Racial Democracy, Visibility, and the History of Colonial Brazilian Art

Abstract

Since the nineteenth century, the history of colonial Brazilian art has highlighted the work of Afro-Brazilian men, specifically those with a white father and Black or parda mother. Antonio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho, is the subject of countless books, exhibitions, television shows, and films. In addition to such famous men, dozens of other Afro-Brazilian artists are known and much scholarship has examined iconography and style with ties to African cultures. This extensive and important work has led to major exhibitions demonstrating Afro-Brazilian contributions as central to Brazil’s past and present. Although intended as celebratory, the language and framing structures scholars use to discuss Afro-Brazilian artists from the colonial period are founded in white supremacy. The conception of Brazil as a nation where everyone is of mixed race, and therefore devoid of racism, is partly responsible for Aleijadinho’s fame. This essay will clarify how this narrative of harmonious racial mixing and the focus on the visibly African perpetuates white supremacist interpretations of colonial Brazilian art and limits the study of Afro-Brazilian artists’ work. I will propose ways to reframe workshop practice and improve connoisseurship using, among other cases, the lawsuit directed toward the white painter Manoel da Costa Ataíde that named the Afro-Brazilian artists who created one of his commissions. The essay builds on existing scholarship, acknowledging the violence of enslaving artists and promoting lines of inquiry that consider the agency and cultural positioning of Afro-Brazilian artists and patrons as subtle, ubiquitous, and heterogeneous.