Plates Full of Beauty and History in Upper Manhattan

New additions to Adriana Varejão’s acclaimed “Plate” series are showing at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, in her first solo museum exhibit in New York.

It is not advisable to attempt to eat off any of Adriana Varejão’s plates.

Nor is it wise to ask the artist, one of Brazil’s most prominent and audacious, to serve from them. (She once told an interviewer, with a hint of disdain in her normally gracious voice, “I don’t cook.”)

The curved fiberglass and resin plates she has on display at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in Upper Manhattan — all but one nearly six feet in diameter —are encrusted with sculpted imagery and painted in surreally lifelike colors to convey flora and fauna, cosmologies and legends of the Amazon region. They reveal an artist whose work has assiduously engaged with many different chapters of Brazil’s history.

“Each plate is like a universe,” Varejão said cupping her hands in a gesture of gentle explanation. “I like how they relate to my passion for ceramics, for the decorative arts and their history, and how craft can disrupt artistic hierarchies.”