From Slave Ships to Galleries: representations and agency of colored people in the National Museum of Fine Arts’s Collection

The history of Black people in Brazil emerged in the XVIth century when thousands of people were forcibly brought to Brazil in slave ships and slavery became the main source of labor.

The first representations of Black people in Brazilian Fine Arts appear in the XVIIth century. These works reflect the perception of European travelers and artists in Brazil, some of who were commissioned to depict the so-called new land and customs.

These representations of Brazil continued into the mid-nineteenth century. The main objectives of the illustrations were to identify, classify, and map the Brazilian landscape and people. The depictions often blurred landscapes and people with visions of a natural, exotic and unknown world.

These artists’ works shaped the Brazilian imaginary about slavery in rural and urban landscapes in ways that projected Eurocentric views that idealized slavery.

“Slaves are the hands and feet of the master, because without them in Brazil, it would be impossible to develop and sustain the plantation economy."

André João Antonil

Dated from 1892, the painting presents the operation of a cassava flour mill. Despite being a record of the post-abolition period, the transition from enslavement to freedom was a gradual one in such a manner that blacks continued to be predominantly stuck to a rural way of life.

Gilberto Freyre

This canvas was used to showcase the paper presented by the physician and head of the National Museum (Museu Nacional) João Batista Lacerda, in the First Universal Race Congress in London, 1911. On the occasion Lacerda contended the racist belief, then widespread amongst scientists, intellectuals and the governing elite that Brazil would only become a civilized nation if became a white nation by means of miscegenation.
In Lacerda´s view this painting - in which a grandmother lifts her hands up in praise for her grandson, son of her mullato daughter and a white man, having turned out white - revealed the possibility of whitening in three generations. In Lacerda´s projection, gradually all mixed race and black people would be diluted in such a way that in 2012 nearly all of the Brazilian population would be white.

In the 1930's, the advent of the modernist movement and the work of cultural anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (1933) brought a new perspective on racial issues that transformed negative views about blacks and mestizos.

This new celebratory viewpoint on miscegenation in which Africans, Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, Indigenous cultures represented Brazil’s harmonious racial and cultural melting pot was framed as the triumph of the Brazilian nation. Racism, nonetheless, did not disappear, at the same time that the state-sponsored cultural sphere celebrated Black culture and integrated it into Brazilian national culture, civil and social rights for Blacks were far from satisfaying.

Brazilian racial and social hierarchies dictated access to artistic fields and recognition within them. Important aspects of the careers of Black artists are featured here, showing prominent aspects of their works and lives.
We can observe on the bottom right corner

the sentence: "Querer é poder" (When there is a will there is a way).

Maria Auxiliadora come from a poor family and was a self-taught artist. Belonging to an artistically talented family she was the oldest of eight siblings. Her difficult childhood meant that she had to quit school at an early age and work as a house maid and an embroiderer with her mum. Her artistic work took place from 1967 to 1974. In 1968 she joined the Embu das Artes Artistic Group created by the black playwriter Solano Trindade and geared towards afro-brazilian themes. From the State of Minas Gerais she migrated to São Paulo at age three and claimed that having no memory of Minas Gerais she painted the reminiscences of her mother´s stories about harvestings and mid year Parties (Festas Juninas). She developed a relief technique with the use of hair. According to Mario Schenberg the exquisite colorful and rhythmic creation in Maria Auxiliadora´s art is remarkable.