Candaces of the Arts: The Legacy of Black Women Artists in Brazil

on Renata Felinto

Dates: September 16, 21, 23, 28 and 30, 2026
Mondays and Wednesdays
Hour: 19h to 21h
Duration: 5 meetings
Audience: general interested parties
Investment: R$ 400,00 + fees

Online course
Live, via video conferencing platform
Recorded classes available for a limited time only
Includes certificate at the end
For Libras interpreter, request by email cursos@mam.org.br with 7 business days' notice.

Candaces das Artes is a history and criticism of visual arts course guided by a central focus: the historical participation of Black women in the construction of languages, repertoires, and institutional disputes in Brazil, with an openness to other Afro-diasporic territorialities (Africa, the Americas, transnational circuits) and to displacements between regions, cities, hinterlands, coastlines, and "territories of origin" as places of knowledge.

The term “Candaces” (kandakes/candaces) is assumed as historical basis and as a conceptual operator: it refers to the sovereigns of the ancient Kingdom of Kush (Nubia), associated with Meroë, in territory now related to Sudan, and to a model of female power that includes regency, centrality of matrilineal lineage and the figure of the “mature woman” as accumulated political authority (World History).

The course follows experiments that start from organic knowledge (knowledge gained through manual skills, daily life, and non-formal creation), pass through academic scrutiny without disregarding repertoires specific to the territories of origin, and arrive at contemporary times and institutions (museums, universities, collections, and curatorial work) as a field of narrative dispute. "Womanhood" and "race" are explored in the plural, as situated and non-homogeneous categories, embracing the diversity of gender experiences, belongings, and diasporic formations (including tensions between social classification, self-definition, and institutional interpretation).

Agenda

Lesson 1 – Candaces: historical context, sovereignties, and diffuse authorship

• The concept of Candaces (kandakes/candaces) and its location for the course: where (Nubia, Kingdom of Kush/Meroë), when (ancient world), and why (a historical archive of Black female sovereignty). 
• Political and symbolic dimensions of the term: "heir princesses" (matrilineal lineage, preparation for leadership), and the principle of legitimacy in which the matrix that "generates" sovereignty (lineage) structures power. 
• Candaces as "mature women": maturity, wisdom, and accumulated power, as political authority and as a conceptual key to understanding permanence, strategy, and leadership.
• Candaces as queen mothers and autonomous rulers: not only consorts, but also regents and, in certain cases, figures with command and strategy (including those associated with conflict and political negotiation). 
• Why “Candaces” in the plural (method): symbolic sovereignty, guidance, permanence, and counter-history; title as a way of looking.
• Collective and diffuse authorship: what art history calls "craft," "popular," "domestic," and "decorative," and the effects of these categories.
• Handicrafts as archives: sewing, embroidery, braiding, cooking, ornamentation, mural painting, graphic design, objects, rituals of care and invention as technologies of memory and of the world.
• “Our mothers’ gardens” as an image of transmission (legacy without a monument): the aesthetics of everyday life as language and continuity.

Lesson 2 – Organic art: creation rooted in everyday life, without hierarchizing knowledge.

• Organic Candaces (adapting the concept to the encounter): creative power that springs from the social ground, from work, from ritual, from home, from the street and from matter, without depending on academic approval to be language.
• Candaces as "mature women" (conceptual transposition): accumulated repertoire and material intelligence as a form of power, continuity and invention, articulating family memory, community and technique.
• Education of the gaze outside of school: popular repertoires, work, religious practices, social interactions, ornamentation; aesthetic formation as a lived and territorial experience.
• Materiality as thought: narrative painting, figuration, clay/sculpture, textiles, assemblage; gesture as historical writing.
• Classification regimes and technical hierarchies (including the role of Lélia Coelho Frota): “naïf”, “popular”, “outsider”, “people’s art” and the effects of confinement or power.
• Circulation and legitimation: home/territory/fair/collection/museum/media; what changes when the system “discovers” and repackages the work.

Key artists of the event: Raquel Trindade de Souza; Maria Auxiliadora da Silva; Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt.

Organizing artists (to articulate method/bridge and discuss repositioning): Sonia Gomes; Lucia Laguna; Yedamaria.

Lesson 3 – The advisors: “relatives” of sovereigns, non-consanguineous lineages, and the academic filter.

• Adapting the concept to the encounter: advisors as "relatives" of sovereigns, understood as kinship of ancestral, conceptual and poetic lineage (not consanguineous), produced by alliances, transmission, method and ethics.
• Academia and the art system as filters: what is learned, what is erased, what is negotiated; access, permanence, and institutional cost (without disregarding the knowledge of the territories of origin).
• Languages ​​and politics of form: drawing, printmaking, painting, installation, textiles, photography, performance, and archives as strategies for historical rewriting.
• Institutional racism and the "place" of the Black artist: legitimation, silence, exoticization, tokenism; the artwork as counter-narrative and method.
• Methodological reference: incorporate Renata Bittencourt's thesis as a historiographical support for thinking about protocols of consecration, erasures, and institutional narratives.

Key artists of the event: Lidia Lisboa; Rosana Paulino; Marga Ledora; Cecília Félix Calaça; Maria Lídia Magliani.

Lesson 4 – Heirloom Princesses: Matrilineality, Counter-Archive, and Contemporary Re-existences

• Heir apparent princesses (operational image for the meeting): women of matrilineal lineage, prepared from an early age to assume leadership; legitimacy through transmission and preparation (historical/symbolic lineage).
• Work as counter-archive: rewriting, recomposition, montage, fabulation, document and performance of the past.
• Body, territory, and community: care, intimacy, Black pedagogies, dissidence, and networks of creation; plural womanhoods and racialities as a key to understanding (without reducing "identity" to a single theme).
• Contemporary circulation: calls for proposals, residencies, collectives, platforms; insertion without assimilation and permanence.
• Curating as co-authorship: how to present the work without reducing it to biography or confining it to exoticization.

Key artists at the event: Maria Macedo; Eliana Amorim; Sou Pixo; Soberana Ziza; Lubi Prates; Gabriella Marinho; Keyla Sankofa; Rosa Luz.

Lesson 5 – Black Women's Curatorship: Reclaiming Voice and New Ways of Telling Stories

• The underappreciated history of art: how hegemonic institutions produce canon, absence, and oblivion (collection, wall, legend, public program).
• Curatorship as a technology of reconquest: selection, assembly, acquisition, research, education, and curatorial writing as "ways of telling stories".
• Black women curators in institutions and circuits: agendas, vocabularies, perspectives, and exhibition ethics (not capturing, not exoticizing, not reducing).
• Thematic areas that reinforce Black womanhood throughout history: correcting erasures; material culture and archives; body and memory; territorialities and diasporas; public pedagogies; networks and collectives.

Main curators of the meeting: Diane Lima; Amanda Carneiro; Lorraine Mendes; Vanicléia Silva Santos; Thayná Trindade.

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Students, teachers and retirees have a 10% discount
Doubts:
cursos@mam.org.br
WhatsApp: 11 99774 3987

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credits

Image: Lucia Laguna, Collage/drawing #272023/2024. MAM São Paulo Collection. Photo: Ding Musa