Leandro Júnior de Sousa Viúvas de Maridos Vivos (“Widows of Living Husbands”)
Presented by TNT Art Lab
For this year’s fair, TNT Art Lab presents a focused project by Leandro Júnior de Sousa, introducing audiences to his ongoing series Viúvas de Maridos Vivos (“Widows of Living Husbands”). Bringing together a painting from the series and excerpts from the documentary of the same name, directed by Diego Kelmann, the presentation offers an intimate entry into a collaboration rooted in the social realities of Brazil’s Northeast.
The project centers on women whose husbands migrate for work, leaving them to sustain households, communities, and emotional worlds in their absence. The film traces these lives through gestures, silences, and the rhythms of daily labor. Inspired by de Sousa’s paintings which give visual and emotional form to these stories, Leandro offers testimony—centering dignity and complexity where silence once prevailed.
The documentary film extends the emotional terrain of the series into moving image. As part of a forthcoming feature‑length project, the excerpts offer a cinematic entry point into the stories and communities that inform the artist’s practice.
Leandro Júnior de Sousa’s paintings, sculpture, and videos invite viewers into a slower, more relational encounter with lives shaped by love and economic necessity. In doing so, it foregrounds the fragile, persistent bonds that sustain communities across separation. At a moment marked by displacement and economic precarity, Viúvas de Maridos Vivos offers a quiet, urgent meditation on absence and presence—and the ties that hold communities together.
The artists’ practice embodies the values at the core of TNT Art Lab’s mission: art grounded in lived experience, attentive to structural inequities, and committed to social engagement.
Artist Bio
Leandro Júnior de Sousa (b. 1984, Cachoeira, Chapada do Norte, Brazil) is a São Paulo–based painter and sculptor whose practice is deeply rooted in the material and cultural landscape of the Jequitinhonha Valley. Raised in a quilombo community founded by Africans who escaped the mines of Minas Gerais, he began painting as a child, guided by intuition and the traditions of a region long known for its ceramic art. He later studied at Faculdade São Luiz de Jaboticabal before returning home to teach art to young people in Quilombo de Cuba and through CRAS, the Center of Reference of Social Assistance—a commitment he views as a continuation of ancestral knowledge rather than an act of service. Through painting and sculpture, he transforms his home into a living archive of resilience, identity, and collective history.
He has exhibited at the National Museum in Brasília, Central Galeria in São Paulo, Slag Gallery in New York, Instituto Santo Amaro, Museum of Sacred Art, São Paulo. He has participated in the Simon Watson Arts program in São Paulo, New York, and Lisbon.
TNT ART LAB
TNT Art Lab is an artist‑run project rooted in the Tenderloin and guided by the question, “What is the responsibility of the creative person in society?” Housed in a once‑vacant storefront, TNT serves as a hub where artists, families, students, and neighbors gather. This presentation forms part of TNT Art Lab’s Global Artist Network, a platform designed to connect socially engaged artists from across the world with the Tenderloin’s vibrant cultural ecosystem. By hosting artists whose practices emerge from lived experience and community‑based knowledge, the initiative fosters cross‑cultural exchange and positions the Tenderloin as a site where global conversations on art and social justice take root.