Until the end of last year, visitors to Inhotim had to overnight in no-frills pousadas in the nearby town of Brumadinho or drive down from Belo Horizonte for a single day, a laughably insufficient amount of time to digest the museum in its entirety. Though Paz started a hotel project on the museum’s grounds in 2011, he abandoned it and eventually turned Inhotim over to a private foundation. The half-built complex festered in the forest until June 2023, when the São Paulo–based chef and hotelier Taiza Krueder bought the property. Over the next 18 months, she transformed Paz’s ruin into Clara Arte, with airy common spaces displaying artworks from Inhotim’s collection and 46 individual villas overlooking the tropical canopy near the park’s entrance.
Rather than rush through Inhotim’s profusion of aesthetic experiences, I decided to linger. On my first morning I wandered off the hotel’s lush grounds and, in moments, disappeared into a pavilion dedicated to the Brazilian artist Lygia Pape, where luminous columns of golden wire sliced through the sepulchral darkness, like light made solid. That afternoon I strolled past Rebeca Carapiá’s cast-iron-and-copper glyphs, which levitated over the reflective surface of a lagoon. Near the park’s periphery I slipped into a living banana grove planted by the artist Paulo Nazareth and stumbled upon a single cast-bronze banana tree that seemed to sprout, solid and burnished, from the mineral-rich soil. Installed in 2024 among pavilions and artworks by blue-chip luminaries like Yayoi Kusama and Robert Irwin, these works reflect Inhotim’s growing dedication to Black and Indigenous artists and its desire to deepen ties to marginalized communities nearby. “Recognizing all the layers of history that make up Inhotim is really important,” says Júlia Rebouças, Inhotim’s former curator. “Sometimes those layers end up covered over time. We’re trying to discover them now.”
Returning to Belo Horizonte, I saw countless projects patiently excavating the past to fortify a strong sense of regional identity “connected to materials and tradition,” says the ceramist Daniel Romeiro, who runs the gorgeous O Ateliê de Céramica out of a sleek modernist house with his sister, Luiza Soares, and his mother, the artist Flavia Soares. Over my final days in town, I scoured the stalls at the Mercado Central; visited the workshop of Alva Design, where siblings Marcelo Alvarenga and Susana Bastos craft expressive homewares from locally quarried soapstone; and feasted on Mineiro ingredients at the charming Cozinha Santo Antônio, where chef Juliana Duarte uses food as “a way into our history.”