A Brazilian mining magnate’s conviction on federal money laundering charges has cast a rare shadow of negative publicity over the Inhotim Institute, a widely admired, environment-themed art and botanical-garden complex he founded in the east-central state of Minas Gerais. Prosecutors this month announced that a Minas Gerais federal judge has ruled that in 2007 and 2008, Bernardo Paz diverted US$98.5 million in employee social-security withholdings from his mining group. The funds went to an offshore account set up to receive donations from his businesses to the Inhotim Institute, then were used to pay bills and debt incurred by the mining group, the prosecutors say. Paz, who denied the charges, was sentenced to nine years and three months in prison, but he will remain free pending an appeal—a process likely to take years.

All this has created an uncustomary burst of embarrassing publicity for Inhotim, and has fueled debate about what the long-term repercussions for the institute might be. Some argue Inhotim will not be harmed by the fallout because it has a reputation for strong, independent management and because the alleged money laundering did not involve donations to the institute by outside individuals or entities.

Others aren’t so sure. “I think Paz’s conviction raises some red flags that could impact Inhotim visitation, donations and, in particular, corporate sponsorship,” says Binka Le Breton, cofounder of the Iracambi Research Center, a nonprofit environmental institute in Minas Gerais. “Even if Inhotim and Paz’s mining group are separate legal entities, Inhotim is indelibly linked in the public’s mind to him, its founder and the genius behind it. Some Brazilian corporations could end their sponsorship because they don’t want to be associated in any way with corruption, which is now coming under increased public scrutiny here.”

Paz himself has not commented publicly on the conviction, which occurred in September but was not announced by prosecutors until this month. And the Inhotim Institute posted a blog item saying in part, “[A]ll of the institute’s accounts are public… and are subject to a rigorous annual auditing process.”

Inhotim is a vast, lushly landscaped complex combining extensive botanical gardens with a large collection of contemporary art in 23 separate galleries and two-dozen outdoor sculpture and installation-art sites. Part of a regional biodiversity hotspot just miles from open-pit mines and the suburbs of Belo Horizonte—Brazil’s third-largest city—the institute has become an oasis of environmental stewardship and understanding in Minas Gerais, which means General Mines in English.

Underpinning it is Paz, a former stockbroker who in 1973 bought a fledgling, 15-year-old mining company and expanded it into the Itaminas Group, a three-million-ton-per-year producer and exporter of iron ore. The company’s chief asset, an open-pit iron-ore mine, sits only 19 miles (30 kms) from Inhotim. Although Paz still owns the conglomerate, an administrative council runs it so he can oversee the institute.

“What, in part, motivated me to create Inhotim, was my being the owner of a mining company who wanted to give something back to society,” Paz, a slightly built 68-year-old with shoulder-length white hair, said in an e-mail interview with EcoAméricas before news of the money laundering conviction was announced. “I also loved nature, art and culture. So I created Inhotim from this tripod of interests.”

The future site of the institute had been mined before Paz bought a modest farmhouse there as a weekend retreat. He began purchasing and restoring acreage surrounding the farmhouse in the 1980s after hearing developers might acquire property in the area. In doing so, he reclaimed terrain pockmarked by abandoned open-pit mines, creating gardens and artificial lakes—five of which now occupy the institute’s 346-acre (140-hectare) grounds. Paz over the years also has bought up 615 surrounding acres (249 hectares) of Atlantic Forest—a highly endangered biome whose tropical biodiversity rivals that of the Amazon—and sparsely wooded savannah.

He began amassing his current art collection in 1998, exchanging his modern art (1880s-1960s) for contemporary art (post-1960s), and soon started building galleries to house and exhibit it. Instead of erecting a mammoth museum, he scattered the galleries on land that would later become a botanical garden designed with input from Roberto Burle Marx, a friend and well-known Brazilian landscape architect who died in 1994.

The growing popularity of what emerged is reflected in visitor attendance, which grew from just over 7,000 when the institute opened in 2006 to 321,000 last year. In 2015, the American travel website TripAdvisor gave Inhotim a “Travelers’ Choice” award for being one of the world’s 25 best museums.

The institute was created as a nonprofit in 2002 to manage Paz’s growing contemporary art collection, for which he already had built the first of the galleries that would form part of the current complex. The initial galleries opened their doors to schoolchildren in 2005 and to the general public in 2006. Inhotim was recognized as a Public Interest Civil Society Organization (OSCIP)—an independently audited nonprofit eligible for tax-deductible donations—by the state of Minas Gerais in 2008 and by the federal government in 2009.

In all, the institute owns 1,300 works. Of those, 700 are on display, representing 250 artists from over 30 countries. For its part, the botanical garden boasts 5,000 species, some under threat of extinction, from five continents and over 28% of the world’s plant families. It possesses one of the largest collections of palms in the world, with about 1,400 species represented. Its collection of Araceae, a family that includes philodendrons, anthuriums and arum lilies, is the largest in Latin America, with 450 species represented, and it has examples of over 330 orchid species.

Inhotim’s environmental efforts evolved gradually. Paz began accumulating plants to landscape the institute. In 2010, he secured federal recognition of the institute’s grounds as a botanical garden. This status ensures the garden will be preserved and requires that it be used to propagate plant species and to conduct research aimed at their conservation.

A second step came in 2014, when Paz got the federal government to designate the 615 acres of Atlantic Forest he had bought up around Inhotim as a Private Natural Heritage Reserve (RPPN). That means the woodlands must be preserved in perpetuity and managed accordingly. Together, the botanical garden and RPPN ensure that 961 contiguous acres (389 hectares) are now legally conserved.

Botanical work focuses primarily on propagation and conservation of threatened plant species, mainly from the palm and Araceae families, and the introduction of little-known species in landscaping to highlight the importance of plant biodiversity. The institute propagates 1 million seedlings a year to cultivate trees, palms, cacti, orchids, bromeliads and many other ornamental plants, says Juliano Borin, the institute’s chief agronomist.

“Inhotim plants 80% of its seedlings in its botanical garden and exchanges 20% of them with other botanical gardens, to acquire new species, or it donates them to ecosystem recovery programs, including the reforestation of degraded areas,” says Borin. “Inhotim propagates all of its threatened species, some 5% of its total species.”

At the same time, Inhotim has implemented numerous practices aimed at reducing its environmental footprint, including recycling, composting, water-quality monitoring and planned solar photovoltaic installations. Says Inhotim advisor José Carlos Carvalho, a former environment minister of Brazil: “Inhotim has gradually changed its governance model to prioritize environmental sustainability. Paz is committed to safeguarding art and the environment to foster public appreciation for both. This is what he wants his legacy to be.”

The complex operates on an annual budget of R$40 million (US$12.1 million), not including the costs of capital upgrades such as the solar system, new art acquisitions and new galleries. Paz underwrites 20% of the budget by making tax-deductible donations, with the remaining 80% coming from admission costs, gift shop revenues, public and private sponsors and tax-deductible donations by others. Any surplus income is plowed back into the institute, Inhotim says.

For visitors, the result is a unique opportunity to see extraordinary art and outdoor plantings as part of a single, seamless experience. “I’ve been to modern and contemporary art museums all over Europe and Latin America,” says retired Rio de Janeiro travel agent Nicola Mandarino. “But Inhotim is unique because you can appreciate a vast collection of contemporary art and, as you go from one gallery to another, rest your eye on its exuberant botanical garden.”

Paz has provided an unparalleled amount of exhibition space to individual artists by giving each his or her own gallery, another creative luxury that sets Inhotim apart. One gallery, devoted exclusively to the work of Brazilian Cildo Meireles, includes “Desvio para Vermelho” (Detour to Red), a large room in which everything—a sofa, a desk, a fan, wall paintings, a refrigerator, even the water flowing from a faucet—is a shade of red.

Outdoor installation art and sculptures are interspersed among the galleries and gardens. “Magic Square” by Brazilian Hélio Oiticica is a lakeside labyrinth of high, mostly unconnected walls, each painted a different bright color except for two white walls, and assembled in the form of a square. “Beam Drop,” by U.S. artist Chris Burden, features 71 giant girders that were dropped from a height of 40 meters by a construction crane into a pool of wet cement to form a steel forest, sprouting at random, off-perpendicular angles from a bare field.

Among the works featuring environmental themes are these:
• “Sonic Pavilion,” by U.S. artist Doug Aitken, is located in a circular hilltop gallery of frosted glass. Its nearly bare interior is dominated by a 200-meter-deep hole at the bottom of which microphones capture the murmurings of the Earth’s inner depths, transmitting the bass sounds through amplifiers to visitors in real time.
• “De Lama Lamina” (from Mud to Blade), by U.S. artist Matthew Barney, stands in a gallery comprising a glass geodesic dome. It is a mud-caked skidder—a vehicle used in the timber industry to pull felled trees through rough terrain—whose huge mechanical arm grasps a gnarled, uprooted tree fashioned from white polyethylene.
• “The Vegetation Room,” by Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias is a nine-square-meter, polished stainless steel cube built so close to the encroaching forest that the structure seems nearly to disappear into the woods. Four rectangular openings, one on each side of the cube, lead to a curving, fake-foliage-lined corridor that tapers to a width too narrow for physical passage.
• “Elevazione” (Elevation) by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, features a branch-less, leaf-less, bronze-cast Brazil nut tree whose metallic roots are anchored to the midsections of five smaller live trees. These live trees suspend the work several meters off the ground and will elevate it further as they grow.
• “The Adriana Varejão Gallery,” whose flat roof comprises rectangular platforms covered in tiles that feature painted fruit-eating birds endemic to the region. The gallery is surrounded by jabuticaba berry trees planted there to attract the berry-eating birds depicted on the tiles.
• “The Claudia Andujar Gallery,” a brick pavilion featuring photos of the Yanomami tribe by the Swiss-born Andujar, who lived with the tribe and helped it fight for the creation in 1992 of its government-recognized reserve on Brazil’s border with Venezuela. One gallery room contains paintings by Yanomami.

“Inhotim’s in-progress transformation from a former iron ore mine to a weekend retreat [for Paz] to a botanical garden filled with contemporary art reflects a shift away from extracting natural resources to creating a conversation between nature and art, one best illustrated by works with environmental themes,” says Inhotim’s artistic director María Eugenia Salcedo.

Inhotim’s 50 educators facilitate that dialogue in guided tours of various types that they conduct through the botanical garden for 30,000 people a year. The institute also runs programming for 8,000 students and 400 teachers from local schools, with subject matter ranging from the use of art to develop one’s relationship to society to the exploration of subjects including food scarcity, climate change and the environmental impact of consumption patterns.

Brazilian advocacy groups applaud these educational efforts as well as the institute’s local-community-oriented hiring—over 80% of the institute’s 600 employees come from the nearby city of Brumadinho—and its land-protection achievements. Says Aline Tristão Bernardes, executive director of the Forest Stewardship Council in Brazil: “Inhotim’s RPPN illustrates its commitment to environmental conservation.”

Inhotim, however, has not been free from controversy. In 2011, just after being recognized as a botanical garden, the institute for research purposes requested and received government permission to collect plants in any public and private areas of Brazil other than protected lands during a one-year period. But the project drew criticism when the acting environment secretary of the town of Cavalcante in neighboring Goias state accused institute botanists of removing three pickup-truck loads of buritirana palms (Mauritiella armata), an elegant species with fan-shaped fronds, from a protected area there. The institute denies that what it did was illegal.

“The institute had authorization to collect the palms for research purposes, plants [that were] not taken from a protected area,” says Lucas Sigefredo, the botanical garden director. “We made the mistake of collecting them without telling the municipality and private landowner from whose property we took them that we had government authorization, and the institute apologized to both parties.”

The money-laundering conviction announced this month creates a far higher-profile challenge. While opinions differ on whether Paz’s legal troubles might dampen the institute’s outside support and visitor interest, most observers believe Inhotim will survive.

Says Le Breton, the Iracambi Research Center co-founder: “Even though I think Paz’s conviction [for money laundering] could hurt Inhotim financially, its existence isn’t threatened. The impeccable quality that makes Inhotim one of the world’s top museums will continue to attract a high volume of visitors from Brazil and abroad.”

Conservation advocate Maria Dalce Ricas, executive director of the Minas Gerais Association for Environmental Defense, doubts fallout from the money laundering case will affect Inhotim operations. But even if she is wrong about that, she says, “[Paz] will never let Inhotim die. It is not just his passion. It is his life.”