NYAB Event - Abdias Nascimento “Artist, Activist, Author”

Abdias Nascimento “Artist, Activist, Author”

Godwin-Ternbach Museum

This event has ended.

This exhibition, organized by John Collins, Director of the Program of Latin American and Latino Studies and the GTM in collaboration with IPEAFRO (Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Afro-Brasileiros, Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), displays forty artworks by Abdias Nascimento (1914-2011), who was a critical political and artistic figure in Brazil and the African Diaspora, an activist and founding force in Brazil’s Black Movement (Movimiento Negro Unificado, MNU), as well as an author, playwright, senator, and artist.

Nascimento’s works have been featured throughout the U.S. and Brazil: at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Gallery of African Art, Washington DC and the Ministry of Culture in Rio de Janeiro, as well as in Paris and Lagos. This exhibition will feature more than two dozen of his artworks focused on the theme of “orixás” – deities in the Afro-Brazilian possession and trance-based religion known as Candomblé. Orixás are mediators between heaven and earth, humans and the gods. Nascimento’s paintings will bring together and encourage dialogue between diverse communities in New York and Brazil: Candomblé is a “sister” religion to Santería as practiced in the Hispanophone Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, et al.) and to Haitian Vodou. Both Santería and Vodou are practiced widely in NYC and Nascimento’s artworks will initiate a broader diasporic conversation about the Americas, Africa, and Queens’ historic and contemporary position as a global crossroads.