Audio Stop 963

NARRATOR:
Exhibition co-curator Hélio Menezes.

HÉLIO MENEZES:
These are the portraits of João de Deus Nascimento and Zeferina. They were two important enslaved Black leaders that are not well-represented in traditional narratives of Brazil.

NARRATOR:
Associate curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic Art at the National Gallery of Art, Kanitra Fletcher.

KANITRA FLETCHER:
They were commissioned specifically for the Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibition when it premiered at São Paulo’s Museum of Art in 2018, but Paula has made a series of paintings to commemorate Black leaders whose presence has been removed from official versions of history and whose likenesses were never recorded.

NARRATOR:
Enslaved as a child, Zeferina was brought to Brazil from Angola. She rebelled against the slaveholding system and was one of the founders and leaders of a large quilombo, a community of people who had escaped enslavement, called Quilombo do Urubu.

KANITRA FLETCHER:
João de Deus was the son of a freed Black woman.  He worked as a tailor, and he was also one of the people who helped plan the Bahian Conspiracy of 1798.  

NARRATOR:
Neither portrait is based on visual records. In the case of Joao de Deus, Paula relied primarily on written records describing him as a Black man who dressed elegantly in the French style – perhaps inspiring the knotted cravat.

HÉLIO MENEZES:
The portrait of Zeferina was inspired by a photograph of a German photographer that took some pictures and made some portraits in Brazil in the 19th century.

NARRATOR:
Paula was faced with the issue of trying to memorialize and portray someone whose likeness was never recorded.

HÉLIO MENEZES:
Dalton Paula used two canvases and put them together to make one single portrait.  One can see that those images are vertically divided in a formal reference and figuration of maybe a divided portrait of people that we’ll never be completely able to know their real faces.  

KANITRA FLETCHER:
These paintings are recalling 20th century retratos pintados.  So, this is a popular tradition in northeastern Brazil, in which, people take their formal black and white photographs and they have them repainted and enlarged and have the figure set usually against a soft blue background like what you see here in Paula’s portraits.  

NARRATOR:
Subjects were often featured wearing their finest jewelry. Not so here.

HÉLIO MENEZES:
To reinforce this idea of an incomplete portrait, because it’s not possible to be complete; the history and the violence doesn’t make it possible to be a whole and complete portrait – are the earrings that Zeferina is using.  One can see they were just left unpainted.  So this is a part of the canvas that the artist chose to not paint.