Inhotim

I arrived at Inhotim expecting an outdoor museum — the kind of place with sculptures on plinths at respectful intervals and a gift shop near the exit. What I found instead was something I have no adequate category for: a hundred hectares of tropical botanical garden containing around forty purpose-built pavilions, each housing installations by a single artist, connected by paths that wind through plantings so lush and deliberate that the landscape itself reads as a work. You enter through a gate and after about twenty minutes of walking you genuinely stop knowing how large it is.

The garden was assembled by Bernardo Paz, a Brazilian mining magnate who began collecting contemporary art in the 1980s and eventually decided the art needed a permanent home in the hills near the town of Brumadinho. He imported plants from across Brazil and around the world and gave artists the kind of brief that almost never happens: build whatever you need, at whatever scale the work demands, and we’ll build around it. The result is absurd and extraordinary in equal measure.

Hélio Oiticica’s Invenção da Cor, Penetrável Magic Square #5, De Luxe occupies a pavilion that you walk into and are immediately surrounded by colored glass panels in configurations that shift as you move — orange and yellow and red making a light that you feel in your chest. Cildo Meireles filled a room with thousands of banknotes on the floor and more hanging from the ceiling until the air itself seems made of money. Matthew Barney built a pavilion for a three-screen video cycle that takes nearly six hours to watch in full and creates an experience more like dreaming than watching. I sat through two of the three screens and emerged blinking into afternoon light that felt newly strange.

The botanical collections are not merely backdrop. Inhotim holds more than four thousand species, and the landscaping team has created planted sequences that function as transitions between the art spaces — the light changes as you walk through a bamboo grove, the sound of water appears and recedes, the horizon opens and closes. Between pavilions, the garden is the work. An elderly couple I passed near the orquidário were sitting on a bench eating sandwiches from a tupperware container, entirely unhurried, and I thought: yes, exactly, that is the correct speed.

I spent the last hour of daylight at the Galeria Adriana Varejão, a low white building set into the hillside with its own reflecting pool. Varejão’s interior is lined with painted tiles — azulejos — but treated as wounds, the walls appearing to split open to reveal visceral interiors beneath the porcelain surface. It is a room about the violence beneath the colonial aesthetic, and it sits there very quietly in its beautiful building and does not explain itself. That felt right. The best things at Inhotim don’t explain themselves.

When to go: Inhotim is open Thursday through Sunday and on public holidays. Arrive at opening (9:30 a.m.) and bring lunch or plan on the in-park cafeteria — the site is too large to leave for a midday break. May through August offers cooler temperatures and clearer light. Wear comfortable shoes and expect to walk far more than you planned.