Sisterhood is Alive

This artwork was inspired by the history of the Sisterhood of Good Death and created in celebration of Black Consciousness Day in Brazil, observed on November 20th.

Jess Viera (Jéssica Vieira da Fonseca), born in Gama / Distrito Federal in 1992, is a visual artist, illustrator and Brazilian researcher. She has a degree in Letters and is a postgraduate student in Brazilian Studies at FESP-SP.
She is known for her representations of the feminine being, centralizing the figure of the Brazilian black woman and her diversity in her creations, as the creators of her own narratives, in scenarios that refer to nature and its connection with non-urban life and more similar to that of native Brazilian people, thus approaching their own territorial origin and their ancestry of black and indigenous grandmothers.
Jess started painting with watercolors as part of an individual investigation process of the influence of her unconscious state on her actions in face of life and perceptions of reality, gradually including experiments with ceramics, acrylic paint and digital illustration. He joined the visual artistic process with studies of amefricanities and sociology, analytical psychology, playfulness and spirituality, thus forming a more intuitive and passionate creative process, but no less current.

And in this work (Irmandade viva), Jess Vieira deals with the theme “Sisterhood of the Good Death” by express the particular magnificence of the women in this group. The black sisterhoods represented in the history of Brazil a nucleus of resistance to slavery, characterized by figuring urban, catholic or syncretized organizations, which dedicated their existence to religious devotion and solidarity.
In particular, the Irmandade da Boa Morte (Sisterhood of Good Death) stood out for being exclusively made up of black women, where members organized to collectively purchases their freedom from enslavement. The Sisterhood paved way for the first free black female workers in the history of Brazil.
Even today, the Sisterhood still observes its celebrations, in the city of Cachoeira, Bahia, its birthplace.