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.
Now, Paulino has work on view in New York — her first presentation in the city, — with a solo exhibition at Mendes Wood DM gallery until June 14, and a mural on the High Line until December. It’s a dual introduction to an artist whom many feel deserved earlier recompense — for both her art and her mentorship of young Black Brazilian artists and scholars.
Cecilia Alemani, the director of High Line Art, came to know Paulino while curating the 2022 Venice Biennale, titled “The Milk of Dreams.” Paulino’s art, intertwining botany and a sense of magical transformation from a Black female perspective, was a perfect fit for the exhibition’s concern with “metamorphosis and the relationship between humans and nature,” Alemani said.
The art historian Igor Simões, who was a co-curator of “Amefricana,” Paulino’s 2024 survey at the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires, called her interpretations of Black Brazilian history and imagination crucial for understanding the broader Afro-Atlantic world. “It’s impossible to depict the Black experience globally if you’re not seeing the work of the most important Black artist in Brazil in the last 30 years,” Simões said.
Paulino was still in art school at the University of São Paulo when she burst on the scene in 1994 with an ambitious installation — part of a group show in the city — that challenged Brazilian self-perceptions and would force its way into the canon. Titled “Parede da memória” (“Memory Wall”), it involved a grid of some 800 patúas, pouches of fabric used in Afro-Brazilian religion to carry seeds or amulets. Onto each one, she printed a Black face, transferred from family photo albums.
“The idea was that you can ignore one person in a crowd, perhaps, but you can’t ignore 1,600 eyes on you,” Paulino said.
Hélio Menezes, the director of the Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo, the country’s largest museum of Black history and art, said it was one of the first times Black faces were included in the white cube of contemporary art galleries.
“That first act of Rosana was a very direct, critical act of decolonization,” he said.
Of course, Menezes added, Brazil had prominent Black artists — like Rubem Valentim, Mestre Didi or Maria Lídia Magliani — but from the 1970s, including in the dictatorship years when the culture was heavily policed, recognition of newer Black artists lagged.
As a result, Menezes said, aspiring Afro-Brazilian artists “couldn’t find references in contemporary production for their practice.” But when Paulino appeared, they found that her work modeled “sophisticated possibilities for expressing their subjectivity.”
Paulino moved from family albums to ethnology and botany archives. Both demonstrated the impulse of European researchers to classify what they considered to be wild people — Black and Indigenous — and plants. In Brazil, which abolished slavery only in 1888, photography and enslavement overlapped. The Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz commissioned images of “pure racial types,” including Augusto Stahl’s photographs of enslaved individuals as naked specimens from the front, back and profile.
Having also studied biology, Paulino was alert to both the manipulation of science in service of racial fallacies and the persistent impulse to avoid its legacy. “The role of pseudoscience was so strong in Brazil,” she said. “In the Modernist period, people did not discuss these photos, these ideas. But for me, we have to put it on the table. It’s essential to understand the country.”
Paulino’s art often interpolates photographs like Stahl’s as well as archival maps, texts, botanical drawings and decorative illustrations, transferring the imagery through different techniques onto canvas and paper. But she alters them with emancipatory gestures: drawing in bodily features, concealing an exposed subject’s gaze, cutting a canvas then suturing it back with careful stitches — each move a restoration of dignity.
Running through Paulino’s work, too, is a mystical or magical impulse that is especially vivid in her sylvan female characters and the plants and animals in her prints and installations — as if all that arduous decolonial labor had finally yielded ecological joy. Her drawings develop a kind of surrealist ethnobotany, where tree trunks or strands of flowers join into torsos or seep from orifices of female figures.
Her High Line mural, “The Creation of the Creatures of Day and Night,” and several works in her Mendes Wood show, “Diálogos do Dia e da Noite” (“Dialogues of Day and Night”), stage these figures in lush settings with full-color backgrounds — gradated sunset reds, deep nocturnal black — instead of her customary white surfaces.
Lately, she said, her mood has turned inward. “I’ve been thinking about aspects of female psychology that are linked with the night,” she said. “Of course, I’m getting old. And when you get old you start to think — in my case at least — about psychology and mystic experiences.”
Even the plants depicted in her works carry layers of meaning: St. George’s sword and Iansã’s sword, two flowering plants of African origin with spiritual powers in Afro-Brazilian religion; or the angel’s trumpet, pacová philodendron, or bromeliads that she appreciates for the Brazilian biomes they represent or the lore that attaches to them.
One favorite is the Dieffenbachia, known in Brazil as “comigo-ninguem-podé” — “nobody can with me” — for its toxicity and its protective qualities. “It’s so Brazilian,” Paulino said. “People put them by their door to ward off bad energies.” In several watercolor and pencil works, this plant grows from the mouth or hands of a female figure who seems to wear an amused expression. “I can’t control it,” Paulino said, laughing. “What do you expect from a plant with that name?”
For Menezes, Paulino’s spiritual turn once again challenges the field. With the rise of a generation of Black artists and curators — many mentored by Paulino — interrogating the archive and centering Black subjectivity, as her early work did, has become accepted.
“Many Black intellectuals have reinforced the need to take your lived experiences as a lens to see the world,” Menezes said. “So when she moves to a more spiritual or cosmological perspective, I can see a whole movement of research on Black practice in art.”
In the studio in Pirituba, Paulino sketched out more immediate goals. She has bought a nearby property and plans to establish an institute with a library and education programs. “We can start programs for teachers,” she said. “We can have young artists come to do research.” Progress in the Brazilian art field has been real, she said; now she wants to bring it back to the neighborhood.
“All my life, I’ve talked about work in collaboration with other artists,” she said. “I think the same way about Brazil. It’s important to think about which country we want to build.”
Rosana Paulino: Diálogos do Dia e da Noite
Through June 14, at Mendes Wood DM, 47 Walker Street, mendeswooddm.com.
The Creation of the Creatures of Day and Night
Through December 2025, High Line at 22nd Street, thehighline.org.
Siddhartha Mitter writes about art and creative communities in the United States, Africa and elsewhere. Previously he wrote regularly for The Village Voice and The Boston Globe and he was a reporter for WNYC Public Radio.
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