In between professorship and captivity

It was from the invitation to participate in the curating and conception of the exhibit: Between two modernities - From Neoclassicism to Post-Impressionism in the Collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts in 2004 

and the exhibit: From Slave Ships to Galleries: representations and agency of colored people in the National Museum of Fine Arts’s Collection in 2018 that I got closer more effectively to the works of art by black painters present in the museum's archive.

We present now, on November 2021, the exhibit In between professorship and captivity: Black Professors in the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts that gives visibility to another part of the Museum's expressive archive.

We highlight for this exhibit six black artists who at an early age joined the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts.

These artists, throughout the years, consolidated solid training and acted as expert painters in the middle of a slavocratic, hierarchical and unequal society.

His sculptures follow the academic mold of official themes such as busts of statesmen and illustrious characters of his time, such as José Bonifácio de Andrade and the Emperor D. Pedro II.

Questioning acts by black people in a slave society were understood as insubordination and, as a rule, should be punished.

   
The audacity of questioning the rules of the Academy, in a public ceremony and in the presence of D. Pedro II, cost him his expulsion from the Academy.

In 1881, he took the exam to become a professor in the Academy's Chair of Painting of Landscapes, Flowers and Animals, with the pseudonym “Ego sum qui sum”, which means “I am what I am”, and emerged victorious.

He began his studies at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in the 1870s.

Returning to Brazil in the same year, he participated in the competition for professor of the Chair of Landscapes, Flowers and Animals at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, taking second place, behind Painter Leôncio Vieira.

He participated in the General Exhibitions of Fine Arts between 1884 and 1890. In 1885, he won the Empress of Brazil Award, in the painting section.

Painter and teacher, he lost his father when he was still an infant, and his paternal grandmother took over his education, guiding him to enroll in the Naval School. In 1877, however, he enrolled at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts,

and he moves with his mother to a shack on the Morro de São Januário, surviving by making religious vestments.

In 1893, Raphael Frederico won the prize for traveling to Europe, initially settling in Paris, and then moving on to Rome.

The brothers enrolled at the National School of Fine Arts in 1894, already under the republican regime, encouraged by Enes de Souza, Director of the Mint.

This exhibition does not intend to cover the entire trajectory of the artists mentioned here. The idea was to follow and share the academic experiences of these six black artists at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and high schools.