A fundamental figure in the history of artistic education in Brazil, a field to which she has dedicated herself for almost 70 years, Ana Mae Barbosa is now the subject of an exhibition. The 67th edition of the “occupations” – exhibitions that Itaú Cultural dedicates to emblematic figures of national culture – revisits her personal and professional trajectory, illuminating her path from her formative years in Recife, through her experience with the Escolinhas de Arte (a movement that came to congregate 144 units throughout the country) and her intense activity with several museology, education and art institutions. In an interview with Arte!Brasileiros, the researcher talks about her work and reiterates the transformative power of art and the essential role of images in the broad, democratic and critical formation of the individual.
You have almost 70 years of career, with more than 30 books published. How was this process of reviewing your trajectory?
It was very mobilizing and questioning; I wouldn't say it was enjoyable. I often wondered about the energy spent on things that didn't continue, about things that are no longer possible, like doing research abroad, for example. In other words, it was a kind of nourishment to keep going, in this period of greater fragility, to keep myself from being completely overcome by inertia. But I keep dreaming, and dreaming is good.
How did the triangular approach, with an emphasis on the idea of contextualization, emerge, which you develop as a way of expanding art education for everyone?
I started working with children until I was about 11 years old. After that, it was kind of difficult. The children were incredibly self-critical, saying, “I’m not good at drawing, I’m going to give it up.” They didn’t pay any attention to what we said, saying that this was a normal phase. The question was: how can we make art continue to be a companion for these children in adulthood? How can we make them continue to expand their minds through art, if they don’t see art? Only making art was valued. That’s when I started thinking about what to do to enable expansion, how to make it possible for, for example, a bank employee who spends all day in a bank looking after other people’s money, to be able to enjoy art when he goes home to a small apartment, and let himself be touched by it. So I added a third element: contextualization. That was the great discovery, almost like the yeast of making and the yeast of seeing art. Because in context, you will have to ask yourself why you did it, where does what you do come from, what you do today with what you did yesterday, and this exercise is much bigger. This image thing really got to me.
Why and how does Brazil adopt the term Art Education?
It emerged in the 1940s, around 1948, when the first Little School of Art was created. With Augusto Rodrigues and Margareth Spencer, an American teacher who started the first little school with him, in a library in Rio de Janeiro. She thought we had a habit of copying foreign countries and that we had an extraordinary culture, which mixed European codes with Afro-indigenous codes and that it made no sense for us to be copying the institutionalization of other people's cultures. I suspect that this is the reason, because the literal translation of the term “art education” would be artistic education. Things evolved and, in the 1960s, Mrs. Noemia Varela and I began to use a hyphen in Art-education. Recently, about 25 years ago, a linguist told a student of mine that the hyphen gives more value to the first word. And that's when I started using the slash.
Why would it allow for a greater balance between the terms?
Exactly. But I find this variety of terms interesting. It also reveals a variety of approaches. I think that's important.
Is it increasingly difficult to establish this connection between people who are not from the art world? How can you overcome this challenge?
Only in practice. There's no way around it! Contemporary art is not easy to understand. In fact, it's much easier for children, because they naturally understand these movements – like putting a chair on top of a refrigerator; they do these operations constantly. Research has been done on how much and how people see. What is the relationship between seeing art and the level of education of that person? They came to the conclusion that there is no relationship. A person with a university degree may have tremendous difficulty seeing art, and a person with less formal education may have a much richer reading experience. It's the frequency of seeing images that matters. I did some research at the Sumaré subway station, with that work by Alex Flemming. It's very interesting, because the first way to explain art, to read art, is to always bring up something you've seen before. For example, a geographer saw that and said it was a photo of all the people who worked on that subway, because when she was in a hotel in Bahia she had seen a photo there of all the workers who worked on that construction site. She had to remember another experience with images to understand that one. While a street vendor looked at it and said to me: “I think it’s the Brazilian people.” He went further, he dared to interpret. It’s a second-degree reading, in which the object separates itself from the subject who is seeing it and says something to him.
The development of creativity as a space of freedom?
That's right, without freedom there is no creative development. Understanding images is increasingly important for the development of the mind. There is a lot of research showing that reading images develops intelligence. Art develops not only creativity, not only visual perception, which is something very important and you don't get it in schools. In fact, even in academic areas — such as final projects with ghostwriting masterwork (German expression meaning “ghost writing of a master’s thesis”) — creativity and visual perception can make all the difference. What is really missing is a conviction that art is important.
You say that your first request for a Capes grant was denied on the grounds that this field of research did not exist. And today it is a solid, well-established field. How do you see this evolution?
What we had before was teaching drawing. Rui Barbosa's program, based on Walter Smith's program, was drawing, with a lot of geometry due to the positivist influence. Art only became mandatory in education in Brazil in 1971-73, with the Law of Guidelines and Bases. And now they're taking it away again. And in high school, which is totally absurd. In adolescence you get completely dizzy, some treat you like a child, others treat you like an adult. Hormones are raging. We always hear: "we have other priorities". Then I ask: "What are they?!". They answer: "literacy!" I retort that art is very important for this. For example, the words "lata" and "bola" look the same. Because they are one tall and one short letter, interspersed. The child sees the same configuration. But those who work a lot with art, with drawing, even if they are just starting to scribble, will start to understand the interlineation and will immediately be able to distinguish words because of the t-stroke.
Do you think the situation is better in museums?
The museum has improved a lot. Not at MAC, where I left 25 years ago. When I left there, I left 14 art educators, each with a research project. I used to say: in a university, those who don't do research are not important. Now there are only two art educators. MAE also has only two art educators. We are creating a bunch of people who are illiterate when it comes to images, which is a very important language.
Returning to the exhibition: did you actively participate in the selection of what would be displayed?
I didn't get involved. Clarissa Diniz (the curator) did everything herself. I only asked for two photos to be included. One with my teacher, or rather, my tutor, Eliot Eisner, the American who at the time was considered the greatest art educator in the world. One day he simply heard a lecture of mine and never stopped. We corresponded, he gave me guidance, even if not formally. He was president of the International Society for Education through Art and, when he was about to leave, he wanted me to replace him. It was during the Collor era, and it was impossible to leave the country without paying just to leave. He ended up convincing me, as shown in the letter there, from him urging me to accept. And another, of me and my husband, taken by Alex Flemming, which was the last photo of him. The rest was all the work of her and her team of very competent researchers.
I found it interesting to choose to include emotional elements in the exhibition, such as her collection of necklaces, which are somewhat of her trademark.
This was an old idea from Regina Machado, a good friend of mine who was my student. I really have a thing for necklaces. I used to wear a lot of big earrings, but as I got older I started to unconsciously wear big necklaces. There are a lot of them. It's kind of crazy. I started buying one everywhere I went and then my friends started giving me lots of necklaces. There are 700! I just found out that they counted and photographed them all and the curator chose some to put in the exhibition. The same thing happens with my caricatures. I have a lot of them because students usually give me drawings as gifts at the end of classes. Maybe my face is good for caricatures.
