Rosana Paulino Turns Brazil's Colonial Album Against Its Makers

Rosana Paulino, the first Afro-Brazilian woman to earn a PhD in visual arts in Brazil, has turned a colonial-era naturalist album into the centerpiece of her New York solo show, now on view at the New School's Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries through November 1. The exhibition, ¿História Natural?, is organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

The show takes its name from Paulino's 2016 artist's book, which won her the 2025–27 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice and its $25,000 award. The book's pages pair linocut and drypoint (two printmaking techniques, one carved in relief, one scratched into a metal plate) with altered prints of photographs made for the Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz's 1865–66 expedition to Brazil. Paulino collages and stitches those images onto paper and fabric. Nothing in the object is accidental; even the lettering carries intent. "This history is dirty," she said while leafing through the book's pages.

How the album became the weapon

Agassiz's expedition photographs were made by and for foreigners. Paulino argues Brazil then imported those images wholesale, without ever examining them. "It's the reference for this album," she told Hyperallergic, speaking in Portuguese. "Because Brazil is a country that has never really looked at itself."

She remembers the same pictures from her own schoolbooks, around age 12. "They weren't images Brazilians made to understand what Brazil is," she said. "They were images made by foreigners for foreigners, which Brazil brought home without any critique. Until quite recently, when schoolbooks discussed slavery, those were the images of Black people you saw. So the book really grows out of those images."

The logic is simple once you see it. European expeditions mapped Brazil visually; the results traveled back to Europe and shaped how the country was imagined; Brazil then borrowed that imagination as its own self-portrait. Paulino reads the archive against the people who made it.

What does this change for the viewer?

The show asks you to distrust the illustrated album — the very format that taught generations what Brazil and Black Brazilians looked like. Paulino sees the colonial past not as history but as an active force in Brazil's present, visible in what she describes as archival and literal violence against Black people, especially Black women.

Her method shows in her working habits. On Monday, October 5 — the day after Brazil's contentious first-round presidential vote sent the election to a runoff — she sat beside a wall hung with her natural-pigment drawings of small figures curled inside seeds. Most were studies; only two counted as finished works. She tears up drawings that fall short, or did, until her studio assistants began hiding the discards for her archive. Precision, in her hands, is a form of respect.

A phrase with teeth

Paulino's reach extends beyond the gallery. Brazil's pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, curated by Diane Lima, took its title from Paulino's 2024 drawings of the same name: Comigo ninguém pode ("No one can beat me"). The phrase fits. On her nation's history, she concedes little ground.

A teacher for many years, Paulino explains her positions rather than defending them — and her conversation, like the exhibition, asks viewers to do the reading she does: to look at who made an image, for whom, and at what cost.