Brazilian visual artist Jaime Lauriano visited Rice University this week to deliver a special workshop, "As imagens também matam," to students on Monday followed by a public lecture, "Black Encyclopedia: How to start history anew?," the next day.
Published in March 2021 and organized in conjunction with historian Flávio dos Santos Gomes and anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, the book Enciclopédia Negra (Black Encyclopedia) is a result of seven years’ research that seeks to redress the invisibility of Black protagonists in Brazilian history. The encyclopedia compiles 417 entries focusing on more than 550 Black people in Brazil from the colonial times to the present day . It is a survey on the contribution and history of important black personalities in Brazil over the last 400 years, focusing on the broad period of slavery and post-abolition.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Art History and the Humanities Research Center, the event was organized by Lynne Lee, Ph.D. student in Art History who specializes in Afro-Brazilian modernism and its transatlantic network.
Jaime Lauriano is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Porto, Portugal and São Paulo, Brazil. His works are often based on archival research and examine the structures of power that underlie the production of history. Through deceptively minimalist creations, Lauriano explores the mechanism behind state control and institutional power–involving police force, prisons, and borders–and how they have shaped contemporary society. He is interested in propaganda films and the impact of visual narratives on the public imagination. His broader artistic project aims at revising our current understanding of history from a more inclusive and collective perspective.
