Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Black Art in Brazil: Expressions of Identity - by Cleveland, Kimberly L.

2016; Wiley; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/blar.12450

1470-9856

Roger Sansi,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Cleveland, Kimberly L. ( 2013) Black Art in Brazil: Expressions of Identity, University Press of Florida (Gainsville, FL), xiii + 208 pp. $74.95 hbk. Black Art in Brazil addresses a very complex, contentious and ambiguous question. What would be ‘Black Art’ in Brazil? The art produced by Black people? For Black people? An art that reflects the experience of Blacks or Black culture in Brazil? In all these cases, what does being ‘Black’ mean in Brazil? Why Black and not Afro-Brazilian? Would this Black art be defined in opposition to White Art? Or Euro-Brazilian art? Cleveland proposes to use the term ‘Black’ as opposed to Afro-Brazilian, for a number of reasons. First she argues that ‘Afro-Brazilian art’ is an academic invention greatly influenced by North-American scholars. It makes reference to culture, and essentially religion, more than race. On the other hand the term ‘black art’ (‘arte negra’) is still more common in popular parlance, and it addresses ideas of blackness, rather than just cultural identification with Africa. In these terms, Cleveland is interested in Black art as an expression of identity – essentially, the identity of the artists the book is presenting. The body of the book is constituted by a very in-depth, detailed analysis of the work of five artists: Abdias do Nascimento, Ronaldo Rego, Eustáquio Neves, Ayrson Heráclito and Rosana Paulino. All very interesting but different cases, belonging to different generations, regions, and with very different kinds of work. Abdias do Nascimento, the older of them, was a poet, playwright, activist and politician before a visual artist. His visual work makes explicit reference to Afro-Brazilian religions like Candomblé, essentially the mythology of the Orixas (African gods), in spite of the fact he is not initiated in that religion. Ronaldo Rego presents a very contrasting example: a generation after Nascimento, Rego is an artist from Rio de Janeiro and ‘white’, for local colour classifications. Rego became deeply involved with the Afro-Brazilian religion Umbanda in the 1980s, and since then his work has been inspired by this religion. He has often featured in Afro-Brazilian art exhibits and catalogues, in spite of the fact of being white. Eustáquio Neves, the third author discussed by Cleveland, is a photographer from the state of Minas Gerais, coming from a rural, black background. His work is often based on the religious expressions of the black communities of his region. According to Cleveland, he feels uncomfortable with being classified as an ‘Afro-Brazilian’ artist, and his work is more interested in addressing the experience of blackness in Brazil, in particular from his regional perspective. Ayrson Heráclito is also an artist with a strong connection with his state, Bahia. Claiming a mixed-race heritage (he describes his father as black and his mother, white), Heráclito works with installations and performances with a very erudite conceptual framework, making reference to the religions, food stuffs and history of Bahia. Heraclitos' work, according to Cleveland, seems to have had a stronger repercussion in his own state, than in other parts of Brazil or abroad. He is also both inside and outside the framework of ‘Afro-Brazilian art’. The last artist discussed by Cleveland is Rosana Paulino, a black artist from São Paulo who has worked on images of blackness and religion through photography, installation and printmaking. Her work takes a gendered perspective that the previous artists may not have. All these artists, from different generations, religions, backgrounds and using different techniques, have different approaches to the question of ‘Afro-Brazilian’ and or ‘Black’ art. Most of them seem to be uncomfortable with either classification; although they engage with questions of Afro-Brazilian culture and Black identity, these artists, as such, don't like to be classified in a specific niche. In these terms, Cleveland's argument, although pertinent, seems to loose definition as the book unfolds, and the very rich material she has gathered by paying very close attention to the discourses of the artists offers a complex picture that cannot be easily constrained within any clear label. In the end, the term ‘Black art’ seems as ambiguous as ‘Afro-Brazilian art’. Wouldn't it have been more useful, after working closely with these artists, to offer a more general sociological and historical analysis of how these worlds of art have been constructed, not just through their individual works, but also through networks and institutions, critics, curators, collectors, politicians, publics? This is particularly important in this field, where very contentious and politically explosive categories are being used- like ‘Black’ in Brazil. Cleveland offers a hint of these dynamics in the first chapters, and throughout the case studies she gives many examples of the influence of local and global networks and institutions in the works of these artists. But somehow this wider social and historical analysis is not integrated in the narrative of the book, which always follows very closely the trajectory of individual artists. Still, this book will be of great interest for scholars working on Latin American contemporary art.