The 60s were the most significant moment for the emergence of a collective attitude of neovanguard expression in the city, marked by the participation of intellectuals, critics, and artists who carried out a series of actions in questioning the political and be-havioral situation and propounding the utopian construction of a new society.

These actions started with the realization of the Semana Nacional de Poesia de Vanguarda (Brazilian Vanguard Poetry Week), organized by Affonso Ávila in 1963, when poets and intellectuals discussed the revolutionary role of the artist and militant critic. Sub-sequently the city staged interventions by students, artist, and intellectuals who were questioning the political model of Brazil and of the artists circuit itself. On a par with the erection of the university campus of Pampulha, various festivals and art salons were started up transforming the university into a place of resistance against the military regime. A new artistic vanguard expression was formed, under the initiative of the militant criticism of Frederico Morais and Marcio Sampaio, who put into check the tradition of the Guignard School and proposed an experimental art focusing on the potitical, social, behavioral and environmental questions being experience by people in the large cities.

The events of neovanguard expression transposed public and private spaces of the city throughout the sixties and terminated in the seventies with the manifestation Do Corpo a Terra, led by the critic Frederico Morais, who wrote a radical manifest in which he denounced the military repression and demanded freedom of expression in the country. In this wave of public demonstration typical of neovanguard, artists realized various proposals of artistic dematerialization, - happenings, conceptual, ecological and political proposals - which took place in the Municipal Park, at the foot of the Serra do Curral mountain, in streets and little rivers of the city, transforming it into a stage of protest against the military dictatorial regime. That event distinguished itself as the last collective manifestation of neovanguard expression in Belo Horizonte. It was also one of the most radical of artistic manifestation of protest against the regime of terror implanted in Brazil, staged through metaphoric interventions of Barrio and Cildo Mereilles.

Artist participating in the neovanguard expression in Belo Horizonte were: Jarbas Juarez and Nello Nuno, the first ones to question the tradition of the Guignard School: Lotus Lobo and Annamelia, creators of new graphical experiences; Teresinha Soares, the producer of happenings and performances; Décio Noviello, constructor of ample object paintings; Dileny Campos, proposer of environmental sub-landscapes; José Ronaldo Lima, inventor of meta-drawings and sensorial boxes; José Alberto Nemer and Madu, who constructed objects to denounce human solitude; Luciano Gusmão, a conceptual artist who worked on the limit between art and physics; and Márcio Sampaio, an artist, poet and critic who expressed a new interpretation of tropicalism, giving an impulse to the young artist of vanguard expression in the city (15).

After the seventies and with the worsening of military repression, the collective vanguard manifestations lost their impact and were substituted by an alternative and individual production, that used metaphor and parody to question the official culture in a very subtle way. In Belo Horizonte the last individual neovanguard outcries emerged through the drawings of Marcos Benjamim, Arlindo Daibert, Mário Zavagli, Lincoln Volpini, Manfredo Souzanetto and Manoel Serpa; through the lithos of Liliane Dardot and Ivone Couto; through the paintings of Mariza Trancoso and Júlio Espíndola, and marked the audiovisuals of Beatriz Dantas, Maurício Andrés and George Helt. During the time, the polemic salons of UFMG were replaced by the global salons, realized in the Palácio das Artes and sponsored by the State Government, with the capital coming from TV Globo (16).

Those years of questionging accompanied the ecological destruction of the city, which lead the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade to sing the Triste Horizonte (Sad Horizon), a poem in which he laments the de-characterization of artistic monuments by real estate speculation, and the destruction of the Serra do Curral mountain ridge driven by the activities of iron ore mining (17).