“Artists have advanced. But where is the art criticism? Where are the new curators? Where are the new historians who will be able to discuss these new narratives and actually ground them?”

Rosana Paulino

e have been asked to reflect on the Afrodiasporic art of the Americas by linking art history with decolonial studies.. This invitation and the quotation above—enunciated at the beginning of MAC USP’s 2021 seminar “Curadoria Crítica e Estudos Decoloniais em Artes Visuais” by artist and researcher Rosana Paulino—resonate with relatively recent calls to decolonize art history and museums globally.. A reflection of this type is not new in Latin America. To reflect on these issues, we must first acknowledge and build upon the contributions of Black researchers from previous generations. Here, I focus on some cases discussed at the seminar and a few others from Peru (the country I know best) to contend that Black researchers have consistently contributed to Latin American art discourse. My argument is two-folded. On the one hand, I underscore how numerous Black researchers were crucial in historicizing Afro-Latin American arts, despite being historically overlooked by mainstream art historiography and institutions. On the other, I highlight how their research and educational methods went beyond limiting conceptions of art scholarship in a way that retrospectively we can call “decolonial”.

In the field of art history, the term “decolonial” is currently used as a theoretical framework that challenges Eurocentric narratives and cultural institutions in formerly colonized countries as well as colonizing ones. Historically, and more than other European-born academic disciplines, art history has put Eurocentric aesthetic taste at the center of its ordering, taxonomizing, and valuing diverse peoples’ cultural production. Issues of high and low culture are particularly intricate in Latin America—a region where modern white and mestizo elites developed a culturalist definition of race that legitimized racist sentiments by appealing to Eurocentric notions of morality, education, and taste. Against this multilayered background, the MAC-USP’s seminar asked: How can we decolonize a discipline historically grounded on cultural bias and racism?

Far from merely criticizing the discipline, the seminar’s speakers brought forward curatorial and historiographical strategies to present Black art in non-Eurocentric manners. Igor Simões presented decentering, unconventional montages of artworks to challenge mainstream narratives. Juxtaposing at the gallery space Swiss Concrete artist Max Bill’s sculpture Unidade Tripartida with Black Brazilian artist Heitor dos Prazeres’ painting Moenda (both shown at São Paulo in 1951), for example, shifts the focus from a genealogy of geometric abstraction to a reflection of mid-century biennial culture. Luiza Gomes, for her part, proposed starting from concepts relevant to Black female writers and audiences. For example, an exhibition on Black childhood that highlights Brazilian poet Geni Guimarães’s and U.S. novelist Toni Morrison’s insights on the topic can help audiences connect with the objects at the gallery. Renata Felinto explored alternative histories also starting from the experiences of Black women—ceramist Ana das Carrancas, painter Madalena dos Santos Reibolt, and choreographer Raquel Trindade. By focusing on the affective private and social lives of artists excluded from mainstream art galleries and discourse, Felinto posited a modern art network that challenged the divide between fine arts and so-called popular arts.

More broadly, Felinto’s presentation raised questions about Black networks of sociability and knowledge production. In that line, Kleber Amancio noted that Black researchers started narrating Afrodiasporic arts early in the twentieth century. He mentioned artist and writer Manuel Raimundo Querino (1851-1923), who published Artes na Bahia and Artistas Baianos in 1909, and curator Emanoel Araújo, who founded in 2004 the Museo Afro Brasil. But publications and exhibitions were not the only strategies Black art workers deployed. In 1944, writer and artist Abdias Nascimento (1914-2011) founded the Teatro Experimental do Negro in Rio de Janeiro. In addition to training Black performers from low-income sectors, the Teatro foregrounded Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage for local audiences; from there, Nascimento envisioned the Museu de Arte Negra in 1950. Poet Solano Trindade (1908-1974) and choreographer Maria Margarida da Trindade created the Teatro Popular Brasileiro in Rio de Janeiro in 1950—a group that recuperated Afrodiasporic dances for public performances. Their daughter Raquel Trindade (1937-1028, mentioned above) founded the Teatro Popular Solano Trindade in 1975—a space that until this day operates as a cultural and research center in Sao Paulo.

These varied projects reveal how, beyond mainstream art history and museums, Black artists took charge of researching and publicly showcasing Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage: often through writing, but not exclusively.

Black research and educational centers existed in other parts of the Americas. In 1958, Peruvian musician and folklorist Nicomedes Santa Cruz (1925-1992) created Conjunto Cumana in Lima, a Black music ensemble that recreated until then largely understudied Afro-Peruvian music and dances. After developing choreographies for Cumanana, Victoria Santa Cruz (1922-2014, Nicomedes’ sister) traveled to Paris, where she directed La poupée noire [The Black Doll] (1965). The choreographic play started as a ballet about a doll brought to life by a sorcerer, who taught her “proper” manners. Eventually, the doll met a group of Black children, and the ballet turned into a display of Afro-Peruvian choreographies. A photograph of the performance captures Santa Cruz and other dancers executing zapateo, a dexterous step dance technique in which the ball of the foot and the heel move independently . Through its theme and choreography, La poupée noire challenged the subjugation of Afrodiasporic heritage to Eurocentric culture. In 1966, Santa Cruz founded her own ensemble, Teatro y Danzas Negros del Perú. In 1973 became director of the Conjunto Nacional del Folklore, where she formed a generation of Peruvian performers.

ABy recuperating Black repertoires for training practitioners and presenting plays, groups like Teatro Popular Brasileiro or Teatro y Danzas Negros del Perú were not only filling a historiographical gap. They were putting historical research into bodies and onto the public space. In that regard, their methods resonated with African American choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham’s performances of the 1930s onward, which Elizabeth Chin has characterized as a “performative anthropology” that put text-based scholarship “on its feet”. Similarly, Victoria Santa Cruz developed a “theory of rhythm” shaped by both her theoretical and choreographic production. These performative research projects anticipated calls by intellectuals like Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui or Boaventura de Sousa Santos to decolonize knowledge by engaging with non-textual practices such as oral history, poetry, and music. Thus, when faced with the question “Where are the decolonial art historians,” I contend, a possible path appears when looking back at the research and education projects conducted by Black Latin Americans.

That is just one path—one that is akin to my specialization in modern art and performance studies. Speakers at MAC USP’s seminar highlighted varied strategies, such as focusing on historiography (Amancio), poetry (Gomes), affect (Felinto), or decentering curatorship (Simões). But in the end, they shared the understanding that to decolonize Latin American art history does not solely mean to include more artists from underrepresented groups in textbooks, survey shows, or biennials. Decolonizing the discipline also entails engaging with research and pedagogic methodologies outside traditional disciplinary boundaries. In that specific sense, decolonial art history has a lot to learn from the research and educational methods of Black Latin Americans like Abdias Nascimento, Solano Trindade, or Victoria Santa Cruz.