The late Amazonian artist Francisco “Chico” da Silva (1910 - 1985) said that “[t]he drawing is what the hand gives and the color is what the details ask for. A house is engineering, while painting is autonomy.” Chico da Silva spent his youth in the Brazilian state of Acre, and as a mature artist drew on the Indigenous cosmologies he grew up with. Swiss art critic Jean-Pierre Chabloz, whom Chico met in the 1940s, championed Chico for his naivete and hailed his “primitive” approach. Chabloz publicly reversed his support of Chico after Chico opened his own studio and began to work in the same ways as Western artists with similar markets and acclaim. This double standard has always existed for Indigenous artists, whose cultures are often exploited and romanticized for an erroneously perceived naïvete. We at Shin Gallery are excited to push against this trend with our exhibition: Drawing Life: Indigenous Amazonia and the Universal Eye – a show which draws parallels between Indigenous Amazonian Drawing and Outsider Art.
Chico da Silva’s insightful quotation allows us to engage with Indigenous Amazonian drawing on more conscious and respectful terms. The Amazon Basin is roughly 2.5 million square miles and covers a diverse range of ecosystems including the Amazon Rainforest, the Brazilian Highlands, the Guiana Highlands, and the foothills of the Andes. The Amazon Basin’s populations are just as diverse as its geographies, and the area was once home to between 3 and 5 million people divided into countless tribes. Colonialism and deforestation have driven these tribes deeper inland and decimated their populations; It is estimated that only 200,000 Indigenous people still live according to their cultural traditions in the Amazon Basin. Luckily we can glimpse into these tribes’ cultures and world views with the help of anthropologists such as Dr. Lucia Haggensen and Dr. Nairo Garcia Pinheiro, who furnished the Indigenous peoples they encountered with art materials.
Drs. Haggensen and Pinheiro collected hundreds of drawings produced by the Yanomami, Mehinaku, and Bororó tribes during their research trips. Despite these tribes being different in many ways, their work is united by a similar vibrancy and relationship to the Animistic spiritual practices which guide their daily lives and define their relationship with the Amazon itself. The drawings take the minutiae of daily life as subject, but suffuse the common with a unique surrealist style. This means that although the subjects in these drawings are common garbs and artifacts, they are rendered in myriad styles including geometrical designs, anthropomorphic figures, mythological or supernatural beings, zoomorphic figures, and landscapes. At times, these works draw parallels to Picasso, Claudia Andujar, Man Ray, and other Modern masters, but they are free from art-historical traditions and anchors. The structural and thematic independence of these drawings furnishes them with the kind of liberatory autonomy present in Chico da Silva’s quote.
Although these works occupy a space all their own, similarities to movements in Western art appear in force. The work of artists like Carla Prina, a key figure in the Altamira movement, offers a perfect compliment to these drawings from the Amazon Basin. Prina’s works speak to something universally human, to the same instincts that members of the Yanomami, Mehinaku, and Bororó tribes felt moved to when they received drawing materials. These Amazonian works also shine next to several Outsider artists, namely Purvis Young, James Castle, Bill Traylor, and Ernest Mancoba. This suite of artists worked disconnected from the art world and its infinite speculation, so it should come as no surprise that they took on themes and styles reflective of their communities. Displaying these works side by side allows us to reevaluate the primitivist reputation of Indigenous Amazonian drawing so that we might consider these works with the same level of attention and consideration as any other artistic genre.