Celebrating the Breadth of Black Art in Brazil

When Igor Simões arrived in Los Angeles as a Getty scholar, he wanted to answer the question: Where are the Black Brazilian artists in the discussions on Afrodiasporic art?

Stories of Black art are dominated by Anglophone countries like the United States and Britain. Simões—an alumnus of Getty’s Connecting Art Histories funding initiative, which brings together researchers across regional and national boundaries—wanted to include Black Brazilian artists in this narrative. Brazil, where Simões lives, was once a major node in the transatlantic slave trade, and today 57% of the population is of African descent.

When Afro-Brazilian culture is represented abroad, he says, it tends to conform to a narrow set of expectations–usually focusing on religious rituals or dance styles like samba. The popularity of the 1959 film Black Orpheus, made by a French filmmaker with music created by white Brazilian composer, is a prime example. “You have Black bodies continuously sweating and dancing and praying,” he says. But the story of Black art in Brazil is much more than that.

In 2018, Simões was invited to curate an exhibition of Black artists in the collection of SESC (Serviço Social do Comérico), a private non-profit started by businessowners to promote the wellbeing of Brazilian workers—and one of the largest sponsors of art in Brazil. The organization subsidizes a large swath of social services—SESC centers boast libraries, cafeterias, gyms, computer labs, even sometimes a dentist’s office—but they are also important public spaces for people to experience art.

But Simões, along with co-curator Hélio Menezes, had a much more ambitious proposal. Instead of limiting themselves to the art that was already in the collection, why not embark on a multi-year research project to uncover the true depth and complexity of Black art that existed in the country? “What we call art history in Brazil is actually white art history because it's an entire field made by white people about white artists,” he says. “But if you have an art history made by white people, then it is not the history of the country.”

The project had Simões, and his collaborators Lorraine Mendes and Marcelo Campos, traveling to 26 states, from rural towns in the Amazon to quilombos–historic settlements founded by escaped enslaved people–all in search of an art that could help paint a fuller picture of artmaking throughout all of Brazil. “We used all possible modes of transportation” he says, “Planes, boats, cars, scooters–we used even a horse.” The team met hundreds of people, visiting public and private collections across the country, but most important to Simões was creating connections between Black artists. He wanted not just to find and display works by Black artists, but to build relationships and create spaces for Black artists and thinkers to come together. In addition to the exhibition, Simões organized an online residency program, which also featured a series of public classes that were recorded and broadcast on SESC Brazil’s YouTube channel.

The resulting exhibition, Dos Brasis—Arte e Pensamento Negro (Black Art, Black Thinking), opened at SESC Belenzinho in São Paulo in 2024. A sprawling exhibition of 250 artists that spanned the late 17th century to the present day, it displayed the work of famous artists and lesser-known ones. And the response was enthusiastic: 2.8 million people have seen the exhibition, drawing 4000 visitors on opening night alone. “One of the artists took a photo of a little girl, a Black girl, in front of a display of portraits, and she was saying, ‘So, this is me, this is my mom, and this is my father.’” After that, Simões felt his work was completed. “You have a Black child making contact with the visual arts and seeing herself in the walls of that exhibition.”

“The selection of the Belenzinho center is noteworthy because it is far away from the city center–but this is one of the beautiful points about the venue, too, because it asks the question: far away, but to whom?” says Miguel de Baca, Senior Program Officer at the Getty Foundation, “Although it is far from the flagship museums in central São Paulo, where white artists predominate collections, it is located in an industrial area at the margin of the city center with proximity to the middle and working class neighborhoods where many Black people reside. That’s why it is so special, why it is such a love letter to Black Brazilians, and therefore, also to the multifaceted cultures of Brazil.”

Simões hopes his work not only corrects an absence in the narrative of Black art, but also draws lines of connection between artists across the diaspora–a focus of Getty’s African American Art History Initiative and Latin American and Latinx Art Initiative. “It's not about saying, ‘Oh, this is being Black.” he says, “It’s about understanding how people share an experience, and how those people find ways to be alive, to exist, and to resist.” He points out how artists like Rosana Paulino, María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Faith Ringold—from Brazil, Cuba, and the United States respectively—have all created work using found imagery from their family archives. “Why do they do that in different moments in different parts of the world?” He says, “Because there is an experience which is shared: the African diasporic experience.”

Simões, who studied film as an undergraduate, is interested in the idea of the montage–where multiple parts are pieced together to form a new whole, and new meanings are produced through creative juxtapositions. In the same way, his curatorial work is an exuberant bringing together, a celebration of multiplicity and the manifold expressions that Blackness can take across the globe. “We need to show that Black art is not a wave,” he says, “It's always, ‘Oh, the new wave of black artists.’ We are not a wave. We are the ocean.”