Na floresta à noite (In the Forest of the Night) by Denilson Baniwa

Na floresta à noite (In the Forest of the Night) is a long-term public artwork on the Storefront facade by artist Denilson Baniwa. The work transforms the building into a luminous Amazonian night, where trees, animals, and spirits unfold in a non-linear constellation. Blending contemporary and ancestral iconography, Baniwa draws from the cosmologies of his Baniwa people and other Indigenous communities of Brazil and the Amazon, whose rich histories told through dance, music, and oral tradition are marked by centuries of loss and extraction. 

This mural becomes a shifting forest  across Storefront’s moving panels,with iridescent colors that recall how moonlight dances through the canopy. Quotidian life and myth collide to create a layered scene that resists longstanding colonial narratives of Indigenous erasure embedded in  Brazil’s founding histories. 

For Baniwa, the Amazon exists as a vital part of our collective imagination—one often romanticized yet disconnected from the corrosive forces that power city life. Na floresta à noite serves as a bridge between these worlds, inviting passersby to step into the forest’s rhythm and to witness the intertwined fates of its beings, both real and spiritual.

Denilson Baniwa (b. Amazonia, Brazil, 1984) is an Indigenous artist who was born in the village of Darí in Rio Negro, Amazonas. He is currently based in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. His work has been shown internationally in exhibitions including Heranças de um Brasil profundo (Legacies of a Deep Brazil), Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo; VaiVém (To-and-fro), at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil; Racism and Anti-Racism in Brazil: The Struggle of Indigenous Peoples, Manchester University, and Reinventing the Américas: Construct. Erase. Repeat, at the Getty Center. He participated in the Brazilian pavilion of the 2024 Venice Biennial and the 22nd Sydney Biennial. Baniwa is the recipient of the 2019 PIPA Online Award.

This exhibition has been made possible through the support of the Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment of the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; with invaluable support from Storefront’s Board of Directors, the Storefront Circle, Storefront members, and individual donors. Storefront is a proud member of CANNY (Collaborative Arts Network New York), currently supported by the Mellon Foundation, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Arison Arts Foundation, Imperfect Family Foundation, and Jay DeFeo Foundation.