Atlantic crossings and “Negro art”: contexts, collections and challenges

Abstract

Protests against racism, the toppling of statues of slave traders, requisitions and promises by European museums to return African artifacts to their countries of origin were some of the events that took place in 2020. More recently, several monuments and memorials that valued European colonialism were vandalized or overthrown in Colombia amid protests against the current administration; the attack on the monument to Borba Gato in the Santo Amaro neighborhood of São Paulo is one more on the list of actions against colonial symbols. In the context of the persistence of doctrines on racial inequities, these events demand to think some expositions in greater depth. This article analyzes some exhibitions of “negro art” in New York and Montevideo as examples of the construction of an aesthetic look that is neither neutral nor spontaneous. This constructed perspective was forged in the early 20th century, in the context of Africa under colonization, through concrete and deliberate actions initiated by a small group of avant-garde artists, critics, collectors and art dealers. Their responsibility in choosing the artifacts, in the exhibitions they organized and the catalogues they published, points to a construction of the “canon” of African arts that, to this day, survives in the West.