In his essay Dialética da malandragem (Dialectics of Trickery) (1970), literary critic Antonio Candido analyzes the figure of the malandro (trickster) as a Brazilian literary figure, concluding that his malice is not intrinsic, but the result of the brutalities and injustices of life. I borrow the title of my dissertation from Candido’s essay, and I contend that the malandro, a bohemian and charismatic trickster who cleverly bends rules and out-smarts social conventions and adversaries, served as a model of resistance for artists working during the Brazilian military-civil dictatorship (1964-1985). Most studies about the malandro dismiss his Afro-Brazilian origin. In my framing, malandragem is fundamentally a legacy of colonialism and slavery, and intimately related to Exú, an extremely important deity in the Afro-Brazilian religious pantheon, the messenger that navigates between the world of the living and the orixás (gods). This divine trickster at once subverts and maintains order, opens and closes paths, and in so doing transcends boundaries and brings dynamism to life. God of crossroads, master of ambiguity and liminality, he symbolizes a Black culture of resistance against oppression. I argue that similarly to Exu, who moves between seemingly incompatible spheres, so artists during the dictatorship drew from local cultural traditions and blended them with international trends, reconciling the popular with the avantgarde. While the malandro has received scholarly attention in religious studies, music, literature, theater, cinema, popular culture and anthropology, this figure has not been explored with the deserved emphasis for what regards the visual arts. Examining the work by Heitor dos Prazeres, Hélio Oiticica, Abdias do Nascimento, Cildo Meireles, and Paulo Bruscky among others, this dissertation investigates the work by both Afro-Brazilian and Euro-Brazilian artists who incorporated marginal figures as subjects of their works, and more significantly, it illustrates how artists embraced marginal behaviors as a strategy to eschew censorship, challenge traditional art institutions, and expose the hypocrisy of the national motto “Order and Progress.”

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the leaders of Mexico’s governmental and imperial regimes employed French photographers to produce official imagery for the country. François Aubert (1829-1906) created thousands of cartes-de-visite portraits for Maximilian I (1832-1867) within the Second Mexican Empire (1864-1867). Aubert also photographed ethnographic ‘popular Mexican types’ and upon Maximilian’s execution in 1867 by firing squad, captured historical views of Maximilian post-mortem. In 1880-1910, left-wing dictator Porfirio Díaz (1830-1915) furthered Maximilian’s tradition of state-sponsored photography and commissioned Alfred ‘Abel’ Briquet (1833-1936) to produce albumen prints of his regime’s success; photographs of landscapes, ethnographic portraits, railroads, and Mexica sculpture within Porfirio’s new Gallery of Monoliths epitomized the regimes slogan of ‘order and progress’. The images created by Aubert and Briquet provided views of Mexico to a wide audience who would construct an imaginary image of Mexico that shaped the nation’s reception and perception thereafter. Through historical and formal analysis and calling upon post-colonial methodologies, I critically engage with the works of François Aubert and Alfred ‘Abel’ Briquet as propagandistic productions of Mexican views during their respective historical moments. I argue that these photographs venerated imperial and governmental control over Indigenous Mexicans and Mesoamerican visual culture. Throughout this Master’s thesis, I work towards a connected art history by laying out multiple visual lineages centering around Aubert and Briquet’s imagined views of Mexico during the Second Mexican Empire and the Porfiriato to consider the relationship between their propagandistic photography and imperial power.

Historically the dehumanizing rhetoric and enactment of racist federal policies within the United States surrounding immigration at the U.S.- Mexico border by government leaders has always been a point of contention for the Latinx community and American society. Within the Latinx community, many have been shaped and deeply impacted by immigration, either as immigrants themselves or as children of immigrants. Some contemporary Latinx artists have incorporated these experiences into their artistic practice. The display method in which they present alternative narratives and the re-presentation of the brown immigrant within museum and gallery spaces furthers the need for the institutions to hold difficult conversations about their role and position on this critical issue; the artists refuse to allow the art spaces to be neutral.

Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands theory I can conduct an analysis of identity that lacks anxiety over its origins and its complexity emerges from an emphasis on process. Karen Mary Davalos’ Remixing framework aides in questioning historical context of art history structures, methods, and institutions to displace hegemonic notions. I have selected artists based on their material use and the disruption the display enacts within traditional art spaces relationship with the rhetoric surrounding immigrants. All the works selected contain a hidden narrative that demonstrates the strength, bravery, and resistance that immigrants embody, rafa esparza’s Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field at the 2017 Whitney Biennial and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s CARNE y ARENA: (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible).

During the second half of the twentieth century, Brazilian society struggled with dictatorship, power struggles, and the HIV epidemic. Nevertheless, it was in these years, particularly the 1970’s-1990’s, when gay male artists in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo began experimenting with various media as a form of expressing their sexual identities. While much attention has been paid lately to networks of queer artists in white American and Chicanx communities, scholarship on Brazilian gay artists from this era tends to look at them in isolation, if at all. Through a combination of biographical and formal analysis, I assess the works of Alair Gomes, Hudinilson, Jr., and Leonilson as innovative appropriations of existing mediums for transgressively queer purposes. These artists are each case studies of a distinct moment in Brazilian history: the dictatorship, Gay Liberation, and the AIDS crisis. Through this masters thesis, I begin a project which begins to put these artists into conversation with each other as contemporaries.