Hélio Menezes Fired as Director of São Paulo’s Museu Afro Brasil
138July 2, 2025
Curator and anthropologistHélio Menezeshas been dismissed from his role as director of theMuseu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujoin São Paulo following an unusually brief tenure. He had been appointed to the post in March 2024, succeeding founding director Araujo (1940–2022), for whom the twenty-one-year-old institution is named. Menezes, a onetime curator at Centro Cultural São Paulo, had been expected to bring a more contemporary focus to the museum, which houses six thousand works of Black art dating from the fifteenth century to the present day, many by self-taught artists and by those working within folk or religious traditions.
Menezes in anInstagram postput down his firing to “decision-making structures shaped by informality, personalism and a lack of transparency—structures still predominantly composed of individuals disconnected from the diversity and Black leadership that the museum represents (or should represent) and lacking engagement with the world of visual arts.” He additionally wrote that he had been let go while ill, without “even minimal standards of respect and care,” and said that two board members, Rosana Paulino and Wellinton Souza, had quit in solidarity.
The Museu Afro Brasil told Brazilian daily Folha de São Paulo that Menezes’ dismissal stemmed from “a lack of consensus regarding the terms of the director’s performance,” noting, “Despite mutual efforts, it was not possible to reach an agreement that balanced the expectations of the former director with the budgetary limits.”
Menezes in 2023 served as a cocurator of the Thirty-Fifth Bienal de São Paulo alongside Manuel Borja-Villel, Grada Kilomba, and Diane Lima. He is known for organizing a major 2021 exhibition of Afro Brazilian memorialist Carolina Maria de Jesus at Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo, and for cocurating, alongside Adriano Pedrosa, Ayrson Heráclito, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, and Tomás Toledo, the 2018 exhibition “Afro-Atlantic Histories” at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the Instituto Tomie Ohtake.