Brazil’s Enthralling, and Proud, African History
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — It’s worth going a distance for greatness. And great is what the exhibition “Histórias Afro-Atlânticas” (“Afro-Atlantic Histories”) is. With 450 works by more than 200 artists spread over two museums, it’s a hemispheric treasure chest, a redrafting of known narratives, and piece for piece one of the most enthralling shows I’ve seen in years.
Its timing, for better or worse, is apt. In the run-up to the national elections held Sunday, the right-wing populist and candidate Jair Bolsonaro was vocal in his hostility to the nation’s Afro-Brazilian community, calling current immigrants from Haiti, Africa and the Middle East “the scum of humanity.” The exhibition, which focuses on the dynamic African-influenced New World cultures that emerged from three centuries of European slavery, takes precisely the opposite view.
The story of the westward African diaspora has been told many times, but never, in my experience, with this breadth or geographic balance. The European trade in black bodies hit South America early in the 16th century, and lingered late. By the time slavery was officially abolished in Brazil in 1888 — the show coincides with the 130th anniversary of that event — the country had absorbed well over 40 percent of some 11 million displaced Africans. Today it is home to the world’s largest black population outside of Nigeria.
Installed at the São Paulo Museum of Art, known to everyone as MASP, and the smaller Tomie Ohtake Institute, the exhibition is divided into eight thematic sections. Afro-Brazilian material dominates. And it’s generously interspersed with work, old and new, from other parts of South America, the Caribbean, North America, Europe and Africa itself.
Images of boats recur. A contemporary São Paulo artist, Rosana Paulino, incorporates 18th century diagrams of slave ship interiors into a fabric hanging. In a wood wall piece, a veteran local artist, Emanoel Araújo, gives a ship a half-abstract shape suggesting both a chained man and an African god.
And in a haunting piece by José Alves de Olinda, at the Tomie Ohtake Institute, the gods have taken charge. Figures of Yoruban divinities, armed and alert, line the deck of a miniature slave ship. They are its guiding crew.
Nearly every one of the 60-plus images, all of black subjects, in a section of the show called “Portraits,” is mesmerizing. Some sitters appear trapped in European conventions. Don Miguel de Castro, a black envoy from the African kingdom of Kongo to the Dutch court, looks forbearingly out at us from under his absurd Rembrandtesque hat. Four oil studies of black men by Theodore Gericault are, by any formal standards, gorgeous. But they’re also disturbing. All but one of the sitters have been cast as emoting bit players in a French Romantic drama.
A large 19th century painting titled “Woman From Bahia” stands in contrast to all this. We don’t know who the subject is, or who painted her, or when (the guess is around 1850). But, wearing white gloves, a midnight-blue gown, and ropes of gold beads, she’s a self- contained presence. She may be an ex-slave; she’s also a queen.
In the context of this racially fraught moment in Brazil, she reads as political statement. Many images in the show do. One picture is of João de Deus Nascimento who, in 1798, led a black rebellion demanding the end of slavery and Portuguese rule. The other is of a woman known only as Zeferina who, brought to Brazil from Angola, established a runaway slave community in Bahia.
The very premise of “Afro-Atlantic Histories” — that all culture is at some level immigrant culture — is anathema to Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters. And at least one work in the show, by the New York Citybased African-American artist Hank Willis Thomas, could confirm their deepest fears. Titled “A Place to Call Home,” it’s a wall-size black silhouette map of the Western Hemisphere, with the South American continent replaced by Africa.