A book usually tells you where to begin. Tadáskía’s ave preta mística mystical black bird arrived as 61 loose sheets, with freeform drawings and bilingual poetic text. In her account for MoMA, the Brazilian artist said she made the drawings first, then wrote and shuffled them; the opening page need not be the first thing she created. That looseness is not a missing plan. It gives a reader the freedom to encounter transformation without pretending it follows a tidy route.
MoMA showed the work in Projects: Tadáskía from May 24 to October 14, 2024, in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem. The exhibition also included a wall drawing and sculptures made in response to the space. Tadáskía describes three works speaking to one another: a large drawing, the unbound book, and an arrangement of materials including dried plants, bamboo, beads, powders, and eggs. The presentation could not be reduced to a single framed image carried from one venue to another. Its parts changed the room and asked the viewer to move among them.
Tadáskía is a Black trans artist from Santíssimo on the edge of Rio de Janeiro, according to a Studio Museum essay published by MoMA. Her work draws on family, spirituality, nature, and the city’s peripheral neighborhoods. Yet those biographical facts should not be turned into a decoder ring that fixes every mark on paper. The artist’s own writing describes the bird as an invitation to imagine shared, not only individual, liberation. Flight in this work is an experiment in relation: how one being changes direction with others and remains able to redraw a route after an error.
The 2024 presentation was her first solo exhibition in the United States. Institutions often announce such firsts as proof they have discovered an artist. That wording can conceal the years of work already made elsewhere, including the bird’s appearance in the 2023 São Paulo Biennial. The New York exhibition mattered because it gave a wider public space to engage the work; it did not create its meaning or its history.
The loose pages are a useful rebuke to any demand that a Black trans artist offer a stable account of identity, hardship, and triumph in the expected order. Tadáskía can make a beginning arrive late and a future appear in several directions. The bird moves through a world of marks, words, plants, and memory. It does not owe the viewer a straight path to prove that its flight is real.