Movimento artístico e educacional de fundamento negro da Praça da República: São Paulo 1960 - 1980

Abstract

This research aims to reflect upon and systematize the black arts movement, consisting of artists, mostly of African descent, who exposed their work weekly at Praça da República in São Paulo from 1960 to 1980. The relevance of the issue shows up as long as we present an intense and expressive set of 81 artists who worked together for 20 years, developing artistic tendencies which left a legacy of knowledge to the future generation. In this work we propose to study various aspects of the political, social and artistic movement of African descent expression as well as to collaborate with the advancement of the studies and the researches on black culture in Brazil, given its relevance and its role in Brazilian education. Therefore, we investigated how the process of building the foundation of black artistic movement at Praça da República took place, in the perspective of the protagonists and written sources. The search follows the path of African descent methodology which has the subject-researcher as the one who looks from inside the locus of research. This investigative method comes from interpretative practices. Moreover, we take the model of participatory research which aims to understand the agent who researches him/herself or their group home, a direct relationship between the researcher and the objects. We conducted the study using oral history and every-day-life to collect information about the artistic movement. Among the results we can say that there are continuities and permanencies of African Art, in the African descendants’ productions. The documentation raised in this research allows a historical assessment about the magnitude and importance of this artistic movement of African basis at Praça da República in Sao Paulo, during the years cited above. We perceived the existence of the third generation of artists from precursors and we realized, albeit with less intensity, that the movement has other developments to the present, despite not having the same magnitude of the past.