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Sunday Readings
Maria Auxiliadora da Silva: A Field of Unending Conversations
Text by Nohora Arrieta Fernández and Tatiane Schilaro Santa Rosa
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Maria Auxiliadora, Untitled, 1973, mixed media on paper on eucatex, 32 x 38 cm |
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“Muitas vezes eu pinto crioulos” — “I often paint Black people,” said Maria Auxiliadora da Silva (1935–1974) in a rare interview published in 1978.1 And indeed, Maria Auxiliadora spent her entire career depicting Afro-Brazilians, especially Afro-Brazilian women, as protagonists in her paintings. The importance of her work to Brazilian art cannot be overstated; yet the acknowledgment of such importance has been limited and remains urgently overdue. Beyond Brazil’s borders, Maria Auxiliadora’s work speaks to the artistic production of the Black Atlantic, joining a constellation of Afro-diasporic artists who have been whitewashed and silenced by western art history.
The exhibition of Maria Auxiliadora’s works at Mendes Wood DM shows the reach of an ongoing historical movement led by Afro-Brazilian artists and thinkers to amend systemic erasure. The works exhibited span 1970 to 1974, the year Maria Auxiliadora, aged 39, died due to fast-spreading cancer. They represent the diversity of subject matters covered during her career as a painter of the everyday life of Black people: Black figures appear worshiping in terreiros, snuggling in parks, partying in bars and restaurants, dancing in samba schools, and tending the land.
Early writing on Maria Auxiliadora’s work, such as Pietro Maria Bardi’s, emphasized her depictions of candomblé or explored the fact that she was self-taught, categorizing her as a naïf painter. More recent literature has sought to redress gaps in those approaches by considering Black protagonism in her work. Writers such as Renatta Bittencourt have discussed how Maria Auxiliadora organizes her paintings as narratives.2 Indeed her artworks ask viewers to look carefully and imagine the conversations unfolding between characters, richly ornamented with many supporting details.
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Maria Auxiliadora, Untitled, 1970, mixed media on cardboard, 16 x 23.5 cm |
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Maria Auxiliadora, Cinerária, 1974, oil on cardboard glued on canvas, 29.5 x 49.5 cm |
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In Cinerária (1974), for example, Maria Auxiliadora painted a Black woman at the center of the canvas, framed by two Black men on either side. All three figures sit or stand on tree stumps amidst a colorful field of flowers that looks like gorgeously stitched embroidery. The crops—groupings of three or four flowers and leaves—are organized in symmetrical rows over a background of vibrant yellow and orange tones. Each man puts one of his feet on the stumps, while hoes rest nearby, showing the men at work. The woman sits comfortably on the stump, embracing a bouquet of white flowers in one of her arms. All figures have their mouths open; the man on the left has his eyes closed as if singing. The woman, too, appears to be speaking or singing: she has eyes fixed on the singing man, while the man to her right looks at her, suggesting a love triangle. Maria Auxiliadora adorned her protagonists with highly detailed features and embroidered clothing, a signature of her work.
The storytelling that structures Maria Auxiliadora’s paintings stems from popular oral traditions in Brazil whose Black roots are often ignored: the narratives, singing, chatter, gossiping, and whispering are vividly present in her work. In some paintings, like Untitled/Sem título (1970), Maria Auxiliadora included speech bubbles in a Pop art style above specific figures, putting them in literal dialogue. These stories of everyday Black life are reinforced by meticulous depictions of clothing and bodies, achieved via skills often undervalued by hegemonic art historical narratives. For instance, her unique technique of painted resin allowed her to create volumes that come off of her paintings. With embroidery and sewing, skills she learned from her mother, she endowed her protagonists with popular fashions. Portraits of Maria Auxiliadora show that it wasn’t just her protagonists whom she styled; she was a fashionista, passionate about the popular fashion culture of her time. In both her life and her work—by freely introducing techniques linked to manual labor and contemporary Pop art—Maria Auxiliadora demonstrated a particular consciousness of her moment in time.
Maria Auxiliadora did not work in seclusion. She was the oldest daughter in a family of artists, guided by Maria Almeida, the matriarch and mentor. Many of Maria Auxiliadora’s siblings had a strong aptitude for arts and crafts. In the 1950s, her older brother, Vicente de Paula, married the artist Raquel Trindade, a daughter of Solano Trindade, who was an important figure in twentieth-century Black activism in Brazil. Raquel convinced the Silvas to move from São Paulo to Embu, a then-small town famous for its arts and crafts communities. There, the Silvas joined the Trindades and other intellectuals and artists and built a vibrant Afro-Brazilian artistic community. Maria Auxiliadora remained a protagonist in the larger Afro-Brazilian intellectual and arts scene.
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Maria Auxiliadora, Untitled, 1973, mixed media on eucatex, 34 x 24 cm |
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Few writers have discussed the significant number of representations Maria Auxiliadora created of the countryside. In that regard, we were amazed by Mendes Wood DM’s remarkable collection of her rural scenes, which, like most of her works, are characterized by their multiple narratives, full of poetic possibilities. In Colheita (1973), Maria Auxiliadora painted five Black people, in two different scenes, among a field of red flowers. In one of the scenes, a man is hoeing the land, his lips wide open and his eyes closed as if singing. Another man seated in a squatting position looks at him, thinking or waiting. In the second scene, a woman holds a girl’s hand while talking to a man: What are they talking about? Is this a couple’s quarrel? Or is this woman asking for help? Each embroidered detail brings movement to the bodies, their evocative expressions and patched clothes; every detail brings forward the lives of these characters.
Maria Auxiliadora’s meticulousness suggests a multiplicity of Black subjectivities. If these rural scenes’ main subject matter is fieldwork, the characters in these paintings are not reduced to their role as rural workers. In Untitled/Sem título (1973), a man lies down smoking while a group of women around him collect flowers. In Untitled/Sem título (1972), a seated man sings, holding some leaves, while the rest of the group works in what seems to be a coffee field. In other paintings, children run around, playing and eating oranges, as in another Untitled/Sem título (1972).
Despite their colorfulness, singing, and conversations, Maria Auxiliadora’s rural scenes are not nostalgic. Those fields are worked fields: crops of cotton, sugar, coffee, oranges, and flowers. The field produces, and to do so, it needs a body. Thus, we see bodies’ bending, reaching, and exerting; they bear tools for planting and harvesting. In Untitled/Sem título (1972), Maria Auxiliadora depicted the different moments in harvesting a cane field: cutting, piling, and transporting the sugar cane. The workers’ outfits are humble, and most are barefoot.
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Maria Auxiliadora, Colheita, 1973, acrylic on eucatex, 30 x 35 cm |
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On the one hand, these representations of rural places as working spaces put Maria Auxiliadora in an Afro-diasporic tradition where the working Black body is embedded in the legacies of slavery and plantation economy. The field as a work space, that work’s precariousness, and the consumption of the body through the work are at the core of some parts of this visual tradition. On the other hand, Maria Auxiliadora’s rural scenes function as a sort of environmental memory of the Southeast Brazilian countryside. In this vein, the paintings suggest a number of questions: What does it mean to look at Maria Auxiliadora’s work considering the mechanization of farmlands in São Paulo or Minas Gerais, where her parents and ancestors lived? How does her practice shed light on the interactions between capitalism and environmental racism? Or on the devastation produced by the agribusiness within the territories of Black communities around the Americas?
As part of the Afro-diasporic visual tradition focused on the quotidian, Maria Auxiliadora’s practice unravels the continuity of colonial paradigms and the structures of our societies, our relations to labor, our understandings of spaces urban and rural, and the ways Brazilians, and the peoples of the Americas, have developed to survive ongoing inequalities. The richness of her poetics gives us the possibility of asking questions, and by asking them, they open us up to imagining other futures. Viewers are given a task by looking at Maria Auxiliadora’s works: to accept her invitation to engage in myriad unending conversations.
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Maria Auxiliadora, Untitled, 1970, mixed media on canvas, 40 x 61 cm |
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Maria Auxiliadora, Untitled, 1970, mixed media on canvas, 50 x 70 cm |
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1.Maria Auxiliadora da Silva and Lélia Coelho Fota, “Eros e Erosão Na Pintura de Maria Auxiliadora,” in Mitopoética de Nove Artistas Brasileiros: Vida, Verdade e Obra (Rio de Janeiro, RJ: FUNARTE, 1978), 77.
2. Renata Bittencourt, “Eu Pinto Crioulos,” in Maria Auxiliadora: Daily Life, Painting, and Resistance, ed. Adriano Pedrosa and Fernando Oliva (São Paulo, SP: MASP, 2018).Nohora Arrieta Fernández
Writer and researcher
Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA
PhD in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies, Georgetown University
Latest writing: Conversa com Francisco Pinto e a história afro-indígena venezuelana Tatiane Schilaro Santa Rosa
Art Critic and Independent Curator
Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art and Visual Culture – UC Santa Cruz
Latest writing: Alva Mooses & Mauricio Cortes: You Enter Dancing/There's Always Sign
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