On Monday, October 5, the day after a contentious first round sent Brazil’s presidential election to a runoff, Rosana Paulino sat in the New School’s Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries beside a wall hung with her natural-pigment drawings of small figures curled within seeds. Most, she was quick to point out, are studies; only two counted as works. She tears up the drawings that don’t meet her standards — or did, until her studio assistants began hiding the discards for her archive. Paulino is an admitted perfectionist; in her hands, precision is a form of respect.
The first Afro-Brazilian woman to earn a PhD in visual arts in Brazil, Paulino sees the colonial past as an active force in her country’s present, visible above all in the violence, archival and literal, against Black people, especially women. Her solo exhibition ¿História Natural?, organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, is on view through November 1. It centers on its namesake, the 2016 artist’s book that won Paulino the 2025–27 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, along with its $25,000 award. The book’s pages pair linocut and drypoint with altered prints of photographs made for the Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz’s 1865–66 expedition to Brazil, collaged and stitched onto paper and fabric. Nothing is incidental; even the lettering is smeared with intention. “This history is dirty,” she said while leafing through its pages.
This year, Brazil’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale, curated by Diane Lima, took its title from Paulino’s 2024 drawings of the same name: Comigo ninguém pode (“No one can beat me”). The phrase suits her: On her nation’s history, she gives little ground. A teacher for many years, Paulino patiently explains rather than defends her positions. She reads the archive against the people who made it. In our conversation below, she asks you to do the same.
This interview has been translated from Portuguese by the author and edited for length and clarity.
Hyperallergic: For ¿História Natural?, you’re working with, and against, the colonizer’s own format: the illustrated naturalist album. European expeditions came to Brazil to picture it, and the images went back to Europe, where they shaped how the country was imagined. What drew you to the form?
Rosana Paulino: The book really is a kind of treatise on how Black people, and Brazil itself, have been represented. As you said, when Brazil was invaded, Europeans came to map the country. First the traveling painters, and later photography. That album format was very common: The country was mapped and the results sent back to Europe. I drew on that format because it produced the first images of Brazil. It’s the reference for this album. And why do it? I think that’s the real question. Because Brazil is a country that has never really looked at itself. Brazil often used those same images, made by Europeans, to represent itself, without looking at them critically. When I was a student, around age 12, those images were everywhere in schoolbooks. They weren’t images Brazilians made to understand what Brazil is. They were images made by foreigners for foreigners, which Brazil brought home without any critique. Until quite recently, when schoolbooks discussed slavery, those were the images of Black people you saw. So the book really grows out of those images.