4 days ago
A Black Brazilian Artist Who Wields Poetry and Persistence
Rosana Paulino, one of Brazil's most influential artists, works from a narrow three-story house in Pirituba, a neighborhood of simple homes and shops that huddle along the hillside in the northwest outskirts of São Paulo. Her small balcony looks toward a pocket park, a railway line and a nature preserve on a ridge that belies the urban sprawl beyond.
The daughter of a cleaner and a house painter, Paulino has pushed her way with stubborn insistence from modest origins in the Black working class into Brazil's top institutions — at one time working clerical jobs for three years to pay for prep classes to get into the best universities. But she remains rooted in São Paulo's north-side neighborhoods, where Black culture formed around the rail yards and the warehouses where laborers transferred coffee and other crops before shipping them abroad.
'It's very important for me to stay here,' Paulino, 58, said, on a muggy afternoon in April, as a tropical rainstorm gathered. 'It's that old story — you start to have a name and money and so you move out of your community. No, no, no. That's absolutely not for me.'
She emerged as an artist when bourgeois tastes and Modernism dominated the museums and schools, making little space for the work and perspectives of artists from Brazil's Black majority.
Lately the climate has changed. A survey at the prestigious Pinacoteca de São Paulo museum in 2018 and participation in the 2023 São Paulo Biennial cemented Paulino's hometown recognition; her inclusion in the 2022 Venice Biennale, with some two dozen large-scale drawings of part-human, part-plant female figures, brought visibility abroad.
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