Eneida Sanches

Eneida Sanches arrives in Milwaukee at the invitation of artist Daniel Minter who has called her into Lynden’s Call & Response program. Daniel has a long history with Eneida: he first visited her studio in Brazil more than twenty years ago with his wife, Marcia. After co-founding the Indigo Arts Alliance in Portland, Maine, they invited Eneida to be Indigo’s inaugural artist in residence in 2019. Daniel and Eneida began to work on a joint exhibition that opened, after pandemic delay, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in 2022.

Sanches has her own, even longer, history with Wisconsin, beginning with the year she spent in Greenfield as a high school exchange student.

Sanches will spend eight weeks at Lynden, completing new work for her exhibition, Material Trance. During her residency, in addition to installing her exhibition, she will participate in the culminating events of Daniel’s two-year Call & Response project, In the Healing Language of Trees. Eneida will also be a master teacher for our Innovative Educators Institute, Material Memory, at the end of June. Other programs include an artist talk and informal meetings with members of the public.

About the Artist
Eneida Sanches (b. Salvador, Bahia, 1962) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. She has a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). Her return to the visual arts was the result of her apprenticeship to the Bahian master toolmaker Gilmar Conceição, from whom she learned to make the brass and copper liturgical objects used in Candomblé ritual. In 1997, she began to study printmaking, first through classes in the master’s program at UFBA and later by participating in workshops at the MAM Bahia (Bahia Museum of Modern Art). Sanches coordinated the ACBEU Gallery in Salvador from 2002 to 2009. She was a member of the executive board of the Instituto SACATAR (a nonprofit artist residency program on the Island of Itaparica) from 2004 to 2011. From 2004 to 2015, she coordinated the Circuito das Artes Bahia e Circuito Triangulações, presenting multiple Bahian artists across museums and galleries in Salvador. She has participated in several artist residencies.

Sanches started exhibiting her work in 1994 in the group exhibition, Face of the Gods, at the Museum for African Art, in New York; since then, she has participated in exhibitions in Brazil, Portugal, and Copenhagen. Solo exhibitions include Divination (Denmark), Princeton Arts Council, Princeton, New Jersey (2001) and Trance: Dimensional Dislocations, São Paulo (2018). In late 2022 she opened an exhibition with Daniel Minter, Through This To That, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. Her work is in the collections of the Caribbean Cultural Center, New York; Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Museum of Modern Art Bahia; Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal, the Netherlands; Nafasi Artspace, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Museum of Modern Art São Paulo.