Earlier this spring, artist Julia Isídrez led an informal guided tour at the São Paulo gallery Gomide & Co. The occasion was a joint exhibition featuring her work alongside that of Maria Lira. At face value, the two artists don’t seem to have much in common. They are a generation apart, and work in different contexts and mediums. Lira is from Brazil and works primarily in painting, while Isídrez is a sculptor from Paraguay who appeared in the 2024 Venice Biennale.
But gallerist Thiago Gomide sees a lot of similarities in their work, as they both approach Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous artistic traditions from a contemporary angle. The two artists “would once have been called ‘folk’ or ‘popular.’ To me, this isn’t a ‘folk art’ exhibition—it’s an art exhibition,” he told ARTnews. He has approached them without labels.
Gomide is just one individual in a small but influential network of Brazilian dealers who have helped change the recognition for arte popular (popular art), a label that also encompasses terms like “folk,” “naïve,” “outsider,” and “self-taught.” It has often been applied to those who have worked outside the traditional paths for artists; many of them have also Indigenous or Black roots. As with most things in the art world, there have been ebbs and flows in the interest in these artists, with the first major era of interest running from the late 1940s until the late ’70s. “With the rise of contemporary art in Brazil, these so-called ‘popular’ names were relegated to oblivion in the art market,” said Galeria Estação owner Vilma Eid, who has also been a key figure in the recent promotion of Brazilian popular art.
Arte popular, and by extension naïve art, have nonetheless become perennial terms in the Brazilian art scene, applied to multiple generations of artists. The launch of the Naïve Biennial in 1992, by the prestigious national institution SESC, is a recent example of artists being first seen within the arte popular framework and later being relabeled as contemporary artists once they have enough market interest. That has been the case with artists like Carmézia Emiliano and Dalton Paula, who received awards at the biennial in 2010 and 2008, respectively; Paula is now represented by international blue-chip Lisson Gallery.
But this recent phenomenon of “rediscovering” names that were once recognized coincides with a broader revision of Brazilian art history and the rising presence of Black and Indigenous artists and curators. These artists are no longer seen as curiosities from whom inspiration could be extracted but important contributors to art history worthy of canonization. Since 2016, the Pinacoteca de São Paulo and Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), two of Brazil’s most important museums, have mounted solo shows for artistas populares like Agostinho Batista, Carmézia Emiliano, Conceição dos Bugres, José Antônio da Silva, Maria Auxiliadora, and Madalena Santos Reinbolt. Despite these fluctuations in interest, late artist and curator Emanoel Araújo, who founded São Paulo’s Museu Afro Brasil in 2004, had been supporting these artists since the 1990s.
But these revisions are also happening outside of Brazil. Internationally, José Antônio da Silva (1909–96), whose estate Eid represents, is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Musée de Grenoble, in France. The Royal Academy’s recent exhibition “Brasil! Brazil! The Birth of Modernism,” included artists who have historically been categorized under the label of arte popular, like Djanira da Motta e Silva and Rubem Valentim, but were discussed in that exhibition instead of important contributors to the rise of Brazilian modernism and postwar art.
“This is a global movement,” Antonio Almeida, a cofounder of Almeida & Dale, told ARTnews. “Foreign institutions have become aware of the gaps in their collections and started paying attention to what Latin America was doing—consequently giving a lot of attention to Brazil, which has a solid circuit and great diversity in its artistic production.”
What’s in a Term?
Although these terms—naïve, folk, primitive, outsider, and self-taught—are often treated as synonyms in everyday usage, there are significant differences between them, even if their definitions can feel slippery.
Angela Mascelani, director-president of the Museu do Pontal in Rio de Janeiro, has provided a concise explanation of these nuances. In her 2009 book, Museu do Pontal – O Mundo da Arte Popular Brasileira, about the private museum’s collection of over 8,000 pieces of Brazilian arte popular, she points out that “primitivism” takes hold around 1850 “in evolutionary theories that aimed to account for a single human historical trajectory,” while primitive art emerges in the early 20th century to describe “the aesthetic sensitivity of the so-called ‘primitive peoples.’” In Europe, around this time, the aesthetics of peoples from the African continent and French Polynesia became recognized for their power, and they were quickly appropriated by white artists working in Post-Impressionist, Cubist, and Fauvist modes like Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse.
Naïve art, Mascelani explains, originally denoted “a more innocent worldview, in which the torments and enigmas of mental health are softened through aesthetic treatment.” Naïve artists could also be amateur artists from the middle and upper classes who engaged in painting during their free time. However, folk art can be traced to folklore studies that spread across Europe when the term was coined by English writer William John Thoms in 1846—“folk-lore,” meaning “knowledge of the people”—to designate a field previously known as “popular antiquities” or “popular literature.”
When discussing the artists in the Museu do Pontal collection, which includes José Antônio da Silva, Mestre Vitalino, Zé Caboclo, Noemisa Batista, and Isabel Mendes da Cunha, Mascelani prefers artistas populares, as it describes “artists who emerge from ceramic production centers or from communities that produce wooden objects and utensils,” particularly during Brazil’s industrialization in the ’50s. This recognition coincided with a broader movement to construct a national identity, transitioning these makers from the realm of craft to arte popular and the larger art system. But in this transition, these artists are stripped of a community-oriented mode of making and recast under the value of individual authorship and, in the process, they become contemporary artists, according to Mascelani, who adds “the ability of some artists to create a distinctive style is crucial for their work to be recognized as ‘art’ and for the creator to be acknowledged as an ‘artist.’”
Cristina Fernandes, an independent Brazilian art historian who has conducted research on popular art and the market and has previously worked as an educator at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, argued that arte popular is a category with blurred boundaries that takes into account the artist’s origin, their socioeconomic status, education, and time period of production in unpredictable ways.
Given the complexity of the Brazilian racial system, racial identity was often an unspoken factor within the arte popular framework; class became the predominant lens through which to view these artists. This was the case of Madalena Santos Reinbolt: she was a Black woman, but in the small town in the countryside of Rio de Janeiro where she lived, racial identity was not articulated in the way it is today. Instead of noting that she was Black, most contemporary observers highlighted that she was a domestic worker and thus labeled her an artista popular.
Consequently, the recent debate around this concept and the naming of artistas populares as Black or Indigenous is part of the ongoing revision of Brazilian art. It represents a historical recovery grounded in this new framework. This movement is complemented by the emergence of a younger generation of contemporary Brazilian artists from underrepresented groups, who approach race as a political issue.
“While ‘art brut’ once referred to artists in psychiatric institutions or those considered eccentric,” Fernandes told ARTnews, “the term ‘outsider’ today encompasses various groups and cultures outside the mainstream.” Today, outsider as a label seems to be an updated version of primitive, she said, adding that “changing the word to address these productions does not necessarily humanize the artists.”
Artists Recategorized—and Rediscovered
One artist who has seen her popularity rise in recent years is Miriam Inês da Silva, who was born in 1939 in the countryside of Brazil and died in 1996. She studied fine arts in her home state of Goiás and moved to Rio de Janeiro in the ’60s, where she continued her education, attending workshops taught by artist Ivan Serpa. Her initial work as a printmaker gained her recognition, including participation in the 1963 and 1965 editions of the Bienal de São Paulo. But when she turned to painting in the ’60s, she was labeled an artista popular.
Gomide, whose gallery showed her work in a Kabinett presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024, attributed her categorization as an artista popular likely because “she was doing figurative work at a time when it wasn’t in fashion, between the ’70s and ’90s. And she addressed popular themes: Carnival, soccer, and samba musicians.”
Elisa Martins da Silveira (1912–2001), who studied with Serpa in the ’50s, was similarly labeled, though it didn’t seem to affect her. “Whether or not I am a primitive painter, that’s not my concern—it’s the critics’,” she said in a 1955 interview. In a 1954 review, critic Mário Pedrosa said the artist “paints, as is well known, entirely by instinct, where the ‘figure’ is so detailed that its elements turn into lines, planes and pure tones. The result is a canvas that resembles colorful and shiny embroidery, full of pictorial richness.”
Pedrosa’s positioning of Silveira as a painter by instinct seems to have cemented her placement as an artista popular. Her recent exhibition at the Museu de Arte do Rio aims to connect her production with other artistas populares as well as her peers in the Grupo Frente, the important 1950s Brazilian art movement, led by Serpa, which helped define constructivism in Brazil.
Another name in this current movement is figurative artist Heitor dos Prazeres (1898–1966), which Almeida & Dale took to Art Basel in Switzerland last year. Antonio Almeida, a cofounder of Almeida & Dale, told ARTnews, “the reception was very warm,” noting that the gallery sold a number of works and established relationships with new curators.
Madalena dos Santos Reinbolt (1912–76) was an Afro-Brazilian artist, once labeled as popular, who is now gaining recognition as part of this shift in interpretation. Her textile work, which presents embroidery as painting, was recently the subject of a monographic exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, where it traveled after debuting at MASP in 2022.
“Her work is pioneering because it engages in a dialogue with the issues raised by feminist art over the past few decades,” said MASP curator Amanda Carneiro, who co-organized Reinbolt’s exhibition. “There’s a tendency to relegate all textile-based work to secondary status, as mere craft, unworthy of a place among the fine arts.”
The case studies of Silva, Silveria, Prazeres, and Reinbolt reflect the ongoing recognition of arte popular. Brazilian collectors have embraced them as well, including Eid and Edmar Pinto Costa, Heitor Martins and Fernanda Feitosa, Lilia and Luiz Schwarcz. “This line between ‘artistas populares’ and ‘contemporary artists’ is quite blurred,” Gomide said, “and, it seems to me, tends to disappear.”
