Painting Anticolonialism: The Global Networks of Afro-Brazilian Art in Postwar Rome

Abigail Lapin Dardashti, Ph.D.

Painting Anticolonialism examines Rome as a crucial site in the development of Afro-Brazilian modernism and transnational Black visual politics during the Cold War. I focus on Rubem Valentim and Wilson Tibério, two important, understudied Brazilian artists whose experiences in Rome shaped their approaches to race, anticolonialism, and artistic practice. Through Rome’s ancient, Renaissance, and postwar art and architecture, as well as its experimental artistic movements, Valentim and Tibério connected their Afro-Brazilian heritage with global artistic networks, African liberation, and resistance to Brazil’s military regime. The project deprovincializes Afro-Brazilian art by positioning migration and diaspora as generative forces that shaped artistic form, materiality, and political meaning. It also reframes Rome as a nodal point connecting Latin America, Africa, and Europe. Through archival research, formal analysis, and interviews, I reconstruct the artists’ movements, exhibitions, relationships, and political ideas. This project develops alongside my digital art history project, Migration, Art, and Diaspora in Brazil, which uses GIS and network visualization to map Brazilian diasporic artists and artworks. Together, these projects expand the geography of Afro-Latin American art history while reconsidering the history of postwar European modernism.