BRUMADINHO.- At the center of the Inhotim Institute, a contemporary art museum here, are four golden yellow partitions. An homage to the Afro-Brazilian deity Oxum, the walls represent spiritual and material wealth. They stand apart from the stark white framework of the Mata Gallery, which contains them.

As boldly colorful as the partitions, the works hanging on the newly painted walls are the realization of a dream held for decades by Afro-Brazilian artist and civil rights activist Abdias do Nascimento. He wanted to open a discussion on the aesthetics of Blackness in a country where over half the population is Black, highlighting the worth of the often-undervalued work of Black artists and of those addressing the representation of Black culture in their works — by making it more visible. He envisioned the Black Art Museum (Museu de Arte Negra), and began collecting pieces to fill it, but after years in exile during a military dictatorship in Brazil, he died in 2011 before his plan could be carried out.

His widow, Elisa Larkin Nascimento, kept the flame alive with the Institute for Afro-Brazilian Research and Studies (IPEAFRO) in Rio de Janeiro, which she and her husband started in 1981. It now cares for the Black Art Museum’s archive. “Black art has always been seen as something secondary,” said Larkin Nascimento, director of the institute. “It has always been linked to folklore or handicrafts, and all those kinds of adjectives that are usually applied to something seen as ‘lesser than.’”

In 2020, everything changed. Bernardo Paz, founder and owner of Inhotim, contacted Larkin Nascimento about working together to finally provide the Black Art Museum with a temporary home.

“I confess, to me, it seemed like something magical,” Larkin Nascimento said.

They agreed that over the next two years, Inhotim would facilitate the discussion that Abdias do Nascimento always wanted to have about the influence of the African tradition on the visual arts.

More than 70 years after it was conceived, the Black Art Museum, for the first time, has a physical space where the paintings, drawings, photographs and installations Nascimento collected can be seen. Even a temporary existence is a milestone for the people behind the effort and for Black artists.

The works depict everything from Oxum herself, which, like the partitions, represent spiritual and material wealth, to the enslaved people who were forced to labor during Brazil’s centurieslong search for gold.

These works are the legacy of the original Museu de Arte Negra, or MAN, which was conceived in 1950 as the outgrowth of the Black Experimental Theater under the guidance of Abdias do Nascimento, who was then inspired to explore other forms of art.

Nascimento first started painting in 1968 — four years into Brazil’s two-decade military dictatorship — when a friend, poet Efraín Tomás Bó, challenged him to create his own art. That same year, he participated in an exchange program that took him to the United States, where he met leaders of the civil rights and Black Arts movements, visited the Black Panthers’ headquarters in Oakland, California, and participated in demonstrations in America against South African apartheid and the Vietnam War.

During his exile in the United States, he stayed for some time at the New York apartment of painter Ann Bagley. There, he used matchsticks and his friend’s leftover paint to continue creating his art.

But when it came time for Nascimento to return to Brazil, the military regime had already shut down Congress and suspended guarantees of constitutional rights, a move that opened the way to the institutionalization of torture, which was common during the dictatorship. As a result, Nascimento, who was the subject of several military police investigations for his activism, lived in exile in the United States and Nigeria until 1981.

“An amazing thing happened to me,” Nascimento, who wrote in Portuguese, once said of his time in the United States, according to the institute. “Blocked by English, I developed a new form of communication. I discovered that I had another form of language within myself: I discovered that I could paint; and by painting I would be able to show what verbiage no one would say. An experience difficult to explain. The most appropriate thing is to say that the orixás have descended and that I paint in a state of intimate communication with the orixás,” he said, mentioning the deities in the Candomblé religion, which was long practiced clandestinely in Brazil.

During his exile, he held his first exhibition, which took place at the Harlem Art Gallery. It included the work he had made during his exile and paintings he had brought from Brazil.

Now, the Black Art Museum exhibition at Inhotim, which will run through December 2023, will show some of those pieces again, as well as several others he painted and collected from other artists over the years, hoping one day he would find them a permanent home.

The first act, titled “Tunga, Abdias Nascimento and the Museu de Arte Negra,” introduces museumgoers to the Black Art Museum, Nascimento and his friendship with renowned Brazilian sculptor Tunga, who in 1968 said, “for me, Black art was the first to break the shackles of the saturated Renaissance images.”

Others whose works are part of the Black Art Museum archive include sculptors José Heitor da Silva and Chico Tabibuia, known for working with wood, an important tradition in Black Brazilian art.

Through its partnership with Inhotim, the institute has started shifting the focus away from the usual Eurocentric perspective of Brazilian museums.

For Julio Menezes Silva, a coordinator at IPEAFRO and curator of the Black Art Museum, its communication with the museum was crucial to the project’s success, and so were the conversations the two institutions had with the local quilombo communities — settlements originally established by people who had escaped slavery.

“We arrived at Inhotim with the idea of dialoguing with the territories around the museum and with leaders from territories in and around Belo Horizonte,” he said of the capital of the state, Minas Gerais. “And we asked them, ‘What should we do with this space? How should we occupy this space over the next two years?’”

Douglas de Freitas, a curator at Inhotim, explained that the residents of the quilombo settlements “always had access to the museum, but this has opened a door to much better communication.”

Although many of the details of the coming acts are still under wraps, Larkin Nascimento said the next two phases of the Black Art Museum at Inhotim will have a link to nature, a central component of the Candomblé religion. Inhotim is home to a botanical garden.

The museum is also working with religious experts to properly care for the sacred objects on display in the Black Art Museum’s collection and hopes to organize more in-person events, such as Afro-Brazilian religious ceremonies, pandemic restrictions permitting, de Freitas said.

Nascimento said the Black Art Museum “was the museum of the future,” said Deri Andrade, an assistant curator at Inhotim and lead researcher of Projeto Afro, a platform built to map and promote Black artists across Brazil. “And now what we have is an encounter with his legacy.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.