Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

ICA Miami’s spring 2025 Art + Research seminar series focuses on the arts and culture of Afro-Brazil as part of the center’s interest in the global cultural legacies of the African diaspora. These seminars take the late Afro-Brazilian painter Rubem Valentim (b. 1922, Salvador, Brazil; d. 1991, São Paulo) as a starting point and are grounded in the artist’s experimentation in geometric abstraction, high modernism and the spiritual and popular traditions of Afro-Brazil. Building from Valentim’s engagement with Afro-Brazilian culture, these seminars will think about the social and cultural context of Afro-Brazil across the modern and contemporary era, the persisting legacies of African slavery in Brazil, the question of racial violence today, the historical and contemporary transformations in religion, ritual and ancestrality, and the impact of Afro-Brazilian culture on contemporary art and urban life. Scholarly and artistic perspectives will span art history and anthropology, as well as curatorial and performance studies.