HÉlio Menezes Appointed Director of SÃo Paulo’s Museu Afro Brasil

Curator and anthropologist Hélio Menezes has been named director of the Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo in São Paulo,ArtReviewreports. He succeeds Araujo (1940–2022), the institution’s founder, in the role. Menezes last year served as acocuratorof the Thirty-Fifth Bienal de São Paulo alongside Manuel Borja-Villel, Grada Kilomba, and Diane Lima.

He previously worked as a curator at Centro Cultural São Paulo and in 2021 organized a major exhibition of Afro Brazilian memorialist Carolina Maria de Jesus at Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo. In 2018, alongside Adriano Pedrosa, Ayrson Heráclito, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, and Tomás Toledo, he cocurated “Afro-Atlantic Histories”at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the Instituto Tomie Ohtake; the exhibition explored Black Brazilian culture through more than 450 works by artists working across the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries.

“I first entered the Museu Afro Brasil in 2005 and from that day it feels like I never left, as big as the impact it made on me,” said Menezes in a statement. “It was (and is) the most interesting museum, with the most stunning acquisitions, and the most unique exhibitions I’d ever seen. It was impossible not to give in to her charms. Since then, I have dedicated scientific enquiry, a master’s degree, a doctorate, countless lectures, articles, classes to the museum.” Menezes further asserted, “I am certain that the greatest legacy left by its founder, which today lends the institution its name, is the principle of change. It is an institution in constant transformation with all its wonders and contradictions.”

Menezes is expected to bring a more contemporary focus to the museum, which is home to a collection of six thousand works of Black art dating from the fifteenth century to the present day, much of it created by self-taught artists and by those working within folk or religious traditions.