In partnership with the Getty Foundation, between October 4th and 8th, 2021, MAC-USP held the timely and very welcome webinar Curatorial Processes: Critical Curatorship and Decolonial Studies in Visual Arts – African Diasporas in the Americas, which I had the pleasure of accompanying as a student of the Postgraduate Program in Visual Arts at ECA USP. The webinar featured speeches by several curators and researchers, including Thomas Cummins, Angelica Sanchez, Mônica Cardim, Renata Felinto, Thiago de Paula Souza, Luzia Gomes, Kleber Amancio, Renata Bittencourt, Kimberly Cleveland, Claudinei Roberto da Silva, Diane Lima and Igor Simões, in addition to the contribution of the artist and advisor to the museum Rosana Paulino and opening and closing debates and pronouncements.

At the outset, I emphasize that, together, the presentations revealed the existence of several points of dialogue that deserve to be discussed in detail and whose potential for reflection is immense. At first I draw attention to the fact that a significant part of the invited researchers and curators showed a visible interest in weaving reflections on emancipatory curatorial initiatives and practices on the horizon of contemporary art, in speeches that guided the possibilities, paths, challenges and the transforming potential of decolonial perspectives in dialogue with the sphere of culture, poetry and art history (Thiago de Paula Souza, Luzia Gomes, Diane Lima, Claudinei Roberto e Silva and Igor Simões). I also highlight the speeches that, along the same lines, chose to present new perspectives, curatorial clippings and approaches to the history of art, starting specifically from works from the MAC USP collection (Kleber Amancio, Renata Bittencourt, Diane Lima, Igor Simões). Finally, it is worth mentioning the presentations that focused on the examination of collections and image files representing the figure of Blacks (Mônica Cardim) and the presentations that proposed new readings on the work of black artists in Brazil (Kimberly Cleveland, Renata Felinto, Angelica Sanchez, Kleber Amancio). It should be said in passing that this grouping is only instrumental, since many of the presentations could belong to more than one group and that this organization does not exhaust the issues raised by the presentations.

In this brief report, I will seek to point out some of the many bridges of dialogue between those presentations that I put together because they focused specifically on the possibilities of (re)reading the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art at USP. Kleber Amancio, for example, focused on the analysis of A Negra (The black woman), by Tarsila do Amaral, noted for being one of the most exhibited, most famous and no less problematic work in the MAC USP collection. In his presentation, Amancio made a summary of interpretations of this work, in which it is associated with visual references of European art, such as paintings by Édouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Constantin Brancusi, among others. In doing so, Amancio affiliated A Negra to a time when Europe and Paris, in particular (the place where the painting was conceived), lived under the fascination of “Negrophilia” – that is, at a time when the figure of the black started to arouse fascination in European art media, acquiring positive connotations without long-held stereotypes being necessarily contested in their essence. This time, Kleber Amancio located A Negra as an emblematic work of what he defines as the “history of white-Brazilian art”. Not only because A Negra would be an example of “white-Brazilian art” – an art that, ultimately, is inseparable from white authorship and its affiliation with a strain of European art, in its relationship with colonialism – but, also, because it is a crucial work within the narratives that make up the canon of an art history that privileges works produced by whites, even if they portray blacks.

If Kleber Amancio focused his speech on a famous and repeatedly exhibited work from the MAC USP collection, Renata Bittencourt chose to focus on the analysis of Jacob Lawrence’s The Class – a painting that, unlike A Negra, was shown only a few times and that I, in particular, did not know. It is interesting to note how Amancio’s and Bittencourt’s statements indicate that the choice of what is exhibited and what is kept in the museum’s technical reserve has as a side effect either the favoring or the obliteration of certain works, conditioning our knowledge of art in general. Assuming that this reasoning is correct, it is necessary to emphasize the role of MAC USP with regard to the institutionalization of the canon we referred to earlier: in a way, if Tarsila do Amaral’s painting crystallized as an emblematic work of Brazilian Modernism and of its history, this occurred as a contribution to the museum’s curatorial policies, which currently benefits from the very fact of conserving among the specimens in its collection one of the central works in the established narratives about art in Brazil. Showing A Negra, under these conditions, can mean a policy of reaffirming paradigms that feed back into the constitution of the artistic canon that prevails in the history of Brazilian art.

This is not to say, of course, that A Negra should be banned from museum exhibits. In this regard, Igor Simões’s presentation proved to be stimulating: in it, the researcher and curator rehearsed alternatives for curatorial proposals in which the montage – the juxtaposition of heterogeneous works – operates as a mechanism to problematize the place and meaning of the works of art. One of the alternatives tested, for example, contrasted A Negra, by Tarsila do Amaral, with a set of works by Rosana Paulino capable of exposing the plots that sew and suture the body of black women, exposing the logic of violence and uprooting without reaffirming them. Displaced from the panorama of Modernism in Brazil or from the broader context of the “Negrophilia” of European artistic avant-gardes and side by side with the works of Paulino, A Negra acquired new connotations, revealed through unexpected resonances and dissonances.

The same happened with other famous works in the MAC USP collection, according to the proposal of Igor Simões. This is the case, for example, of what is perhaps the “the apple of the eye” in the museum’s collection: the Tripartite Unit, by the Swiss Max Bill, winner of the International Prize for Foreign Sculpture (Federation of Industries) at the first Bienal de São Paulo, in 1951. This is a work that established itself as a kind of “trigger” for abstraction in Brazil, imposing itself as a fundamental reference for the Concretist movement in São Paulo. According to Simões’s proposal, however, this sculpture does not appear side by side with other abstract works, as usual, but together with the painting Moenda, by Heitor dos Prazeres, which, in that same year of 1951, won the Acquisition Award for the first Bienal de São Paulo. With this gesture, the curator and researcher ties a knot in two apparently separate threads of history and thereby reminds us that art history is not made up of a single linear narrative in which Brazilian concretism prevails, but is woven from several modernities that, entangled, make what seemed univocal into something more complex.

At this point, Igor Simões’s presentation dialogued with what had been exposed by Diane Lima at the same debate table. In her speech, the curator and researcher took a photograph of Peter Scheier as a significant document for the reflection on the contradictions that permeated the I Bienal de São Paulo and that, even today, permeate the narratives about Brazilian art. This photograph, which is part of a set of images taken during the assembly and opening ceremony of the famous 1951 Bienal, records two black workers cleaning the floor of the Swiss pavilion of the exhibition, in front of paintings by Sophie H. Taeuber-Arp. In it, abstract forms – in all their supposed modernity – contrast with a work model that is far from modern. It is as if, behind the scenes of that exhibition, the real “cleanliness” behind the acclaimed “cleanliness” and “clairvoyance” of abstract forms was revealed in its rawness, dismantling the discourse that sustains the supposed universality of artistic abstraction. Based on the analysis of this and other photographs by Scheier, Diane Lima questioned the place of abstraction in the history of Brazilian art. The discussion unfolded with the analysis of works by Rosana Paulino in which abstraction is also questioned as a discourse and which, together with works by other contemporary artists, allowed Diane Lima to present alternative forms of abstraction from a black perspective.

The questions raised by these and other presentations reveal the many possibilities of exhibiting works from the MAC USP collection, which deserve to be seen and interpreted from different angles from those already carried out by established narratives about modern art. By exposing this need and giving visibility to the consistent work being carried out in this direction by black curators and researchers throughout Brazil and around the world, the webinar Curatorial Processes: Critical Curatorship and Decolonial Studies in Visual Arts – African Diasporas in the Americas turned out to be stimulating and challenging, reminding us that much has already been done, but much remains to be done. As a postgraduate student and webinar participant, I hope that this event can expand and trigger such initiatives as exhibitions, study groups, disciplines, among others. The museum’s collection, after all, has works whose potential for reflection is virtually inexhaustible and which currently seem to require a spectrum of ever more comprehensive and diverse curatorial models and strategies, as the webinar was able to show.