Abdias Nascimento

Abdias Nascimento was an actor, playwright, painter, politician, and anti-racism activist. His activism spanned from his early involvement in organized Black movements in Brazil to his participation in global Pan-African networks. Throughout his life, he engaged with numerous collective projects focused on Black arts, including the Teatro Experimental do Negro and theMuseu de Arte Negra. As an activist and artist, he helped to advance strategies for social engagement and racial equality in Brazil.

On October 13, 1944, Nascimento gathered with a group of Black intellectuals in downtown Rio de Janeiro to establish the Teatro Experimental do Negro. The group staged plays exploring the African diasporic experience and worked on various initiatives to improve the lives of Black people in Brazil. Among its activities, the group published the newspaper Quilombo (1948–50) and organized the first Congresso do Negro Brasileiro (1950), which brought together intellectuals from Brazil and international anti-racist organizations, such as the American newspaper Chicago Defender and the French literary journal Présence Africaine, to discuss strategies for overcoming anti-Black discrimination globally.

During that event Nascimento proposed the creation of the Museu de Arte Negra (MAN), a project he pursued throughout his life. Beginning in 1950 he began collecting works by contemporary Black artists and those who depicted life in the African diaspora for the envisioned future museum. Although he lacked the resources to formally establish an institution, Nascimento organized numerous activities throughout his lifetime as part of this conceptual museum project.

In 1955, Nascimento and sociologist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos issued an open call for artists to display their work at the exhibition “Cristo Negro,” the first organized by MAN, held in July of that year at the Ministério de Educação e Saúde. The call, which attracted 106 submissions, asked artists to imagine Jesus as a Black man. After the exhibition opened it became the subject of public dispute between those who recognized its anti-racist content and detractors who saw its subject as heretical. In May 1968 Nascimento organized MAN’s second event: an exhibition of its “collection” at Rio de Janeiro’s Museu da Imagem e do Som to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. To accompany the display, Nascimento published two articles in the Rio-based art journal Galeria de Arte Moderna that advocated for the establishment of a museum in Brazil dedicated to Black arts.

In November 1968 Nascimento traveled to the United States on a fellowship from the Fairfield Foundation to lecture at Black theaters across the country about his artistic and political practices. Over two months, he visited institutions such as the Black Panther Party’s headquarters in Oakland, California; the National Black Theater in New York; the Kuumba Theater in Chicago; and Amiri Baraka’s Spirit House in Newark, New Jersey. During the fellowship, Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship issued a bill suspending individual rights and institutionalizing the arbitrary detention and killing of individuals seen by the regime as a threat to state sovereignty. This political shift forced Nascimento into exile, and he remained in the United States for thirteen years.

In 1969 Nascimento became a visiting lecturer at the Yale School of Drama and a visiting scholar at Wesleyan University the following year. In 1971 he was appointed chair of the newly founded African Cultures in the New World course at the State University of New York at Buffalo’s Instituto Puertoriqueño, a position he held until his return to Brazil in 1981. During his first years in the United States, Nascimento created and exhibited around sixty paintings, the majority of his artistic output. His first solo exhibition took place in 1969 at the Harlem Arts Gallery and was followed by numerous shows at cultural centers and university galleries, including the Studio Museum in Harlem (1973). In February 1970 he curated 13 Brazilian Artists at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities, the only known exhibition of MAN’s collection that Nascimento organized in the United States.

Nascimento strengthened his connections to African intellectual circles after his participation in the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in June 1974. In 1976 he became a visiting scholar in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Ife (now the Obafemi Awolowo University), Nigeria. He also attended FESTAC ’77 in Lagos, although the Brazilian government excluded him from its official delegation. The dictatorship’s official doctrine at the time denied the existence of racism in Brazil and silenced the voices that denounced it in state institutions. In response to his exclusion, Nascimento wrote a text in protest that was widely circulated during the event.

Nascimento returned to Buffalo in 1977 before moving back to his home country in 1981, following the start of Brazil’s redemocratization process. In the following years, he served in both the Congress (1982) and Senate (1997) of the Brazilian federal government. In 1982 he and his wife, Elisa Larkin Nascimento, founded the Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Afro-Brasileiros (IPEAFRO), an independent organization dedicated to promoting anti-racist education and preserving his legacy. The institute maintains his personal archive and the MAN collection that Nascimento envisioned as part of a future museum—a project he pursued until his death in 2011.