Heitor Dos Prazeres (1898-1966) was a samba musician and self-taught painter in Rio de Janeiro. Son of a military musician and a seamstress, he grew up surrounded by Rio’s Afro-Brazilian music scene which was dominated by carnival. In his late ’30’s he developed an interest in painting and started portraying the life and culture he observed in the streets of Rio’s favelas, including mulatas dancing, people in neighborhood bars, and scenes from the genres of carnival and Rio’s extravagant downtown entertainment district. By the 1950’s he was a known and celebrated “naif” artist whose works today are included in private and museum collections all over Brazil, and the subject of several books and catalogs.
Carlos Garcia Huergo’s mysterious drawings combine images of human figures, birds or fantasy creatures with letters, names, numbers and mathematical and religious references. He thus creates a universe populated by inhabitants of his own inner environment which includes angels, devils and - always in the foreground - people, surrounded by text and mathematical symbols.
06/11/2018
Brazilian ex-voto sculptures - wooden heads, torsos, body parts - represent a special art form without “artists”. Made for generations by anonymous creators, men and women from rural communities who were never exposed to the concepts of art, three-dimensional ex-votos are unique to Brazil’s Northeast (“Nordeste”) - a world synonymous with poverty and backwardness.
05/22/2018
José Francisco Borges (J. Borges) lives and works in Bezerros, Pernambuco, Brazil where he was born in 1935. He is a self-taught woodcarver, woodblock printer and poet who started as an itinerant peddler of home-made illustrated chapbooks addressing popular themes, folk tales and legends native to the impoverished Northeast (Sertão). This unique art form - "literatura de cordel" (string literature) - consists of written verses and woodblock prints illustrating the rhymed stories. Traditionally, the cordel booklets were sold at country fairs and rural markets where they hung from a piece of string or clothesline.
I met Derek Webster by accident in 2001 when I got lost driving around South Chicago and made a wrong turn. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.
