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“A Place of Whites”: the History of Brazilian Art[1]
Rachel Cecília de Oliveira
Abstract
This article examines the racial foundations of art system in Brazil, focusing on how whiteness has shaped aesthetics and art history. Drawing on anthropological analysis, it explores two key dimensions: the spatial and symbolic “place of whiteness” and the mechanisms of cultural and institutional racism. Through these categories, the paper investigates how the histories of non-Western peoples and the artistic production of racialized artists have been systematically marginalized. By revealing their near-total absence from canonical narratives, the article highlights the need for an anti-racist rethinking of Brazilian art history.
Key Words
aesthetics; art history; Brazilian art history; whiteness
1. Introduction
In this paper, I examine the construction of art history in Brazil through a race-based perspective, centering on whiteness as a point of departure. Unlike the focus on non-white populations in previous analyses, my approach aims to address the role of those who have historically created racialization, benefited from it, and often remain unaware of their own racial identity. This habitual invisibility within power structures positions whiteness as a foundational reference in both the history and the system of art in Brazil. Bearing this in mind, I tailor an analysis of whiteness based on the structural question of the text, “The lasting power of whiteness: a problem to solve,” written by British researcher Vron Ware: “What historical and contemporary forces sustain particular formations of whiteness in Brazil and what anti-racist strategies would be appropriate to subvert them?”[2]
2. Whiteness in Brazil
An attempt to answer this question was made by Lia Vainer Schucman in the book, “Entre o encardido, o branco e o branquíssimo: branquitude, hierarquia e poder na cidade de São Paulo” [“Between the grimy, the white and the whitest: whiteness, hierarchy and power in the city of São Paulo”]. To do this, Schucman analyzes the internal and external borders that support the categories of white and non-white. Two of the main arguments are: there is a “place of whites,” that is, the borderline between whites and non-whites is a space and outlines regions, places, and institutions linked to the ideas of wealth, civilization, and progress; and because of an assumption of “racial superiority,” there is an overestimation of aesthetic and subjective conceptions of whites. This second argument is directly shaped by scientific racism at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, which has its premises anchored in what is now named cultural and institutional racism and shifts the focus from classic biological differences to hierarchize knowledge, arts, and, consequently, people. This is because those are more durable and flexible, more difficult to deconstruct, than a simple biological discourse. Therefore, the pattern of social differentiation between whites and non-whites is directly associated with the place and approach by which public and private life is structured, since this model maintains a supposed moral, aesthetic, ethical, and intellectual superiority of whiteness.
Therefore, the concept of a “place of whites” and cultural and institutional racism are directly connected to the fundamental nature of all aesthetic assumptions of art history, both in the popular sense of appearance and in the philosophical sense. Schucman explains the consequences of a one-sided white occupation of social, institutional, and cultural spaces in Brazilian society. In the conclusion of her book, she points out the need to establish a severance between the whiteness of the body and the power of whiteness. She says:
And, it seems that for this severance to be accomplished there is a need to think about the idea of aesthetics not as is thought in common sense, definitely linked to the ideal of Western beauty, but rather, think about it broadly, as an art of life, production, and transformation of existence, the aesthetic as a possibility of connecting with others: ‘the fact of experiencing common emotions, feelings, passions in the most diverse domains of social life’ (Maffesoli, 2005, p. 288) […] The aesthetic dimension, thus can occupy a privileged position for thinking about the anti-racist struggle and it is this reference that is explored to propose a logic of identification that puts the subject on stage based on the aesthetic relationship with the other.[3]
What Lia Vainer Schucman suggests is a shift in the position of the cultural hegemony of whiteness so that a critique of this category can be carried out, that is, so that places of invisibility at its margins are no longer occupied. Schucman’s proposal requires a collective effort of deterritorialization by those who are part of this whiteness. Therefore, examining the history of art from the “place of whites” and outlining cultural and institutional racism would achieve a displacement of that position. This is because art history can be understood as an epitome of the ideas of wealth, progress, and civilization, already claimed as ideas associated with whiteness.
3. Art history and Black people
The art critic and researcher Clarival do Prado Valladares begins a text published in 1968 with a summary of this scenario: “The modest presence of black Brazilian artists in the current production of what are called plastic arts is clarified once these became an attribute of prestige to the social stratum with the highest economic level […],”[4] due to that presence being a vast majority in colonial artistic production before the arrival in the country of the French Mission and the opening of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, in 1826. Valladares continues the argument, stating that “Brazilian society, although of mixed race, considers itself white in terms of standards, tastes, habits, and assimilated cultural attitudes, identifying itself with a dominant cosmopolitanism that many confuse with universality.”[5] This mistaken idea of an aesthetic and artistic universality ended up transforming Brazilian art history into an appendix to the European-United-Statesian doctrine. Art history as a place for whites is a construction of whiteness, which counterintuitively relegates the impact and understanding of whiteness to the periphery of history.
The discussion of art history categories, or as I like to call it the issue of adjectives attached to the word art in the course of pluralizing its history, has already been widely confronted by researchers of different backgrounds who study minorities. The classic article of the lecture by American anthropologist Sally Price, “A Arte dos Povos Sem História” [“The Art of Peoples Without History”], questions the premises of the art history discipline by exploring the adjective ‘primitive,’ which, as Valladares shows, was transformed into a category capable of encompassing the production of the Black population after art was territorialized as a privileged social activity.
The so-called primitive art proves extremely resistant to the traditional categories and periodization of Western art; therefore, its classification as prehistoric is perceived to be the most logical approach. After all, if it does not fit into the categories and periodization, it must be thought of as an art that fits into a moment before these criteria were established. In other words, through the organization of history by Western cultural hegemony, the place where wealth, civilization, and progress are made is almost exclusively defined as a “white place,” even if it isn’t categorized with the same adjectives used to demarcate “other peoples’ places.”
This is because a large part of the structure that constitutes the history of art is based on the practical racial invisibility of whiteness because of the habit of starting from a place of speech or writing that is transparent. Transparent, because the subject who writes generally does not identify him- or herself as part of the categories he or she speaks of; that is, he or she does not identify with any of the adjectives he or she attributes in the process of hierarchizing cultural production. Therefore, this transparency derives from the place of power this subject occupies. Gayatri Spivak, in his famous text, “Can the subaltern speak?,” exposes in detail the devices used in the construction of the discourse of the intellectual who adopts a transparent attitude, who takes the place of speaking subjects without being any of them and without placing him- or herself as an integral part of the discourse. Therefore, the subject who occupies the place of power in the construction of discourse does not treat him- or herself as a human being cut out by the same categories dealt with and questioned by those for whom he or she speaks.
To justify his criticism of the adjective ‘primitive,’ Price analyzes a series of art history books used as references for the introductory teaching of the discipline in American universities. It is critical to point out that many are also applied in Brazil. She concludes that the examples of artistic production of peoples called ‘primitive’ “[…] in the histories of Western art reflects nothing, other than a form of cultural imperialism.”[6] Thus, despite the distinct realities of these societies, philosophers and historians describe their people as:
[…] faceless producers of art, who are not able to appreciate, value, comment on or document their work except through grunts and shrugs of the shoulders and their world as a world that has no history, no aesthetics, no erudition, neither expertise, nor humor, nor irony.[7]
Examining a category considered marginal, as Sally Price does, helps to frame the structure of a race-based exclusion mechanism.[8] Its workings are far more subtle when the categories in question don’t refer to peoples seemingly inhabiting a “different” reality but circumscribe artists sharing the same social dynamics as ours.
4. Art as a white problem
The expression cultural imperialism can be translated into the terms used by Schucman as cultural hegemony of European-United-Statesian whiteness, a hegemony applied and replicated throughout the world by the various white-identifying portions of colonized populations who understand themselves as inheritors of its hierarchical dynamics, torchbearers of the history of the oppressor. Frantz Fanon, in the chapter, “On National Culture,” of the book, The Wretched of the Earth, explains the phenomenon:
Vis-a-vis this state of affairs, the native’s reactions are not unanimous. While the mass of the people maintain intact traditions which are completely different from those of the colonial situation, and the artisanal style solidifies into a formalism which is more and more stereotyped, the intellectual throws himself in frenzied fashion into the frantic acquisition of the culture of the occupying power and takes every opportunity of unfavorably criticizing his own national culture, or else takes refuge in setting out and substantiating the claims of that culture in a way that is passionate but rapidly becomes unproductive.[9]
Fanon’s excerpt connected with Schucman’s analysis allows us to assert that while the masses, that is, non-white populations maintain heterogeneous traditions, the intellectual, that is, colonized whites, strive to keep alive and active the system of categorization and hierarchization of oppressor with whom they identify. This is shown, as exposed by Sally Price, in the dislocation of artistic expression of non-Western peoples into pieces “outside of history,” trite, entombed in tradition,[10] which are generally called folklore, Indigenous art, and popular art in Brazil. After all, as Joel Rufino dos Santos states: “[…] culture is what the educated say is culture, while everything else is but folklore.”[11]
When we deny historicity to these populations, we transform them into frozen-in-time totalities, throwing them to the past. And it is exactly this status as a thing of the past that makes a tradition die. Traditions are, after all, living constructs, constantly changing, and hardly ever resemble the idea of timelessness and the fixity attributed to them. In other words, Brazilian art history, by compartmentalizing the artistic expression of the Black population into the primitive art section, directly contributes to the apparent absence of black contribution to the plastic arts, since it essentially conditions artists to produce works that fit into this category if they aim to be included in the arts system.
This is what Kleber Amâncio addresses in the article, “A história da arte branco-brasileira e os limites da humanidade negra” [“The history of White-Brazilian art and the limits of Black humanity”]. The author confronts the systemic-epistemological silencing within the modus operandi of art history that presupposes the universality and unquestionability of its premises, with its outstanding agents for the most part belonging to the same contexts of race, gender, class, and geography.[12] Therefore, the frame that structures Brazilian art history as a whole follows Fanon’s blueprint of the colonized intellectual. By reproducing the methodologies and logic of constructing Eurocentric narratives, Brazilian art history does not see “universal” value in pieces rooted outside the matrix of European-United-Statesian culture. This affects a substantial part of the production of non-white artists’ structuring our art history as a tool for standardizing whiteness. This means that a large part of the Brazilian arts system is made up of traditional white spaces, the “place of whites,” playing a powerful role in maintaining the cultural and institutional racism that outlines the actions of whiteness in Brazil.[13]
In addition to this process of de-identifying part of the production originated outside the West and its consequent folklorization, the artistic expression of the Black population began to be allocated only to the period of slavery, creating another way of transporting this population to a “primitive” past, a premise fundamental to the institutional, racist, whitening strategies installed by Brazilian state policy during the twentieth century. Emanoel Araújo comments on the overview of research on the presence of Black people in Brazilian history until 1988:
This research, however, has practically been limited to slavery itself and the black heritage found in religious syncretism, music, literature, and customs. The plastic arts have always been relegated to a secondary level, practically limited to isolated and incomplete works.[14]
Araújo’s comment is part of the first known undertaking to identify and catalog the contribution of the Black population to the Brazilian arts, shown in the famous exhibition, “The Afro-Brazilian Hand,” in 1988, the first exhibition to consider so-called ‘erudite’ art produced by Black Brazilians and establish a dissociation of art by the population of color and the African, or ‘primitive,’ matrices of artistic production that had been in place since the research of eugenicist Nina Rodrigues.[15] Ironically, she was the first author to deal with the theme in Brazil and the creator of the Black art category. This scenario shows the effectiveness of hierarchical categorization for the subalternity and invisibility of the art production in question.
Contemporary artists such as Rosana Paulino[16] have critically engaged with the legacy of racial categorization in Brazilian art history. Her works interrogate both the archival erasure of Black subjectivity and the aesthetic frameworks that sustain racial hierarchies. In this sense, Paulino’s practice materializes the call for an anti-racist revision of the art system. Beyond her visual production, Paulino has also played a central curatorial and institutional role in challenging structural racism in the arts. A notable example is the exhibition, “Diálogos Ausentes” (“Absent Dialogues”) (2016–2017), co-curated with Diane Lima, which gathered works by Black artists and collectives across cinema, theater, and the visual arts. The exhibition responded to a racial controversy involving the use of blackface.
“Diálogos Ausentes” sought to build counter-narratives to stereotypical representations of Blackness in Brazilian society, fostering dialogue between different creative practices and generations. The show foregrounded the intersection of race, gender, and class, with particular emphasis on the experience of Black women. Through this and other projects, Paulino emerges not only as a leading artist but as a key protagonist in the construction of institutional strategies for transformation.[17]
5. Conclusion
Responding to Vron Ware’s question at the beginning of this text, it is safe to say that art history corresponds to one of the “historical and contemporary forces sustaining the particular formations of whiteness in Brazil.”[18] Breaking this pact of making non-white artists invisible would force us to redefine what we understand as Brazil, by calling into question the unrestricted adherence to a white sociocultural point of view. Especially because, as Hélio Menezes shows in the text, “Exposições e críticas de arte afro-brasileira: um conceito em disputa” [“Exhibitions and criticism of Afro-Brazilian art: a concept in dispute”], the association of an artistic production that reflects Afro-diasporic culture and the color of the artist’s skin is not self-evident. Examining a work of art, it is impossible to say what skin color its author has. Regardless of the diversity and quality of the Black population’s artistic production, their skin color continues to act as a camouflaged criterion for their inclusion in preeminent spaces of the art system. Therefore, Menezes concludes his text by stating that “[in] a structurally racist society like Brazil, continuing to ignore or relegate to the background the production of Afro-Brazilian artists […] means to continue ignoring the very complexity of art history of this country.”[19]
While this analysis foregrounds the exclusion of Afro-Brazilian in art system,[20] it is important to recognize that the racialized logic has also historically marginalized Indigenous epistemologies, diasporic intersections, and popular visual cultures. These exclusions are not merely historical gaps but active mechanisms of silencing that persist within institutional validation structures. It is urgent a wider critique that must consequently attend to the multiplicity of these exclusions, articulating the ways in which different racialized and cultural groups have been subjected to aesthetic disqualification. Therefore, this state of affairs requires a shift in the cultural hegemony of whiteness towards an anti-racist review so that a real change in models and strategies for structuring research and artistic institutions is possible. A shift that is fundamental for the art system to stop being just a “place of whites.”
Rachel Cecília de Oliveira
rachel-cecilia@ufmg.br
Rachel Cecília de Oliveira is a professor at the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses with an emphasis on theory, criticism, history, and philosophy of visual arts. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UFMG, with a doctoral research stay at Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research focuses on the construction of plural narrative models and critical ontologies in the field of art history, theory, and criticism, with particular attention to counter-hegemonic epistemologies and decolonial thought. She leads the research group Experiências Descoloniais (Decolonial Experiments), a transdisciplinary space that brings together artistic practices, curatorship, criticism, philosophy, history, anthropology, and politics. Her professional trajectory combines teaching, curating, and art criticism in projects that challenge power structures embedded in visual narratives and regimes of visibility. She has been a visiting professor at Université Paris 1 – Sorbonne and Universidad de la República (Uruguay) and has worked as a curator and critic in exhibitions and publications in Brazil and abroad. Among her publications are articles and book chapters on contemporary art criticism and philosophy of art, as well as the Portuguese translation of What Art Is, by Arthur Danto.
Acknowledgement
The author gratefully acknowledges the anonymous reviewers of Contemporary Aesthetics for their generous comments and suggestions, which significantly contributed to improving this article.
Published on October 3, 2025.
Cite this article: Rachel Cecília de Oliveira, “A Place of Whites: the History of Brazilian Art,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 13 (2025), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] A previous version of this text was published in Portuguese in the journal Revista Viso. See https://doi.org/10.22409/1981-4062/V32I/530.
[2] Vron Ware, ed., Branquidade. Identidade branca e multiculturalismo (Garamond, 2004), 9.
[3] Lia Vainer Schucman, Entre o encardido, o branco e o branquíssimo: branquitude, hierarquia e poder na cidade de São Paulo (Veneta, 2020), 201.
[4] José Valladares, quoted in Emanoel Araújo, ed., A mão afro-brasileira: significado da contribuição artística e histórica (Tenenge, 1988), 285.
[5] Valladares, quoted in Araújo, A mão afro-brasileira, 287.
[6] Sally Price, “A arte dos povos sem história,” Afro-Ásia 18 (1996): 208.
[7] Price, “A arte dos povos,” 223.
[8] In addition to the invisibilization of Afro-Brazilian artists, the art of Indigenous peoples has long been excluded from canonical narratives. Only in the 1960s did anthropologists begin to frame their practices through concepts borrowed from Western aesthetics, categorizing body adornments and featherwork as “plumed art,” for example. This belated and external validation, however, reinscribes colonial hierarchies, often ignoring the complex epistemologies embedded in Indigenous practices themselves. More recently, Indigenous artists have claimed agency in both national and international circuits, as exemplified by their presence at events like the Venice Biennale, marking a crucial moment in the reconfiguration of Brazil’s artistic landscape. However, the hierarchical frameworks that structure art theory, criticism, and historiography in Brazil remain deeply entrenched, continuing to shape both institutional practices and interpretative paradigms.
[9] Frantz Fanon, Os condenados da terra (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira, 1968), 198.
[10] Price, “A arte dos povos,” 209.
[11] Joel Rufino dos Santos, in Araújo, A mão afro-brasileira, 7.
[12] Kleber A. de O. Amancio, A História da Arte branco-brasileira e os limites da humanidade negra (Revista Farol, 2021), 29.
[13] Renata A. F. dos Santos, “A pálida História das Artes Visuais no Brasil: onde estamos negras e negros?” Revista GEARTE 6, no. 2 (May/August 2019): 314-68.
[14] Araújo, A mão afro-brasileira, 9.
[15] Marcelo Bernardo da Cunha, Eliane Nunes, and Juipurema A Serraf Sandes, “Nina Rodrigues e a constituição do campo da história da arte negra no Brasil,” in Gazeta Médica da Bahia 76, suppl. 2 (1996).
[16] Rosana Paulino, Notas sobre a leitura das obras de arte de artistas negras e negros no ambiente brasileiro, MASP Afterall, 2020, accessed June 9, 2022, https://assets.masp.org.br/uploads/temp/tempYh4JU5Diisv5FvmMb8Vl.pdf.
[17] See more at: https://www.itaucultural.org.br/dialogos-ausentes-mostra.
[18] Ware, “Branquidade,” 9.
[19] Hélio Menezes, “Exposições e críticos de arte afro-brasileira: um conceito em disputa,” in Histórias afro-atlânticas, edited by Adriano Pedrosa, Amanda Carneiro, and André Mesquita (MASP, 2018), 590.
[20] Anti-racist strategies in the field of art history may include restructuring academic curricula to foreground Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous contributions; diversifying curatorial teams and acquisition policies in museums; fostering partnerships with marginalized collectives; and revising language and categorization practices in archives and exhibitions. These measures are essential not only to confront the hegemony of whiteness, but to reimagine the foundations of artistic canons in Brazil.