Marcio Doctors

Museu do Açude was created in 1964 by industrialist Raymundo Ottoni de Castro Maya, owner of Gordura de Côco Carioca. A man of many virtues, Castro Maya was an important collector of Brazilian art and a nature lover. In 1943 he coordinated the reform and development of Tijuca Forest. In the early 1990s, after the Earth Summit in 1992, curator Marcio Doctors was invited by the then director of the museum, Carlos Martins, to devise a project that interrelated contemporary art and nature. The result, in 1994, was an exhibition of temporary installations that interacted with Tijuca Forest, listed by the national heritage protection agency, IPHAN, since 1966. In 1999, Marcio Doctors conceived of a Space for Permanent Installations, building up a collection of contemporary art for Museu do Açude, where he reconfigured the old bourgeois idea of the sculpture garden into a space (alluding to the cosmos) for permanent installations. A pioneering project in Brazil, it won the Estácio de Sá award in 2004 from the Rio de Janeiro state government for its excellence and relevance to the history of Brazilian art.