“I emphasize: we have no definition, we come from a continuous time, never stopping. I remember, we seek the most abstract meanings, we deal with other very firm dealings along this passage. I reinforce, both my grandfather Makunaima and I myself, a direct part of him, are artists of transformation.” — Jaider Esbell, 2018

New Humans: Memories of the Future, the exhibition reopening the New Museum after three years of expansion, includes six paintings by Jaider Esbell. Against the backdrop of accelerating social and technological change, the curatorial project traces a diagonal path through the 20th and 21st centuries, exploring art as a collective exercise in shaping the future and reimagining what it means to be human.

Four of the works on view belong to the series Transmakunaimî — O buraco é mais embaixo, a celebration of the ancestral figure Makunaima (or Macunaíma, as crystallized in Mário de Andrade’s work). In the series, Esbell breaks with the myth of a singular “Brazilian identity,” reclaiming the Indigenous divinity as a being in constant transformation, able to take on different forms.”Makunaima is far greater and more complex than the caricatured figure we were handed,” Jaider Esbell said in a 2018 interview with Amazônia Real.