Current Exhibition
Samba Sessão: Afro-Brazilian Art & Film
April 7 - July 29, 2012
FEATURED PROGRAMS
A series of related programs for In Material: Fiber 2012 will be offered this spring.- Saturday, March 3 (10:30 AM) | Gallery Talk with artists Lucy Arai and Mi-Kyoung Lee in conjunction with the Fiber Philadelphia 2012 opening weekend
- Weekly Film Series in the Sky Lounge of Harrison College House | all films begin at 7pm. Penn Card Holders Only. Free Brazilian Snacks and Pizza.
February 9th : Gabriela
February 16th : Bye Bye Brazil
February 23rd : Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
March 1st : Quilombo
March 15th : Kiss of the Spider Woman
March 22nd : Central Station
March 29th : Orfeo Negro
April 5th : Xica da Silva
For additional information and updates please check the Harrison website - March 22nd-25th: Dance Brazil at the Annenberg Center
For more than 30 years, Dance Brazil has thrilled audiences throughout the world with a dazzling fusion of Afro-Brazilian culture, live music, contemporary dance and Capoeira, the African dance/martial arts form that evolved in colonial Brazil as a means of fighting enslavement.
Website: http://www.pennpresents.org/tickets/?id=188
Student Ticket Info: http://www.pennpresents.org/tickets/college.php - March 27 (12:30 - 1:30 PM) at La Casa Latina | Lecture by Zeca Ligiero: "Dance, Soccer, and Capoeira: Afro-Brazilian Performance Fundamentals"
Zeca Ligiero is a theater/ video director and scholar specializing in Afro-Brazilian culture. He has taught at the University of Rio de Janeiro - where he founded the Graduate Theater Department - for the past 15 years. His lecture will explore the African origions of the three Brazilian passions: samba, football, and capoeira.
RSVP to wtamara@sas.upenn.edu by March 22
- April 13 (4:15 - 4:45 PM) | Bateria Drumming at the Gallery
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
The term "bateria" refers to the drum sections that participate in the samba school parades during Carnaval. Formed exclusively by percussion instruments, a bateria is the very essence of what makes Carnaval and its music so exciting. Members of the Whalasa Bateria are Wharton students led by instructor Alex Shaw.
- April 13 (5:00 - 7:00 PM) Inside the Arthur Ross Gallery | Opening Reception & Alô Brasil Performance
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
Philadelphia-based Brazilian ensemble Alô Brasil, led by Alex Shaw, has been performing popular Brazilian music to the tri-state region for over 10 years. Much of the band's repertoire is rooted in African-based rhythms such as samba, samba reggae, partido alto, maracatu, maculelê, and ijexá, among others. Featuring the music of Alô Brasil, the opening reception for the Samba Sessão exhibit will certainly be a celebratory occasion.
- April 13 & 14 at McNeil Center for Early American Studies | Symposium: "Polo S: Reorienting the Visual Culture of the Early Americas"
This international and interdisciplinary conference takes as its mission an exploratino of the theoretical, regional, methodological, and subjective problems encountered by scholars who are currently working on the visual and material culture of the southern United States, the Caribbean, and South America. For more information, please visit this website
- April 18 (4:30 - 5:30 PM) Outside the Arthur Ross Gallery | Capoeira Demonstration by FICA Philadelphia
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
Capoeira Angola is an African-Brazilian martial art and dance that evolved as a form of self-defense and cultural resistance to the oppressive institution of African slavery in colonial Brazil. A playful sparring involving style, wit, flexibility and strategy, Capoeira weaves intricate movements, spirituality, mental and physical discipline, oral tradition, song, percussion, and philosophy into a unique "game".
- April 18 (5:30 - 6:30 PM) Inside the Arthur Ross Gallery | Samba Dance Workshop by Angelica Cassimiro
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!
This Brazilian samba dance workshop led by Angelica Cassimiro introduces participants to samba no pé (basic samba step) and passo marcado (simple choreographies); samba styles typical of the Rio Carnaval. This workshop is accompanied by live drumming.
- Please consult the Gallery's Events Calendar for further details.
About the Exhibition:
The exhibition Samba Sessão will introduce viewers to the visual culture of African-descended people living in Brazil, the world’s fifth-largest country and a seldom exhibited and little studied area of Latin American art. Formerly home to the largest concentration of African slaves in the Americas and the longest lasting slave system in the Western Hemisphere, it has a rich artistic tradition. Collected in the late-1990s by John P. Axelrod and later acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the fifteen paintings and four sculptures that form the core of the exhibition were all made during the twentieth century and draw on different aspects of Afro-Brazilian life, from working in the fields to religious rituals and syncretic belief systems born from the experience of New World enslavement. An examination of Brazilian film and television from the 1950s to the present will also be incorporated in this exhibition.
This exhibition is being organized in cooperation with students in the Halpern-Rogath Curatorial Seminar supported by the Department of the History of Art and the Arthur Ross Gallery. The seminar is being taught by professors Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and Tamara J. Walker.
