Summary
I am an African Brazilian woman currently based in Greensboro, North Carolina. My research, both as a scholar and a visual artist, is focused on African Diasporas in the Americas, and Latin American visual culture with a focus on photography, serial prints, and materiality.
Early Post-Colonial Street Vendors Portraits: From Typification to Symbolic Family Album - Art History Master Research Paper - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
My research project - Early Post-Colonial Street Vendors Portraits: from Typification to Symbolic Family Album - asks what are the implications of adding the portrait of healer, cultural agitator, and street vendor Tia Ciata/Hilária Batista de Almeida (1854-1924) to the series of portraits of street vendors printed by Marc Ferrez in ca. 1900. The centrality of the portrait of Tia Ciata in my research can bring great insight into Afro-descendant Art in the diasporas across the American continent if photography is seen as a social event with multiple actors and authors. In that sense, Tia Ciata’s portrait has her own signature as a co-author. This unique portrait yields further questions: How does the history of intersectional class struggle and skillshare between poor immigrants and formerly enslaved individuals in the early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro affect the ways of seeing the series? Can symbolic familial ties revoke colonial typification? My research is on photography, art, visual culture in Latina America and African Diaspora contexts. Not always these are imbricated in my work though. As a work-in-progress research, I was accepted to present at 2020 BRASA - Association for Brazilian Studies conference.
My research project - Early Post-Colonial Street Vendors Portraits: from Typification to Symbolic Family Album - asks what are the implications of adding the portrait of healer, cultural agitator, and street vendor Tia Ciata/Hilária Batista de Almeida (1854-1924) to the series of portraits of street vendors printed by Marc Ferrez in ca. 1900. The centrality of the portrait of Tia Ciata in my research can bring great insight into Afro-descendant Art in the diasporas across the American continent if photography is seen as a social event with multiple actors and authors. In that sense, Tia Ciata’s portrait has her own signature as a co-author. This unique portrait yields further questions: How does the history of intersectional class struggle and skillshare between poor immigrants and formerly enslaved individuals in the early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro affect the ways of seeing the series? Can symbolic familial ties revoke colonial typification? My research is on photography, art, visual culture in Latina America and African Diaspora contexts. Not always these are imbricated in my work though. As a work-in-progress research, I was accepted to present at 2020 BRASA - Association for Brazilian Studies conference.
