Imaginação museal e prática curatorial: a curadoria quilombista do Museu de Arte Negra

Abstract

This master’s thesis is on how Black Art Museum (literal and free translation for “Museu de Arte Negra”), the MAN, has become an idelogic and politic tool for reassuring afrobrazilian identity and aesthetics from the decade 1950 to 1960, just when curatorship as well as art museums blossomed out. The study highlights a contemporary key dicussion for academic studies in order to place properly Black people’s cultural, intelectual and artistic work struggling for space as well as power relations in theoretical, historic and critic studies of art and its reception in museums in Brazilian context. The research shows Abdias Nascimento’s curatorial practice and musem imagination as strategies against black experiences erasures of Brazilian art. It spots his work as a museologist and curator of MAN while modern art is getting autonomous also as a legimator of Brazilian art system. MAN is here seen as the institution which made a socio-historic speech of memory, power and resistance, also as remeaning and denying in art history.