator Larry Ossei-Mensah, who has collaborated with her on several projects in recent years. Gomes has exhibited in museums across Brazil (in 2018, she had two solo shows—one at the São Paulo Art Museum, another at Rio’s Niterói Contemporary Art Museum) and at prestigious international venues like the Venice Biennale.

Her latest collaboration with Ossei-Mensah, which will surely raise her profile in the U.S., is a new commission for New York’s Storm King Art Center, opening May 7. Titled Sonia Gomes: Ó Abre Alas!, the exhibition—co-curated by Ossei-Mensah and Storm King’s executive director Nora Lawrence—features 13 of Gomes’s signature hanging sculptures, suspended like lanterns from an oak tree on Museum Hill, which Lawrence calls the “beating heart” of the 500-acre sculpture park. Gomes will also fill the indoor museum’s first-floor galleries with sculptural works from the past two decades.

Ó Abre Alas! marks several firsts: Gomes’s first outdoor exhibition (and her first U.S. solo museum show), as well as Storm King’s first presentation of a Brazilian artist. The outdoor setting posed new challenges—her sculptures will endure sun, rain, and wind from May through November. “I realized I’d need different fabrics than what I usually work with,” she says. “It was the first time I actually had to go out and buy materials.”

The result is a mesmerizing mix of old and new, earthy tones and neon, shifting in scale from grand to intricate. While Gomes sourced weather-resistant materials like nautical rope and nylon mesh from outdoor-supply stores, the installation wouldn’t be hers without eclectic embellishments from her own collection—an old padlock, a strand of cowrie shells, a blue fishnet “donated long ago.”

Vibrant and joyful, the work nearly had a different title. “At first, I thought of calling it A Symphony for Nature,” Gomes explains, referencing her earlier hanging works with “symphony” in their names. “But when it was finished, I realized it was much more connected to Carnival.”Sonia Gomes, Ó Abre Alas (detail), 2025
Photo: Courtesy the artist, Mendes Wood DM, and Pace Gallery

The title Ó Abre Alas—shared by both the outdoor artwork and the larger exhibition (with only an exclamation point distinguishing the indoor presentation)—references the opening float of a Carnival parade (roughly translating to “Open Wings”) and the 1899 song Ó Abre Alas! by pioneering Brazilian composer Chiquinha Gonzaga.

“From the outside, Carnival might seem like just a big party,” says Ossei-Mensah. “But for Afro-Brazilians and others across the Global South, it’s an act of resistance and celebration. Gomes wants to honor that cultural history.”

Gomes’s sculptures, though fully abstract, have a biomorphic quality. Each knotted protrusion hints at a body or body part, reminiscent of Senga Nengudi’s work. Even with neon ropes and synthetic sequins, her organic shapes retain a softness that contrasts with the often heavy, metal-based (and traditionally masculine) sculptures dotting Storm King’s grounds.

Though this is her first outdoor installation, Gomes has long incorporated nature into her practice. “This project really highlights her connection to the land,” notes Ossei-Mensah. Wood, for instance, acts as a canvas for her painted and sewn creations.

She’s also drawn to natural ratios, like the Fibonacci sequence, which inspired the 13 pendants in her Storm King piece and the 34 in a stunning 2023 installation at São Paulo’s Pinacoteca museum.

For Gomes, placing her work outdoors feels fitting—even overdue. “You can’t display something here that’s separate from the environment, the trees, the greenery, the sky,” Lawrence observes.

Sonia Gomes, Untitled, from Raiz series, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York.
Photo: EstudioEmObra

Sonia Gomes, Untitled, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York.
Photo: EstudioEmObra

Born in 1948 in Caetanópolis, a former textile hub in Brazil’s Minas Gerais state, Gomes is the daughter of a Black mother and white father. After her mother’s death when she was three, she was raised by her father’s bourgeois family—an environment she describes as lacking affection and connection to her African roots. Her early experiments with clothing as self-expression became a lifeline, a way to reclaim her identity.

Though she pursued law school (a practical choice urged by others), she never stopped creating. By her 40s, exhausted by balancing both worlds, she left law to study at Belo Horizonte’s Guignard University of Art. “There, I found freedom for the first time. I could make anything I wanted,” Gomes recalls. It was also where she finally embraced calling herself an artist—a term she once reserved for those who could draw.

While confident in her vision, the art world initially dismissed her work as mere “craft,” partly due to her medium and identity as a Black woman. Undeterred, she persisted: “I didn’t care about labels—art or craft. I just kept making.” By the mid-1990s and early 2000s, she began exhibiting in Minas Gerais galleries, and in 2012, she had her first solo show with Mendes Wood DM, the São Paulo gallery (now with global locations) that still represents her alongside Pace.

Gomes has lived in…Sonia Gomes has called São Paulo—a city of nearly 12 million people that she describes as “where everything happens”—home for about a decade. It was here that the Museu Afro Brasil’s founding director, Emanoel Araújo, included her in his pivotal 2013 exhibition “A Nova Mão Afro-Brasileira” (“The New Afro-Brazilian Hand”), marking a turning point in her career.

Two years later, Okwui Enwezor selected Gomes to participate in the 56th Venice Biennale. The honor stunned her. “I felt like that was the absolute pinnacle,” she recalls with a grin, throwing up her hands. “On the plane ride home, I thought, ‘It can crash—I don’t even care!'”

Though her work has appeared in group shows at U.S. museums and is held in the collections of New York’s MoMA and the Guggenheim (currently exhibiting another contemporary Brazilian artist, Beatriz Milhazes), Storm King’s exhibition is her first solo museum show in this country. “It was important to bring the work of an established female artist—one who isn’t widely known in the U.S.—to a place like Storm King, where boundaries can be pushed,” says Lawrence.

Her installation, Ó Abre Alas, will transform from morning to night, from May through November. Some fabrics may endure, but like a tree, they will shift with the seasons. It’s an experiment three years in the making. “What I love about Sonia is her excitement for risk, for the adventure of trying something new,” says Ossei-Mensah. “She could rest on her laurels, but that’s not what drives her.”

Gomes is thrilled more people will see her work outside the white walls of a gallery. She doesn’t dictate what her sculptures mean or how they should be interpreted. “My only concern is the beauty of the work,” she says. While not overtly political or about identity, it inevitably carries traces of both—because she’s the one making it. The reverence she shows for every material she works with is radical, especially for someone born in a place where textile work was often labor performed by marginalized women.

She calls her practice a necessity, something that’s been in her sangue (blood) since childhood. In her studio, as we snack on freshly made pão de queijo, I ask if a perfect day of making art exists for her. What would it look like? “Every day,” she replies. “I need to make art to be alive.”

“Sonia Gomes: Ó Abre Alas!” will be on view at Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York, from May 7 to November 10, 2025.