A Mão do Povo : Appropriations du populaire dans l’art des femmes brésiliennes des années 1970

Abstract

This essay examines artworks of the 1970s by Regina Vater, Lygia Pape, and Anna Bella Geiger, that adopted « popular » cultural forms including folk art, handicrafts, and Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian rituals and customs. It examines how these white, urban, middle-class women deployed references to the popular and the « feminine » in their works in ambivalent ways that negotiated the complex boundaries between primitivism, cultural appropriation, and anthropophagy, terms which this paper seeks to unpack through theorizations of race and identity by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Suely Rolnik.

Keywords

• the popular
• women’s art
• appropriation
• anthropophagy
• Brazil
• 20th century