Jonathas de Andrade’s A Study of Race and Class – Bahia >< New York reimagines the 1952 UNESCO-commissioned report “Race and Class in Rural Brazil” within New York City, creating an ethnographic experiment where the audience participates as both viewers and subjects.

Andrade often elicits participants to engage in the realization of his art, presenting them in abstracted forms and altered scenes situated within the context of their work and communities. Interweaving the audience’s qualitative and quantitative data from chance encounters and a ‘photography studio’, A Study of Race and Class – Bahia >< New York raises questions about social constructs and how they subsist in our everyday lives. Andrade’s process uses performance as a means to evolve a relation to other individuals that is sometimes fictional, always ambiguous, and necessarily culpable. He investigates universal questions such as love, desire, and modernity through the radical specificity of individual lives and local culture. All the while he points to larger questions about perception and relation, Brazilian culture and society, and the ways in which they have been popularly constructed through various imaginaries, including Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre’s seminal 1933 book Casa-Grande & Senzala (The Masters & the Slaves).  

For this project, de Andrade invites persons of color (mixed race, African descent, non-white, etc.) to sit for photographic portraits. All participants will be granted a copy of their portrait. Sign up here!

Curated by Adrienne Edwards. 

Image credit: Jonathas de Andrade, O Levante still, 2012-2013; courtesy of Vermelho Gallery, Brazil. Jonathas de Andrade, Educação para Adultos, 2010; photo courtesy of the artist and Alexander Bonin, New York.