Article

Journal of Black Studies

41(2) 301319
Appropriation and the The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/0021934709349458
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Brazilian Art

Kimberly Cleveland1

Abstract
In reflecting on the past and present, some contemporary Black Brazilian artists
working in the secular field have identified similarities between themselves and
previous generations of Africans in Brazil, based on their shared experiences of
racial and sexual discrimination. Artists Eustquio Neves and Rosana Paulino
create works with historical and contemporary references that highlight past
and current power imbalances in Brazilian society and seek to correct them.
These artists appropriate what have traditionally been White spaces of control
in their country and confront contemporary race-related social challenges by
creating in their work alternative depictions of Africans and African descendents
in Brazil. Through their representations, Neves and Paulino infuse their own and
other Black bodies with meaning and respect and show that they, too, have been
challenged but not broken by the struggles they have faced in their lifetimes.

Keywords
Afro-Brazilian, art, appropriation, Eustquio Neves, Rosana Paulino

In the past two decades, American art historians have included Brazil as an
area of focus in their studies of artistic influences in the African diaspora. For
example, Robert Farris Thompson and Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara exam-
ine artistic connections through the lens of sacred art forms related to

1
Georgia State University, Atlanta

Corresponding Author:
Kimberly Cleveland, PO Box 4107, Atlanta, GA 30302-4107
Email: artklc@langate.gsu.edu
302 Journal of Black Studies 41(2)

Afro-Brazilian religions. Henry Drewal also adopted this approach and later
extended his studies to include some secular art. With few exceptions, these
scholars have framed their examinations along the common theme of reli-
gious resistance and retention. Because their interest lies primarily in sacred
forms, however, they have not explored much secular artistic production
across the diaspora. An examination of contemporary Afro-Brazilian artists
use of appropriation provides another window into the theme of resistance,
and sometimes recovery, in the visual arts.
In reflecting on the past and present, some contemporary artists working
in the secular field have identified similarities between themselves and previ-
ous generations of Africans in Brazil, based on their shared experiences of
racial and sexual discrimination, rather than religious practices. Artists such
as Eustquio Neves and Rosana Paulino have reacted to this acknowledg-
ment by creating works that highlight past and present power imbalances in
Brazilian society and seek to correct them. They employ historical and con-
temporary references and images to show how Blacks continue to be dis-
criminated against in their country. These artists appropriate what have
traditionally been White spaces of control in Brazil and confront contem-
porary race-related social challenges by creating in their work alternative
depictions of Africans and African descendents in Brazil. I argue that through
their representations, Neves and Paulino infuse their own and other Black
bodies with meaning and respect and show that they, too, have been chal-
lenged but not broken by the struggles they have faced in their lifetimes.

Eustquio Neves
Today, people are drawn to the state of Minas Gerais to experience its baroque
architecture and regional cheese products. In the 18th century, however, the influx
of individuals to Minas was not as innocuous. The growth of gold mining in the
region required importation of additional workers, making this area one of the
main recipients of enslaved African labor in Brazil. Although not as sizable as that
of Salvador or Rio de Janeiro, its Black population has been a constant presence.
In fact, three centuries later, the origins of most of the states current African-
descendent population can be traced back to this period of colonial history.
It is from this physical and psychological position, in the interior of Minas
Gerais, that Eustquio Neves (b. 1955) works. Distanced from the gritty urban
bustle of So Paulo and the enchanting seaside of Rio de Janeiro, Minas is one
of several areas of Brazil rarely projected to other parts of the world in televised
coverage of Carnival or tourist brochures of the tropical beaches. Neves, a self-
taught photographer, visually reflects on this and other realities of his home
region and his hometown of Diamantina. He draws on his academic training in
Cleveland 303

Figure 1. Eustquio Neves, Other Slave Ships, 19992000, mixed media, 24 16 in.
(60 40 cm). Collection of the artist, Diamantina, Brazil.

chemistry to create chemical and other types of physical interferences in his

visually complex photographic series. More than simply a technique, the juxta-
position of numerous negatives is telling of the way that he views the world,
multilayered and never able to completely separate the present from the past.
Nevess 19992000 series Other Slave Ships exemplifies his theory that one
need only graze the surface of contemporary Brazilian society to expose the still
raw wounds of slavery (Figures 1 and 2). A trip to the emergency room and the
realization that the majority of the sick and injured were Afro-Brazilians
prompted the photographer to contemplate social inequality and the concept of
contemporary slavery (Sebastio, 2002). He thought about the large number of
Brazilians who remain socially and economically marginalized due to their lack
of access to education and employment. This, in turn, led him to consider the
great number of people who travel daily, stuffed into the public busses and trains
uncomfortably for hours at a time, packed together like enslaved Africans on a
ship. Neves recognized that the racial and economic inequality that plagued
contemporary Brazilians could be traced to the condition of the blacks who
304 Journal of Black Studies 41(2)

Figure 2. Eustquio Neves, Other Slave Ships, 19992000, mixed media, 28 14 in.
(70 35 cm). Collection of the artist, Diamantina, Brazil.

were brought [to Brazil] as slaves . . . in the past, and he likened overcrowded
and sometimes unsanitary places such as public prisons, hospitals, and urban
trains to new slave ships (Persichetti & Andujar, 2000, p. 68).
A trip abroad prompted Neves to expand his knowledge of the history of slav-
ery in the African diaspora, and it provided an additional perspective for his
visual examination. In residency at Gasworks Studios in London in 1999, he
returned to the Other Slave Ships project. This was influenced, in part, by his
discovery of Brixton, a predominantly Black neighborhood, and by the historical
archives he consulted in London (personal interview, August 2003). The original
starting points of the series were a lithograph of a slave ship and one of Brazilian
poet Antonio de Castro Alvess well-known abolitionist works, O Navio Negreiro
(The Slave Ship), from 1869. As Neves began to draw social and economic cor-
relations between Brixtons African-descendent population and Brazils, he
moved away from a purely nationalistic focus. He subsequently expanded the
project to include Brixton as the focal point for his research on Black/African
diasporic communities in London.
Cleveland 305

Creating the seven Other Slave Ships images was a way for Neves to put
the shared history of these two Black populations and their different roles in
the current global economy into perspective. The photographer believes that
the origins of the current economic disparities between Blacks and Whites in
Brazil and England can be traced back to the period of slavery. He alludes to
the way that enslaved Africans were shipped as goods to other parts of the
world, by layering postage stamps onto the Black bodies in some of his
photographs. He seals one image with the sticker Aberto pela aduana do
Brasil (Opened by Brazilian customs), as if the goods have just arrived in the
21st century (Figure 2). Neves says that his Other Slave Ships series aims to
establish a relationship between the past slave market and the current global
economy (Oostindie, 2001, p. xxxviii). Although not nearly as life-threatening
but impersonal and uncomfortable enough to be likened to modern slave ships,
crowded busses and packed subway cars transport those who are forced to travel
to work to survive. The movement of people between places on the earth is
intrinsic to globalization. It is poverty, however, which drives the relocation
from rural to urban environments and the subsequent increase in urban desti-
tution. This sequence of events causes Neves to question if this pseudo
democracy of globalization is not a new slavery (Sebastio, 2002). He views
the globalization and international movement cynically, as an event borne
more so by necessity than by choice.
In switching to a local discourse, Neves created seven images for his The
Mask of Punishment series (20022003). He began with a photograph of his
mother and one that he took of an iron mask used to punish enslaved Africans,
which he discovered in the Slave Museum in Belo Vale, Minas Gerais (Sealy,
2000, p. 87). He placed the photograph of the mask on top of that of his
mother, layering historical text onto the combined images and filling in the
outline with notices and descriptions of runaway enslaved Africans (Figure 3).
The local history of slavery in his hometown of Diamantina and the regional
history of slavery in Minas Gerais are very personal things for the artist, as is
the photograph of his mother. Because American and Brazilian scholars both
tend to focus on Salvador and Rio de Janeiro in their studies of Brazilian slav-
ery, however, it is a regional history that is often overlooked.
In essence, Nevess Mask of Punishment series is an examination of the
tools used to repress the African and African-descendent populations in Brazil.
The photographer employs both historical and contemporary forms of bondage
on the image of his motherthe mask and tapeto suggest that, decades later,
many Afro-Brazilians are still bound by the history of slavery. And although at
first glance the tape appears to be on the surface and easily removable, one
quickly realizes that it is actually embedded in the image permanently. Neves
says, My relationship with the past stems from daily experiences; it has to do
306 Journal of Black Studies 41(2)

Figure 3. Eustquio Neves, Mask of Punishment, 20022003, mixed media, 24 20 in.

(60 50 cm). Collection of the artist, Diamantina, Brazil.

with inequality, with my mothers struggle to raise me and my four brothers

with dignity (Eustquio Neves, n.d.). A resilient woman and a strong presence
in his life, Nevess mother has been challenged but not broken by the struggles
that she and many other Black Brazilians have faced.
Although Neves bases the majority of his works on the marginalized Afro-
Brazilian community, Mask of Punishment is the one series in which he most
directly addresses slavery in the images. This may be due, in part, to the dis-
comfort and pain associated with examining the history of slavery in Brazil,
both for the artist and for the audience. For example, in 1995, Neves created the
installation Black Maria for the Festival of Black Art in Belo Horizonte, Minas
Gerais. In keeping with the festivals theme, Neves made the 17th-century
maroon society leader, Zumbi das Palmares, his subject. Neves stated that
Black Maria was supposed to be a more poetic work but that it was impos-
sible not to talk about the painful aspects wrapped up in dealing with this
theme (Sebastio, 1995). Due to a lack of a tradition of overtly political art in
Brazil, work that explores current and historic themes of racial inequality is
Cleveland 307

still a sensitive area of artistic production. Discussions of race and recognition

of racial discrimination are relatively new topics at the national level. As such,
Black Brazilians artists, including Neves, are often reticent to create works that
directly address these themes.
The underlying theme of the 2005 Good Appearance series, social exclu-
sion, is one of these sensitive subjects (Figure 4). It is another topic, however,
with which the photographer, hours away from a major city and art center, is
familiar. It is perhaps because of his firsthand experiences that Neves nar-
rows the site of discussion to his own person as he continues to examine the
wider history of racial discrimination in his country. In this body of five
images, Neves addresses mid-20th-century Brazilian employment ads that
excluded potential African-descendent applicants. He combines this modern
reference with historical texts that contain physical descriptions of runaway
enslaved Africans. The artist uses his own image to address how physical
appearance or features have been used in various ways against Brazils Black
population and other Blacks in the diaspora. He appropriates the spaces of
White control in the ads and descriptions and inserts himself as a participant
in the discussion and documentation.
Good Appearance exposes not only Black Brazilians shared experience of
discrimination but also the recent history of national legislation. In 1951, the
Brazilian congress created the Afonso Arinas law to prohibit racial discrimina-
tion in education and employment (Andrews, 1991, pp. 184-185). Nonetheless,
the law proved largely ineffective and there were no convictions of offenders
despite complaints of discriminatory acts made to the police. Unwilling to
comply with the move toward equality, Brazilian employers found a way to
circumvent the legislation. They placed employment advertisements in news-
papers that called for a good appearancean indirect way of saying that
only Whites need apply. These ads were but one of the social practices that
openly perpetuated discrimination until 1988, the centenary of abolition of
slavery in Brazil and the year when an updated version of the Afonso Arinas
law was incorporated into the new constitution, with much stricter penalties for
discriminatory acts (Andrews, 1991, p. 185).
In the Good Appearance images, Neves engages with White Brazilians
use of physical features to discriminate against the countrys African descen-
dents by including his own image in the photographs. He, himself, represents
history and becomes the subject sought after in the descriptions of runaway
enslaved Africans and rejected by the modern good appearance advertise-
ments. Throughout the series, Nevess image progressively disintegrates or
disappears. He removes his physical being, making it unavailable to the
viewer. Reclaiming his body becomes a symbolic act for reclaiming ones
freedom and control over ones destiny.
308 Journal of Black Studies 41(2)

Figure 4. Eustquio Neves, Good Appearance, 2005, mixed media, 47 35 in. (120
90 cm). Collection of the artist, Diamantina, Brazil.

Appropriation, Revisionist Readings, and New Power

Neves captures the marginalized Black Brazilian populations situation in
many of his images. In contrast to purely documentary photographic records,
the artist reacts against the situation through his appropriations and reread-
ings. He visually conflates ideas, processes, and individual images in his
works. According to Rubens Fernandes Junior (2003), Nevess sophisticated
play of elements not only results in a daring manifestation not only of the
social and political problems that devastate the country but also a discus-
sion of photographic aesthetics (p. 180). Not to be confused with, for exam-
ple, Pierre Vergers well-known documentary-style photographs of African
and Afro-Brazilian religious practices, Nevess works clearly demonstrate
physical and chemical interferences. The evidence of the artists hand in his
images is symbolic of his voice in the discussion. Neves wants to not only
introduce the topic but also leave his mark on the conversation.
Cleveland 309

In Other Slave Ships, the photographer cuts through both image and time.
He appropriates a physical description of a runaway enslaved African, insert-
ing it into the image and body of the woman (Figure 1). Here, the nude Black
female is not simply an objectified body. Neves makes no attempt to clarify the
image for the viewer, presenting instead a figure that appears to be retracting
into the background. Nor does he attempt to hide the photographic support;
rather, he leaves the raw edges of the negative exposed. By slicing through her
nipples, the artist severs visual pleasure and the history of the Black woman as
an object of pleasure. It is a violent attempt to call attention to a long history
of sexual and social manipulation and to shear a general complacency.
The characterization of the Black or mulata (biracial) woman as an object
of desire is not new in Brazil. Portuguese men often used Black African and
mulata women to fulfill their sexual desires due, in part, to the extremely low
number of Portuguese women who came to Brazil during the colonial period.
Sexual attention did not often equal real affection or respect, however, and
both male and female Brazilians came to believe in the Black womans sup-
posed propensity toward promiscuity both pre- and postabolition (1888). In
an attempt to counterbalance White upper-class Brazilian societys negative
views of African descendents, author Gilberto Freyre accentuated the mula-
tas beauty in his early-20th-century works. Unlike the United States and the
Anglo-American mythification of black male eroticism, in Brazil it is the
mulata [who] is eroticized to mythic proportions (Ydice, 2003, p. 115).
This highly sexualized female figure appears as a stereotypical character not
only in Brazilian literature but also in national cinema (Stam, 2001). More
recently, this invented character has pervaded contemporary Brazilian media
in the form of the mulata and Black Brazilian, rather than African, woman.
She is featured in television commercials, magazine advertisements, and
public billboards. In his image, Neves deprives the audience the easy experi-
ence of casting their eyes on yet another gratuitous Black female nude.
In Mask of Punishment, the photographers pairing of an image of his
mother with an iron mask may seem a strange combination for viewers who
know who the woman is (Figure 3). According to Mark Sealy (2000), Neves
morphs the mask . . . onto his Mothers dignified portrait, until she is com-
pletely obscured . . . and effectively silenced, and objectified (p. 87). For
Sealy, the series relives Brazils history of oppression, in which Neves plays
the role of the slave owner. One can also read this series as affirmative. Neves
feels that he revindicates by combining the mask with the photograph of
his mother (personal interview, July 2004). The artist appropriates an object
that Portuguese colonizers used to repress Black Africans and Brazilians.
With Neves in control, the mask is no longer a realistic physical threat but
merely a visual prop.
310 Journal of Black Studies 41(2)

Along this same line, the photographer gives another re-leitura (re-reading)
of Brazilian history through his manipulations and appropriations in the Good
Appearance series (Figure 4). He juxtaposes historical texts with his own
image, appropriating sites of White control and inserting his own body in the
place of the runaway enslaved African and the Afro-Brazilian who does not
meet European-influenced standards of good appearance. Although the 20th-
century employment advertisements were more subtle than the descriptions of
runaway enslaved Africans, their intent was equally as discriminatory. Neves
attempts to highlight the relationship between the historical texts and practices
and the perpetuation of racist attitudes and approaches in the 20th century. The
photographer says that he wants to express how things that were characteristic
of a period . . . repeat themselves in another form (personal interview, May
2006). When Neves inserts his own image into the discussion, he communi-
cates the inextricability of the personal experience from the general atrocities
of slavery and the equally transparent nature of persecution based on ones
physical traits embodied in the texts and employment ads.
Through his images, Eustquio Neves captures different aspects of the
Black experience, past and present. He draws on regional influences and sub-
ject matter from Minas Gerais and uses the colonial city of Diamantina as his
base to explore conditions on the social and economic periphery. His photo-
graphic series are fluid and open-ended, mirroring how the systems put into
place during slavery have carried over into neocolonialist practices in mod-
ern and contemporary Brazil. Neves may consider a photograph part of more
than one series, and he only names groups of, rather than individual, images.
The multilayered works reflect not only an artistic vision but also the histori-
cal and contemporary intersections that Neves sees in daily life.

Rosana Paulino
Rosana Paulino (b. 1967) draws much of her inspiration from So Paulos
urban environment. According to the artist, the local setting has always been
an influence and driving force in her work (personal interview, August 2003).
As one of the many Brazilians who live on So Paulos periphery, Paulino
constantly travels the city. Day in and day out, individuals navigate the space
between their homes on the fringes and their work in the city center. Due to
the existing public transportation systems, these travels can take, as in
Paulinos case, as much as 2 hours one way. The artist also traverses Brazilian
social boundaries when she leaves her familys house on the periphery to
work in the center as a restoration assistant at a conservation studio, to teach
art classes at one of the citys cultural institutions in the financial district, or
Cleveland 311

to pursue her graduate studies at the University of So Paulo. Paulinos nego-

tiation of these physical and social spaces informs her creative vision and
influences her choice of subject matter.
In Brazil, beauty is a serious business. The country is home to interna-
tional supermodels Gisele Bndchen and Adriana Lima, and it is a place
where cosmetic procedures like liposuction are fairly accessible across the
economic board. More than simply target areas for cosmetic manipulation,
however, hair and other physical features are markers of racial categories and
identity (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999, p. 45). This is due to the high percent-
age of biracial Brazilians, who have both typically Black and White physi-
cal features. The more European features one has, the better, because in
Brazil, it is the White characteristics that are advertised as desirable. As a
creator of visual works, Paulino has a heightened awareness of the images
and ideals regarding the female body that are promoted in the mass media.
In an untitled installation from 1997, Paulino addresses this contemporary
practice of social categorization based on physical traits (Figure 5). The artist
asserts that Black and White Brazilians both often use hair and other physical
features to make their own racial associations and assumptions about others
(personal interview, June 2004). In this installation, Paulino encloses bits of
synthetic hair on loose cotton in small glass domes, treating the hair like
scientific specimens. She organizes the domes in parallel lines in a grid for-
mation. She labels each sample with a womans name, thus making it repre-
sentative of a Black Brazilian woman. In the center of the installation is a
dome containing black and blond synthetic hair. In this microcosm of con-
temporary society, the blond beauty shines brightly, surrounded by the
Afro-Brazilian women who are reduced to a sea of black synthetic hair.
In her installation, Paulino views society through the lens of science, har-
kening back to an earlier period of Brazilian history. In the early 19th century,
European traveler reporter artists, including Jean-Baptiste Debret and
Johann Moritz Rugendas, traveled to Brazil. In their efforts to collect scien-
tific information, they documented the unfamiliar peoples, flora, and fauna.
Upon returning to Europe, they disseminated their artwork, allowing their
patrons the experience of becoming armchair travelers. Paulino alludes to
this 19th-century artistic and scientific interest in Brazils various social and
racial groups in her installation (personal interview, June 2004). In preparing
her own specimens of synthetic hair, she categorizes, labels, and dissemi-
nates information, much like the European artists did in the past.
The year after completing this installation, Paulino found herself a foreigner
in England and subsequently shifted her focus on the Black bodythe female
body in particularfrom Brazilian popular culture and mass media to the fine
312 Journal of Black Studies 41(2)

Figure 5. Rosana Paulino, untitled, 1997, watch glass, photograph, cotton, synthetic
hair, and letters, 5-in. diameter (13 cm), 3-in. diameter (8 cm). Collection of the
artist, So Paulo, Brazil.

arts. While studying at the London Print Studio, she embarked upon a study of
how Brazilian artists had treated the Black subject as other in 20th-century
artwork. In the 1920s and 1930s, White upper-class artists attempted to break
with past approaches and techniques by combining national subjects with
avant-garde European styles. Artists such as Tarsila do Amaral began to depict
Brazils African-descendent population as part of this larger interest in nation-
alism. Amaral and her generation took what they saw as generalized aesthetic
qualities of African art and mapped them onto their depictions of the African-
descendent populations. Her 1923 painting The Black Woman became one of
the iconic works of Brazilian modernism and was an obvious example for
Paulino to consider in her investigation (Figure 6).
While in London, Paulino created what was, in essence, a reply to The Black
Woman with her print Self-Portrait With African Mask ITarsila (Figure 7). In
her famous painting, Tarsila manipulates the Black female body. In a similar
vein, Paulino appropriates elements from several of Tarsilas paintings from the
1920s, including the Cubist sun and Black female figure. She arranges and
Cleveland 313

Figure 6. Tarsila do Amaral, The Black Woman, 1923, oil on canvas, 39 31 in. (100
81 cm). Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of So Paulo, So Paulo, Brazil.

discards elements as she pleases. Paulino also represents the Black woman and
replaces the anonymous, generic female in The Black Woman with her own self-
portrait. This substitution exemplifies Salah Hassans idea (2001) of deliberate
self-insertion in contemporary production as an act of counterpenetration
(p. 26). Paulino does not explore the history of representation of the Black female
from the sidelines but by literally forcing her way in, by making a place for
herself in one of the most important Brazilian works of art of the 20th century.
In 2005, Paulino again rescued the Black female from obscurity in national
memory in her sculptures Wet Nurse I and Wet Nurse II (Figure 8). In Brazil, it
was a common practice for White mistresses to use African women to breast-
feed their babies during the period of slavery and to hire free Black women to
do the same work following abolition in 1888. Although Whites often viewed
these wet nurses as being primarily responsible for the spread of diseases and
bad morals, they turned their children over to them for sustenance. Whites
sometimes sent their children to live with the women in the slums for a
314 Journal of Black Studies 41(2)

Figure 7. Rosana Paulino, Self-Portrait With African Mask ITarsila, 1998, linocut on
paper, 15 11 in. (38 28 cm). Collection of the artist, So Paulo, Brazil.

period of several months while their infants nursed, which made the wet nurses
the primary caregivers. Paulino pays homage to these Black women, who are
important, although commonly overlooked, individuals in Brazilian history. At
the same time, the artist tries to capture in her works some of the social and
cultural hypocrisy surrounding this practice.
Paulinos fractured sculptures reflect the present lack of information and
understanding of these largely anonymous wet nurses. As headless, truncated
forms, their bodily functions supersede their identities, although their different
shapes suggest individuality. Paulino gave Wet Nurse I what she calls a more
European form, with its partial neck and shoulders and with greater definition
through the sculpting of the torso (personal interview, June 2004). Wet Nurse II
is larger and sturdier by comparison (Figure 8). Paulino developed the body of
the second sculpture down to the top of legs, including the genitalia necessary to
produce offspring. Women come in all shapes and sizes. Nonetheless, they both
Cleveland 315

Figure 8. Rosana Paulino, Wet Nurse II, 2005, terracotta, plastic, cloth, 15 7 3 in.
(38 18 8 cm). Collection of the artist, So Paulo, Brazil.

have multiple rows of breasts from which ribbons of milk flow. In this line of
work, the Black wet nurse is figuratively and literally tied to the White infant.
Her milk streams from her body to those of numerous White infants, repre-
sented by the miniature plastic dolls. Although her figure dwarfs them, she is
yoked to her employer with this responsibility.

Appropriation, Found Objects, and National Memory

In her use of found objects, Paulino primarily focuses the viewer on the con-
tent, versus the form, of her work. Her choice of materials in her examinations
of the Black female body from the times of slavery to the present, however, is
deliberate. Paulino states, Part of my art practice is to appropriate everyday
objects of little worth, choosing to use objects that belong almost exclu-
sively to the domain of women (Museu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo, 1997,
p. 145). There is a difference between her use of found or everyday objects as
materials and that of an artist who uses these same materials because of
316 Journal of Black Studies 41(2)

financial limitations. Paulino is a university-educated, formally trained artist.

In working with popular materials, the artist underscores the connotations or
beliefs that are implicit to those materials in contemporary Brazilian society.
Paulinos use of synthetic hair in her 1997 installation, for example, is
essential as a technique of appropriation in the work (Figure 5):

I appropriate what is unacceptable and seen in a bad light. Hair. Hair that
is terrible, kinky, stiff. Hair that tangles. Hair that is very far from
the smoothness of silk, far from the shine of the shampoo commercials.
Black womens hair. Devalued hair. Hair, seen here as classifying ele-
ments, which determine the difference between good and bad, pretty and
ugly. (Museu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo, 1997, p. 145)

She turns material considered of little or no value, such as synthetic hair,

into part of an erudite installation of art shown in museums and galleries.
In recontextualizing the material and its meaning, the artist infuses value into
the elements and, by extension, her works and the women they represent.
In her self-portrait from 1998, Paulino grapples with determining her own
worth and identity (Figure 7). In the print, an African mask obscures the artists
face. The mask is generic, which may allude to the Brazilian modernists disre-
gard for cultural specifics in their depictions (Salum, 2000, p. 113). It may also
suggest that Whites continue to view and treat Afro-Brazilians as a homoge-
neous population in contemporary society without recognizing their individu-
ality. It is, however, the artist herself who placed the mask over her face,
blocking her identity. The artist explores the value of taking on or assuming an
African identity, which is symbolized by the mask. Paulino states,

I began to put these Black female figures with the African mask. And
there you have a game, a joke. I am a Black woman, but I went as far
as looking [at] how this mask becomes me, even considering if
[wearing] this African mask would be useful to me in some way. And
if it doesnt suit me, what are my roots? (personal interview, June 2004)

Paulino does not feel that an association with Africa is an innate part of
her but, rather, something that she can put on and take off, like a game. If she
chooses not to take on a superficial African identity, because it does not
benefit her, and instead sees herself as simply Brazilian, she questions if that
means she is denying her African heritage. She can either openly embrace her
African identity and present herself to the world in that guise or close herself
off from it and be attacked for doing so.
Cleveland 317

Paulinos exploration of her identity through the self-portrait is in keeping

with wider tendencies in contemporary Brazilian art. Katia Canton (2000)
has identified a group of self-portraits that embody the contrasting qualities
of familiarity and foreignness (p. 68). She argues that the self-portraits pro-
duced by Brazilian artists at the end of the 20th century and at the beginning
of the 21st re-create and subvert this artistic genre by conveying a sense of
discomfort, a sense of looking at oneself in the mirror and not recognizing
oneself (p. 68). At the time that she produced her self-portrait, Paulinos
sense of discomfort was perhaps caused not so much by what she expected to
see in the mirror but by what others expected to see in her. As such, she
explored the unfamiliar reflection with the African mask and questioned
what the value of this history was to her as a contemporary Brazilian woman.
Regardless of whether Paulino sees a connection between herself and
Africa, she does identify with the history of racial and gender inequality
experienced by Blacks in Brazil. She uses modern, mass-produced plastic
dolls to underscore the perpetuation of such disparities. Although the job of
the half-forgotten wet nurse is a thing of the past, the Black womans role
as caretaker is still present in contemporary society, most often in the form of
employment as a nanny. The mere pairing of Black female and White infant
has deep cultural and historical significance in Brazil.
Through her work, Rosana Paulino ensures that the Black woman will not
be forgotten. She assigns names and titles to the nameless, even if only to call
attention to their duties. Paulino explores her own identity as she explores
theirs. She dares to put her own name and that of Tarsila do Amaral, one of
the countrys most famous modernist artists, together in the same title. She
leaves nothing to the imagination, exposing bodiesincluding her own
revealing their natural and synthetic parts.
In the social mixture of a big city like So Paulo, Paulino sees difference
and inequality. The images on the billboards and magazine stands that line the
streets, and the works of art in the citys museums and galleries, inspire her to
ask who, why, and how. She reaches for the immediate, the everyday objects of
the female realm to create works that provoke. Paulino demonstrates how pop-
ular forms can function at a higher level; she demonstrates the vapidity of the
elite and erudite. The list of names taken from a telephone book, now paired
with bits of synthetic hair, form a microcosm for the bodies hustling along the
city streets, packed together in the crowded buses, navigating So Paulo.
Contemporary artists such as Eustquio Neves and Rosana Paulino are
expanding the discourse on Afro-Brazilian art. With an emphasis on the art-
work over the artist, the scholarship on Black Brazilian artists by American
art historians to date provides few clues about individual identity and
318 Journal of Black Studies 41(2)

subjectivity. In contrast, Nevess and Paulinos works reveal much about how
they view themselves and the world around them through their choice and
treatment of subject matter. In their work, they underscore correlations
between Afro-Brazilians and Africans based on suffering and racial discrimi-
nation rather than on common religious practices. While many artists who
work within the sacred communities draw on their religious knowledge and
formation for subject matter, Neves and Paulino actively research topics
related to Brazils African and African-descendent populations.
Although these artists may not feel a strong connection to contemporary
Africa and Africans, they identify with earlier generations of enslaved Africans
and African descendents in Brazil. Neves and Paulino realize that racial discrim-
ination and power imbalances were not as formally institutionalized in Brazil
during the period of slavery as they were in Africa under colonialism and apart-
heid. Nonetheless, the existence of such disparities in their country was arguably
just as prevalent. In their work, they use the Black body as a vehicle for represen-
tation of those shared experiences between Africans and African descendents
across the diaspora. They carefully choose their themes, materials, and tech-
niques to start a visual dialogue that has long been absent in Brazilian artistic
production. Although they cannot change history, they represent it, appropriating
what were White spaces of control in their attempt to correct power imbalances
of the past and encourage greater equality in the present.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this
article.

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Bio
Kimberly Cleveland, assistant professor of art history at Georgia State University,
is an expert in African and modern Latin American art. Her primary areas of research
are modern and contemporary Afro-Brazilian art. She is interested in examining
questions of race, identity, and artistic production.