Sacred Art: Catholic Saints and Candomblé Gods in Modern Brazil
Join Us: Lecture, Book Signing & Refreshments
Folklorists Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla Present an Illustrated Lecture on the People’s Art of Brazil, based on their monumental new book:
Sacred Art: Catholic Saints and Candomblé Gods in Modern Brazil
Saturday, December 2, 2PM
Free, Open to the Public
Unlimited Free Parking
Books Available for Purchase
São Benedito by Edival and Izaura Rosas, Salvador, Brazil.
Yemanjá by Francisco Santos, Salvador, Brazil.
Sacred art flourishes today in northeastern Brazil, where European and African religious traditions have interacted for centuries. Professional artists in the Northeast create images of the Catholic saints and the African gods of Candomblé to meet the needs of a vast market of believers and art collectors.
Over the past decade, Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla, folklorists trained in anthropology, have conducted intense ethnographic research in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco, interviewing the artists at length, photographing their processes and products, attending Catholic and Candomblé services, and finally creating a comprehensive book, governed by the understandings of the artists themselves.
Nossa Senhora Desatadora dos Nós by Rosalvo Santana, Maragojipinho, Brazil.
Beginning with Edival Rosas who carves monumental baroque statues for churches, and ending with Francisco Santos who paints images of the gods that hang in Candomblé terreiros, the book displays the diversity of Brazilian artistic techniques and religious interpretations. At the same time, enhancing their findings with comparisons from previous fieldwork on art and religion in the United States, Nigeria, Portugal, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, and Japan, Glassie and Shukla gesture toward an encompassing theology of power and beauty that brings unity into the spiritual art of the world’s people.
Author Bios
Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla by Sergio Perboni, Salvador, Brazil.
Henry Glassie, College Professor Emeritus at Indiana University, has received many awards for his work, including the Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies for a distinguished career of humanistic scholarship. Three of his eighteen books — Passing the Time in Ballymenone, The Spirit of Folk Art, and Turkish Traditional Art Today — were named among the notable books of the year by the New York Times.
Pravina Shukla, Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, is the author of The Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India, which won the Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies, and the Davenport Award of the Costume Society of America. More recently she published Costume: Performing Identities through Dress and co-authored The Individual and Tradition: Folkloristic Perspectives.