Rosana Paulino

Rosana Paulino (born 1967, in São Paulo) is a Brazilian contemporary artist, curator, and researcher.

Paulino holds a doctorate in Visual Arts from the University of São Paulo, School of Communications and Arts and a specialization in printmaking from London Print Studio.

She was awarded the Mercosur Konex Award from Argentina in 2022.

Paulino engages with mediums including drawing, embroidery, engraving, printmaking, collage, and sculpture, often to engage with archetypes, memory, familial legacies, histories of racial violence and slavery in Brazil and to explore, what she describes as, Black female psychology.

Her works have been displayed in several shows in the UK, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cape Verde, Puerto Rico, USA, Mexico, and Brazil.

She has had solo exhibitions in Belgium, Germany, and Brazil.

Paulino is recognized for her visual representations of Black women that examine historical and modern social contexts of racism, discrimination, and slavery in Brazil.

Across North and South America, the Black female body has been an “icon on display for public consumption”.

It has been symbolic of sex and desire; eroticized, exoticized and objectified.

All these perceptions, biases and stereotypes that seek to define the Black female body have been constructed by other’s definitions which are usually Western viewpoints.

Paulino examines how Black women in Brazil are represented in history, media and society and builds a counter-narrative through her art works, re-claiming the voice and body of Black Brazilian women.

As seen in her many exhibits, Paulino is a master of technical versatility using art mediums including drawing, sewing, lithography, digital printing, video, and sculpting.

Paulino juxtaposes the way the Black female body is profited from and commoditized with depictions of the Black female body that are individualized and raw in an attempt to normalize it in mainstream media and art.

Paulino sought to understand and bring meaning to “what it means to be a woman and what it means to be Black in Brazilian society”.

Racial and gender inequalities in Brazil are deeply rooted in society.

While there have been social and cultural movements to empower Black women and challenge these issues, inequalities are still interwoven in the social fabric of Brazil and its institutions.

In her works, Paulino creates space where Black women do not assume stereotypical roles including wet nurse, nanny and maid.

Moreover, she simultaneously subverts usual class hierarchies and the social fabric that represses Black women in Brazil.

In an artist’s reflection video on Parede da Memória, Paulino says “I had to speak up.

And I chose art to address these issues”.

Paulino grew up in a middle-class family with two sisters.

As a child she regularly drew and played with clay which was the genesis for her fascination with the arts.

As she grew older, she realized the prejudices and marks of slavery left on Black women in Brazil and wanted to address those issues.

Never having black dolls to play with as a child or realizing how Black women were only depicted on television in certain roles are examples of gender and racial inequality that affected Paulino.

As an artist in her early days, she realized the limitations of drawing and began to use other media types such as photography and engravings.

She used personal family photograph archives as the inspiration for several of her exhibits.

She thought that Black women fell into the background of society, not seen nor heard, and were unable to defend themselves.

The inspiration for her early exhibit, Assentamento(s), was the historical archives of photographs of Black women in Brazil by a Swiss zoologist and Harvard professor, Louis Agassiz.

Paulino saw the limitations of these photographs and how they de-humanized and objectified the women without acknowledging their lives or struggle.

She re-created an artwork using the photograph of one woman and gave her agency, a name, a story, and a history.

Her focus was on understanding the lasting marks of colonialism and slavery on Brazilian society, particularly towards Black women.

Her interests, as can be seen in her many works, include autobiographies, biology, flora and fauna, and topics centered on history.

Assentamento(s) is an art project by Rosana Paulino where she examines how the Black female body is interwoven in the history of Brazil.

Paulino disassembles and re-assembles the historical photographs of Black women by Swiss zoologist and Harvard professor, Louis Agassiz, in an effort to refazimento or ‘remake’ their narrative in Brazilian society.

Paulino transposes these images onto a fabric and uses a multi-media approach where she cuts and re-assembles pieces with stitching.

The photographs by Agassiz objectify and de-humanize the Black women, denying them names, a story, or a history.

Paulino gives agency and identity to the women, enlarging Agassiz’s photographs to true size and stitching biological organs in color to their bodies.

She acknowledges the struggles and scars of colonialism and racism through the rough stitching of misaligned sections of the fabric.

Paulino encourages the viewer to contemplate the history of Black women in Brazil and how they “continue to be treated as second-class citizens, subject to cycles of oppression”.

The Sewing of Memory at the Pinacoteca of São Paulo is a celebratory exhibition that showcases over 140 works by Paulino from 1993-2018.