The Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP), supported by the Getty Foundation, presents this website as a result of the research webinar, MAC USP CURATORIAL PROCESSES: Critical Curatorship and Decolonial Studies in Visual Arts - African Diasporas in the Americas, held between October 4th and 8th, 2021. Coordinated by the curator and current director of the museum, Ana Magalhães, and by the researcher and visual artist Rosana Paulino, the webinar promoted discussions on recent research that works on Afro-descendant art in diasporas across the American continent.
MAC USP - which is home to a graduate program and interdisciplinary research projects – understands that this is an opportunity to disseminate studies on curatorship, in addition to reflecting on its own institutional history and contributing to offering new readings of its collection. Throughout its trajectory, the museum played an active role in the study of the exhibition as a way of producing knowledge. In these moments, it promoted experimental practices of curatorship and acquisition of works that, in recent years, have become the object of several research studies. Currently, it hosts a Thematic Project financed by Fapesp that studies the curatorial cycle from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Here, the results of the event and its preparation were gathered. There are nine articles by Brazilian and foreign researchers, three articles by curators that come from contact with the MAC USP collection, and eleven reports on the webinar prepared by postgraduate students in Brazil and abroad. Added to this is the organization of two lists of works belonging to the museum. The first brings together works by black artists, and the second raises the representation of Afro-descendant bodies. Finally, a selected bibliography composed of titles already existing in the Lourival Gomes Machado Library and those acquired by the project that become part of the special collection Getty Library of African Diasporas in the Americas. The objective is for this site to serve as a platform for the general and specialized audiences, fostering new research and the expansion of debates on the subject from the Museum.