Throughout the second half of 2023, several artists dedicated themselves to producing illustrations in response to a call for the creation and execution of original artworks specifically to celebrate four decades of struggle for Popular Agrarian Reform. Organized by the MST itself, in partnership with the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, the International Assembly of Peoples, and ALBA Movements, the "MST 40 Years" call initially aimed to summon perspectives, knowledge, and affections to be translated into artistic visual elements – paintings, drawings, digital illustrations, prints: all printed on 42 x 60cm tactel fabric.

We received more than 150 entries from Brazil and other Latin American countries. With the most varied ways of expressing the complex proportions of the struggle for land in our country, the production and exhibition of art contribute to strengthening the artistic and cultural productions of the MST (Landless Workers' Movement) as a confrontation with neoliberal land ownership and its various forms of violence against peasant bodies, their lands, their imaginations, and subjectivities.

In this exhibition, you can see part of the beautiful result of this work, with forty artworks selected from over 150 entries. The criterion for selecting forty pieces was the symbolism of the number that officially marks the four decades of the movement's existence. It also marks the appropriation by the peasant hand of the mechanisms of symbolic production and representation of their condition as signifying producers of their own reality as part of the social and political reality of Brazil.

The exhibition "MST 40 Years: The Art of Sowing Dreams and Struggle for Social Change" shares with our public the beauty, strength, and victorious nature of the artistic gesture that not only illustrates but nourishes our territory of collective struggle for Popular Agrarian Reform. This collective artistic gesture feeds back into the imagination and subjectivity of the largest organized movement in Latin America, highlighting its robustness, its scope, and its capacity to generate emotions—and, even more so, to affect Brazilian and international society. Long live the MST!

In addition to these pieces being displayed in the exhibition "MST 40 Years: The Art of Sowing Dreams and Struggle," which took place at the Antônio Candido Library at the Florestan Fernandes National School and at the Elza Soares MST Cultural Center, both in 2024, an urban intervention exhibition was conceived in Minhocão Park as part of the 5th Agrarian Reform Fair in Água Branca Par, São Paulo, in 2025.