Josely Carvalho is a multimedia artist, born in São Paulo and maintains studios in Rio de Janeiro and New York. In the last four decades, her artwork embraces several mediums and seeks to highlight memory, identity, women issues and social justice while consistently challenges frontiers between artist and public and art and politics.
Her present research – Diary of Smells – is an on-going cross-disciplinary series of works where olfaction, a powerful connector to memory and emotions, is a protagonist among other typically dominant components in contemporary art. The inclusion of the olfaction, one’s first and last experienced sense, results from her long examination of our basic need to be sheltered in a moment in which the sense of home/nest is threatened by war, migration, refugees, instability, pandemic and the destruction of the environment – our collective shelter.
In 2023, Josely received the Lee Krasner Award for Life Achievement from Pollock-Krasner Foundation on acknowledgement of a lifetime artistic achievement. It was the the first time a Brazilian artist has received this prestigious award in its history. In 2019, she received the International Art and Olfaction Sadakichi Award in experimental olfactory artwork category for her installation Glass Ceiling: Resilience presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in São Paulo in 2018. joselycarvahlo.com
