NEW YORK, NY (ú).- Jack Shainman Gallery has announced the representation of the Estate of Emanoel Ara鷍o and the forthcoming exhibition Emanoel Ara鷍o. This will not only be his debut presentation at the gallery, but also the first major survey of his work in New York since the 1980s. The late Brazilian artist, curator, and collector had a career that defied categorization; Ara鷍o forged personal and public platforms to express the nuances of Afro-Brazilian life and culture—reenvisioning philosophies of Modern aesthetics, creating space for marginalized artists to exhibit their work, and preserving the material history of his ancestral heritage in a time before Afro-Brazilian voices were championed by regional or international audiences.

Born in 1940 in Santo Amaro da Purifica玢o, Bahia, to an Afro-Brazilian goldsmithing family of modest means, Ara鷍o’s adolescence orbited creative output—over the course of his youth working both with the cabinetmaker and woodcarver Eufr醩io Vargas and as a graphic designer for his hometown’s Imprensa Oficial (Official Press). After his first solo exhibition in Santo Amaro da Purifica玢o in 1959, he enrolled in the Escola de Belas Artes da Bahia in Salvador. While in school, he studied printmaking—in the vein of his Modern predecessors and contemporaries Lygia Clark, H閘io Oiticica, and Lygia Pape—developing a practice oriented in communal expression and geometric abstraction. From the start, Ara鷍o was concerned with working in graphic and three-dimensional media while diverging from appropriating abstraction from Colonial European tradition—envisioning Modernism born from a singularly Brazilian context and comprehending abstraction’s ability to ignite political power and social transformation.

Ara鷍o’s work functions on multiple registers, merging the formal language developed in his studies, the unapologetic embrace of his queer, Black, and Brazilian identity, and the intricate ideologies of his life as a curator and collector of Afro-Brazilian artwork and artifacts. With simplified figures, primary structures, and high-contrast palates, his engravings, reliefs, and sculptures are assemblages of reference: a mosaic of his upbringing in the Afro-Brazilian capital, inherited trauma from Brazil’s transatlantic slave trade, patterns from Nigerian and Beninois textiles, and Yoruba symbols of Orisha spirits. Embedded within his work is a creolization, assembling segments from past works and found objects that cut, interfere, refract across the image plane—reflecting the great dimension of Brazil’s layered society; celebrating everyday life beyond the international epicenters of Rio de Janeiro and dismantling systemic racism from within the studio and institution to promote, exhibit, and collect his and fellow Afro-Brazilian artists’ work.

At the core of Ara鷍o’s creative and professional career was an ambition to challenge himself and his country to overcome adversity and imagine a more inclusive society through art rather than contorting to the market or establishment. Over the course of his life, his accomplishments included developing the Pinacoteca de S鉶 Paulo into an internationally regarded museum, founding the first artist-established institution in Brazil dedicated to promoting the work of Black artists (Museu Afro Brasil), and amassing an archive of around six-thousand objects and four-thousand documents from the Afro-Brazilian diaspora. Ara鷍o was a visionary, boldly asserting his creative presence in a way that was grandiose, totemic, and vibrant; his life comprises a portrait of a nation and generation, and the infinite complexities within them.

Emanoel Ara鷍o

Emanoel Ara鷍o (Santo Amaro da Purifica玢o, Brazil, 1940 - S鉶 Paulo, Brazil, 2022) was an artist, curator, and collector. He has shown his work in several local and international galleries and exhibitions, totaling about fifty solo exhibitions and more than one hundred and fifty group exhibitions. He was awarded a gold medal at the 3rd Graphic Biennial in Florence, Italy, in 1972. The following year, he received the award of the Associa玢o Paulista de Cr韙icos de Arte (S鉶 Paulo Association of Art Critics—APCA) for best printmaker, and, in 1983, for best sculptor. He directed the Museu de Arte da Bahia from 1981 to 1983, and taught courses in graphic arts and sculpture at the City College Arts, in New York (1988). He also directed the Pinacoteca do Estado de S鉶 Paulo for a decade (1992-2002) and founded the Museu Afro Brasil in 2004, where he worked as Curator-Director until his death. In 2005, he worked as Municipal Secretary of Culture in S鉶 Paulo and, in 2007, he was honored by the Instituto Tomie Ohtake with the exhibition "Autobiografia do Gesto” (Autobiography of the Gesture), which brought together 45 years of the artist's production.

In 2018, a year dedicated to Afro-Atlantic stories at the Museu de Arte de S鉶 Paulo (MASP), the museum presented a major exhibition entirely dedicated to the work of Emanoel Ara鷍o, A Ancestralidade dos S韒bolos: 羏rica-Brasil (The Ancestry of Symbols: Africa-Brazil), in addition to the two solo shows that MASP had held in the past—the first in 1981 and the second in 1987, titled Esculturas em Grandes Formatos (Sculptures in Large Formats). Emanoel Ara鷍o passed away in S鉶 Paulo in 2022, at age 81. His work is in collections such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Tate Modern, London; Museu de Arte da Bahia, Salvador; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Rockefeller Foundation, New York; Museo de Arte Moderna de Firenze, Florence; Museu de Arte Contempor鈔ea, S鉶 Paulo; Museum of Sydney, Sydney; Museu de Arte S鉶 Paulo, S鉶 Paulo; Museu de Arte de Bras韑ia, Bras韑ia; Pal醕io do Itamaraty, Bras韑ia; Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro; Instituto Ricardo Brennand, Recife; Museu do Estado de Pernambuco, Pernambuco; Pinacoteca do Estado de S鉶 Paulo, S鉶 Paulo; and Museu Afro Brasil, S鉶 Paulo.