I am going to divide my life in 5 parts according the context I lived
1-Basic Formation years –
2-The Years of the Dictatorship-
3-MA / Ed. D and after -
4-The Direction of the Museum of Contemporary Art. -
5-After the Retirement –
Death and the politics of my country punctuated my life.
Formation Years
I was born in Rio de Janeiro, but the first perversity of life with me was to take me away from this wonderful city.
My father who was an electric engineer educated in the United States, at the University of Chicago, died when I was 3 years old. My mother, who never worked before, got a job in a much smaller town in the Northwest of Brazil, Recife near by the State of Alagoas where her parents lived, but unhappily she died when I was 6 years old. I had no brothers and no sisters. After my mother died I went to live in a large house in Alagoas with my grand parents. It was a kind of farm in the urban area. I could have dogs, chickens, etc Raising crabs was my great entertainment. I even had for few days in a cage an alligator caught at a lagoon(lake) we had in our property .I lived my childhood in a paradise of fruits and free space but alone, without kids around. I learned to read alone. My grand father had a very good library, then when they noticed that I could read I had already read some books not appropriated for kids.
Since the first grade till the 7th grade I studied in Catholic Schools. One was so nice that I wanted to be a nun myself, but for economical reason it closed the doors. The second one was the opposite. It was so much driven by the values of money and status that made me to fight with my grandmother in order to move to a public school. I was enjoying some freedom of education in the Public School when again my life was changed by death. My grandfather died. It was impossible for my grandmother at that time already an old women and a teenager (I was 14 years old) to live alone in a house and a land that big in the suburbs of the city. My uncle who lived in Recife took us to live there. I went to a very good public school and despite the tutored life of the adolescents that time I had a festive teenager experience thanks to the large family of my aunt, the wife of my uncle. Her brother used to take me everywhere with his daughters, the same age than me. I am still friend of them. One, Clarice, I admire very much. She studied art/education after an unhappy marriage, already mother of three children. Four years ago I was very happy to go to Recife to see her receiving the biggest Award in Art Education of the State of Pernambuco.
In our time it was not usual young woman to go to the University. It was a fight to convince my grandmother to accept my desire to study at the University. At that time there was only 3 important courses to be followed by a top student: Medicine, Law and Engineering. I tried first to get the support of my grandmother to study Medicine. For moral reasons she prohibited. How could a woman to see naked bodies side by side her male classmates? Then I decided to study Law, but I needed money to pay my studies what my grandmother refused. Nobody in the family had courage to help me. According my grandmother I had to work in order to study, but the only work acceptable for woman in my social class, old upper class economically decadent, was teaching. I had a high school diploma (a kind of Normal School Diploma) that allowed me to teach primary school, but my whole family knew that I hated the idea to became a teacher since the time they choose that modality of high school for me. Nobody would ever imagine that I would accept to teach in order to pay the preparation course to enter at the Law School. But, I did and that was my great luck in life. In order to get a place to teach at public Schools, that paid very well that time, it was necessary to pass in a hard examination. I took a temporary teaching job to pay a preparation course for the annual examination and the organizer of the course was Paulo Freire and his wife Elza Freire.In the first day he asked to us to write an essay explaining why we wanted to be teachers. I wrote explaining why I was being forced to teach, in order to get money to study at the University. In the next class he commented all the essays except mine. At the end I ask for it and he told me
_With you I want to talk in private.
We set up an appointment and after talking with him for 3 hours I left convinced that education could be a process of freedom and not what I had. Paulo Freire converted me to education. In his course I discovered Art Education with a teacher, Noemia Varela who was Director of the Escolinha de Arte where Paulo Freire was the President of the Board. He was not nationally famous yet but was already locally very influential. He and Eunice Robalinho, the mother of a friend of mine kept stimulating me to take the examination to enter in the Law School.
1956 was a very successful year for me. I got the second place in both examinations: for the Law school and for the Public School System and I got a boyfriend who became my husband. We are married for 42 years. We have a son who is a poet with 4 books already published and a National Prize of Poetry and a daughter who is art educator and artist and mother of our only granddaughter (one-year-old), Ana Lia, our great passion.
Life was going very well, I married and I choose to teach at the Escolinha de Arte de Recife with Noemia Varela and Paulo Freire as guides when again death changed my life. My mother in law, already a widow, died leaving seven kids. Nobody asked me if I would be able to take care of them. Because my husband was the oldest son and the only one married it was taken for granted that we should have the responsibility to raise the kids.
I was persistent in continuing to work and I believe that the work at the Escolinha saved my life that it was a hell at that time.
The Escolinha de Arte do Recife belonged to the Movement Escolinhas de Arte led by Augusto Rodrigues , an artist. It was the first institutionalization of Modernist Art Education in Brazil. The first Escolinha was created in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of the country at that time. When I begun to work the Movement had 12 branches, but when I created in 1965 the Escolinha de Arte de Brasilia ,in the new Capital of Brazil ,there was already 32 Escolinhas. I got a high position at the Escolinha of Recife after Noemia Varela went to work at the Escolinha of Rio de Janeiro. I took charge of the activities of the Escolinha with the Federal University of Pernambuco, including the teaching of one discipline in Art Education. Herbert Read and Lowenfeld were the dominant authors in our courses for teachers.
After surviving for 6 years the pressure of my husband’s family, specially aunts and uncles that never helped but created battles to involve us, my life begun to be directed by the politics of the country under a very hard military dictatorship.
The Years of the Dictatorship- after 64
Despite my husband and I never had been involved with real politics we had friends involved and it was very sad for us to see our friends in jail or leaving the country.
For example, Paulo Freire left the jail to go to the exile in Chile. In 1965 we decided to accept jobs at the, the University of Brasília, a new one. His creator, the educator Anisio Teixeira, had been John Dewey’s student. We took with us our kid , one brother and 2 sisters of my husband, a large family for an young couple. But, despite the difficulties I was fascinated to live in an Oscar Niemeyer’s building.
At the University of Brasília I created one Escolinha de Arte. It took 8 months to prepare the building and the teachers. It was a fantastic experience. Everything in the little school should be good design. The Dean of the Institute of Art was a “bauhausian” architect, Alcides da Rocha Miranda. There, I organized the first conference on Art Education in a Brazilian university.
However, one week before the inauguration of the Escolinha the Army invaded the Campus of the University and closed it. All the 230 teachers were fired .I went back to Recife pregnant, to have my daughter. My colleagues at Escolinha were very nice but the whole atmosphere of the town was very repressive.
We decided to move to São Paulo , a bigger city. There, my first job was to teach art in a Montessori Primary School but soon I got together with a group to create an Escolinha de Arte.
It was an experimental school. We research on teaching through projects and on interdisciplinarity among the Arts. In my first book Theory and Practice of Art Education (1975) I have a chapter on our researches. Paulo Freire, already at Geneva, provided guidance and books. His daughter worked with me. The only disturbance in life was an illness of my son that marked my soul very profoundly. I am sure that he would not have survived without sequels if we had not living in São Paulo, a more advanced medical center. To be conscious of this fact helped me to adapt and to love São Paulo.
This time, the family effort concentrated on giving conditions to my husband write his doctoral dissertation.
My first encounter with the international community of Art education was in 1970, in the Congress of INSEA in Coventry, England, organized by the president of INSEA, Eleanor Hipwell. I could not read my paper because my English was terrible, as it still is. A Brazilian teacher, Lea Elliot read it for me. I could not interchange with international colleagues but the congress stimulated me a lot to pursue further studies. We were more or less 12 Brazilians at the Congress. We founded at Coventry a Brazilian branch of INSEA, the SOBREART. The president, self-elected, was the wife of the governor of Rio de Janeiro (choose by the dictator) who was there representing the Escolinha de Arte of Augusto Rodrigues. She was president for 14 years, using the association only for her sake.
MA / Ed. D and after -
In 1971, I begun to look to as enroll in a masters program in Brazil. The prejudice against Art Education was terrible. A historian opened a small possibility for me. She would accept me in the masters program if I worked alone because she didn’t know anything on Art Education.
However my husband got a kind of post doctoral fellowship to go to Yale University .I tried in Brazil a fellowship but I received a the letter of the Ministery of Education saying that they didn’t recognize Art Education as a field of research. I keep this letter until today .At Yale I was happy to be invited to collaborate in the program of Portuguese. I gave a course on Brazilian Culture, than I got enough money to pay my fees at Southern Connecticut State College.
At the begin I had a schizophrenic experience. At Yale the upper class students treated me as a queen. Every end of class one of the students invited me to lunch, they offer to get books at the library and so on while at the middle class Southern Connecticut State College the Dean received me asking, very politely;
-May I ask you who is going to pay your course?
I said
Myself .
Then he went on
It is my obligation to advise you that probably you are going to waste your money because I know that the education standards of South America are very low and our standards very high.
I am going to try, I answered.
I had some difficult to be accepted by the colleagues. I was transparent for them. I didn’t exist. Probably, they saw me was one Latin American more to compete with them. I had two wonderful teachers at Southern Connecticut State College: George Harrington, who was my adviser and helped me to overcome the resistance of my classmates and Robert Saunders, my dear friend for many years. I never took a course with Robert Saunders but Harrington recommended me to look for his advice for my thesis on History of Art Education in Brazil: from the origins to the Modernism.
Years later (1984) he helped me to organize the first Conference on History of Art Education advising me to invite Arthur Efland and Foster Wygan. It anteceded few months the 1st Penn State Conference on History of Art Education. I organized two more on History, one in 1986 in Bahia and other at the University of São Paulo in 1989.
At the end of the first semester of the Master’s Program George Harrington indicated me to represent the SCSC, with my paper for his discipline, at the Insea World Congress at Zagreb. This time I could read and discuss my paper but I had little contact with the colleagues. My kids had a food intoxication that took them to the hospital in Zagreb.
Back to Brazil I published my thesis and I won a dispute to teach at the University of São Paulo that needed some one to teach 2 disciplines on Art Education in the new course of Licenciatura em Artes Plásticas, created by the Federal Government to prepare teachers for Art Education, subject made compulsory by Law from the 1st till the 8th grade. (1971)
In 1977 my husband got a Guggenheim Fellowship and chooses to go to Harvard. Even without fellowship myself, I iniciated my studies for the doctoral degree at Boston University, in the Program of Humanistic Education ( it doesn’t exists any more) They didn’t have Doctoral Degrees in Art Education at BU that time. A Foundation in São Paulo(FAPESP) paid the tuition. It was a tour de force. I took all the 12 courses, and submitted my dissertation proposal in one year, because my husband could stay only one year away from São Paulo. In Brazilian Culture at that time we could not conceive that a woman could stay away from home alone in benefit of her career. Back to the work in São Paulo I wrote the dissertation on American Influence on Brazilian Art Education: Walter Smith and John Dewey. Within six months I came back for the examination. I rushed this time because USP promised me to create a Graduate course in Art Education as soon as I had my doctoral degree .I was the first doctor in Art Education in Brazil and the only one for 10 years.
However the creation of the line of research in Art Education in the graduate program in Arts, was possible only in 1983 and in 1989 my first students got their doctoral degrees. One of the more brilliants of them, Regina Machado, in charge of Art Education, Graduate, Undergraduate and Extention programs at USP after I retired in 1995.
In Brazil we have today 18 graduate programs in Art Education. Most of them created by ex students at the University of São Paulo.. To get a place in those programs is a fight because we have more or less 132 undergraduate courses around the country.
My impression about American Universities changed a lot for better after my experience at Boston University. It was Paulo Freire who advised me to study there because he knew my political worries. The teachers were politically informed and social concern was always present in the classrooms. I was puzzled, or the United States had changed very much in 5 years or Boston University was really different from the nice formalism of Yale and the competitiveness of SCSC. To be a foreign Student at BU was challenging, teachers and colleagues frequently questioned on equal rights, racism, poverty, etc in both countries. Respect for plurality, even theoretical was an imperative. I have the fantasy that Multiculturalism in the USA begun at BU. At least my Multiculturalism begun there. I became friend of a great teacher, Nancy Smith who sent me to take courses at Mass College of Art. Al Hurwitz , that time directing Art Education at Newton Public Schools was very friendly .He invited me to write my first article for a magazine in English and my first chapter in a book in English. The article was published in the journal Art Education. The chapter “Brazil: emphasis on the new” published in the book Art in Education: an international perspective. It gave some trouble to the editors Al Hurwitz and Robert Ott because the publisher thought it was too much political. That time in the United States relationships between Art Education and real politics were not a concern. But Robert Ott defended my chapter under the argument of international differences. In my doctoral year besides to study a lot I gave several lectures at BU , at Harvard and other places on Art and Culture in Brazil. At that time people in the United States were interest in Latin America.
In 1980 the dictatorship was at its end. The government was military but we had not torture any more. The sectors of education were politically and conceptually disorganized than I dared to try to organize the Art Educators. I asked to the director of the School of Communications and Arts, a man allied to the dictatorship, permission and money to organize a seminar on Art Education, very modestly designated Art and Teaching Week. He agreed because, as he told me afterwards, he thought that art education would interest only few people Therefore he figured out a small meeting. We had 3.000 art educators from all over the country. Paulo Freire who was coming from the exile opened the Conference and we created the first State Association of Art Education. I traveled a lot around the country to create other States Associations. For this Conference I got great support from the colleagues who worked in Communications, specially the journalists. They always helped more Art Education at USP than the artists and art historians
My post doctoral studies on Marion Richardson I develop in England in 1982 It was the first time I left the family and I stayed alone in Birmingham for six months. It was a difficult but reconstructive experience. Before that I never could think that I could live alone. My husband and my 15 years daughter came to stay with me for the last six months. It was the first time that my husband followed me, a very difficult situation because he was accustomed to be the person who counts, the important person. I always followed him .In England my friends were David Thistlewood, John Swift, Rachel Mason, Sheila Paine and a group of Brazilian students at the School of Art Education. Critical Studies and Multiculturalism were very alive that moment.
Back to Brazil I participated very actively of the redemocratization of the country.
I direct with Claudia Toni and Glaucia Amaral the first project or first event of the first Government elected in the State of São Paulo after 20 years of Dictatorship. It was the Festival of Campos do Jordão. Before it was only a Music Festival for few talented music students. We organized a Multicultural and Multimedia Festival together with workshops and courses for 400 Art Teachers of the Public Schools of the State of São Paulo. For 15 days the teachers lived together in dormitories making, thinking, and seeing Art. It was a kind of introduction of Art Educators to the beginning of Post Modern Art Education. We gave great emphasis to the context and to the analyses of Art Works. We had two critics in residence to help the understanding of the exhibitions, concerts, movies, theatre and dance presented every night to the public in general but planned for the appreciation of the teachers. It was the begin of the a methodological Approach, the Triangular Approach, that we systematized and researched after at the Museum of Contemporary Art, when I was its director.
This festival had great visibility in the media .The too major newspapers of São Paulo took different sides, one was enthusiastic of our work and another published only severe critics.
I hated to be on spot, than I left my position in the new government and went back to the University where I could work creating extension courses for the teachers of the Secretary of Education and a Specialization Course, a kind of graduate course without theses for teachers very well recognized and functioning till today. The University of São Paulo was the center of reconstruction of Art Education for the Democracy.
In 1984 we had in Brazil a World Congress of INSEA organized by the wife of the ex governor of Rio during the dictatorship, For political reason I was not invited to collaborate .She even prohibited me to have in the Congress the autograph night of my fourth book, Art Education: conflicts and certainties. However, my friends and students organized the autograph party outside of the Congress, in an Art Gallery at the same University that was housing the Congress. It was my most successful book. Almost the whole edition was sold that night.
In that Congress I was elected for the World Council of INSEA , where I served for eight years before to be elected President, thanks to the indication of Elliot Eisner (91-93). I was till now the only president of INSEA from the 3rd World. I had great support from Canada, France, United States, but I had few bad moments with the opposition of England and Australia. I never looked for explanation about this opposition; I just worked in order to double the membership and to make more flexibles the rules of INSEA because the poor countries can not follow the same rules that the rich ones stablish.
Thanks to INSEA I met those who are today my best friends in the United States: Pat Stuhr, Julie Lindsay, Larry Kantner, Michael Parsons, Mary Stokrocki.I miss very much Mary De Jong who passed away .
The Direction of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
In 1986 I was invited to direct the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo the second most important Art Museum in Brazil and the most important European Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art in Latin America.
I was successful enough in fund raising to build a new building for the museum, develop the collection and to initiate a collection of Contemporary American Prints. Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, Ed Pasche, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselman produced special prints for the Museum
Exhibitions
In seven years (1986-1993) I idealized and organized more than 200 exhibitions being curator of shows of artists such as Christo and Barbara Kruger, and of several others of Brazilian Artists to be sent to countries in Latin America and to the United States. Under my direction the Museum got every year the prize of the best exhibition.
Multicultural Policy- I developed a multicultural policy in the Museum. It was the first Museum in Brazil to present an exhibition of an American black artist, Jacob Lawrence .The museum succeeded in mounting at least one exhibition per year about the cultural and aesthetic codes of the other. We had the Project Aesthetics of the masses that exhibited Designers of Carnaval, Popular Art, Art produced by low class people, traditional Art, etc.
I published two articles in English(“Cultural identity in a dependent country: the case of Brazil” in Doug Boughton and Rachel Mason (ed), Beyond multicultural Art Education: international perspectives. New York / Munchen/Berlin, / Munster: Waxmann ,1999 ,pg185 a 199.
”Art in Brazil : several minorities” in Phoebe Farris-Dufrene , Voices of Color :Art and Society .in Americas.. Atlantic Highlands,New Jersey:Humanities Press , 1997 p 65-71) and a book in Portuguese (Utopians Topics, 1998) on the Multicultural exhibitions of Mac under my direction. The artists and art historians were very much against this policy but I got the Great Prize of Art Criticism in 1989
Art Education in the Museum of Contemporary Art
I organized an Art Education Department (12 teachers) that became the leader for the reconstruction of art teaching in Brazil. The Art Education Department worked very successfully in parternship with other institutions as the Secretary of Education of São Paulo (under Paulo Freire's direction) and several Foundations. In 7 years the Department received the visit of more than 70 foreign art education specialists to give courses and lectures . We organize the 1st National Congress to discuss Art Teaching at Universities ending with the affirmation of the necessity of a formal and official evaluation of the system in the whole country. In 1989 I organized another Congress, this time to defend compulsory Art Education that was in danger . A new federal Law planned to take Art from Schools . We had 49 professors of Art from outside of the country and 1.200 Brazilian Art Teachers at this Congress.
We published the first book of a Brazilian museum to teach about works of Art of the collection to formally uneducated people .We initiate a collection of Art for children very successful till now.
We created a permanent exhibition for blinds, and several projects for kids on the streets and other marginalized people.
I worked very hardly seven years at the Museum. Many friends from England and the United States helped me to organize a very solid group of Art Education, most of them having good positions today in Brazilian Universities
At the Universities in Brazil the President is elected among the Full Professors. I participated actively in the election in 1993 working for a candidate who lost. The new President, fired me from the Museum. I was informed by the newspapers.
I went back to the Department, but because I had fought publicly with the new president. I was not very well received in the Department. I decided to retire.
AFTER THE RETIREMENT
I kept giving graduate courses and advising students at USP. Now I have 2 doctoral students and one post doctoral researcher on my orientation.
In 1994 I became President of the Comission of Art and Design of the Ministery of Education. We decided to prepare the instrument of evaluation of the Courses of Arts. We planned 4 meetings with all the Deans, Chairs and representatives of teachers of all Brazilian Universities. We consulted all the Arts Courses in the country. We gave our project for evaluation approved by all the Universities to the new government and resigned.
From 1995 till 1997 I was President of the National Association of Researchers in Visual Arts for artists, Art Historians, Curators , Conservators and Art Educators (ANPAP)
In 1996 I organize the Congress of ANPAP at USP . Even retired I got great support. The president, my enemy, was almost at the end the office.
In 1997 I published a book as result of a research I did in the dissertations and theses on Art Education in Brazil from 1981 to 1993( 80 dissertations) looking for the foreign influences on the changing of the modernist paradigm to the post modern one. Elliot Eisner, Brent and Marjorie Wilson, Ralph Smith, Vincent Lanier, Robert Ott, Robert Saunders, Feldman, Arnheim were the most quoted Americans together with the British, Herbert Read and David Thistlewood. I published their most influential articles plus the article “A day in the life of a Navajo girl” by Mary Stokrocki, unknown till that time in Brazil, but that I like very much. I was motivated by the fact that I found only one theses about Indian’s Culture and we needed a higher participation of woman in the book.
In 1993/4 I created a Nucleus of Culture and Extension for the Promotion of Art in Education, inter institutional and interdisciplinary at the University of São Paulo. After my retirement at USP it was coordinated by Regina Machado and I coordinate, there, a course based on the Triangular Approach.
The triangular approach was the first postmodern methodological approach to be researched in Brazil. I systematize it and researched its possibilities at the MAC, at public and private schools, with different social classes. In 1997 the Government established the National Curriculum. They used the Triangular Approach but changed the designations in order do not recognize history. Destruction of History in order to submit the teachers was the hidden agenda of the spanish professor who designed the National Curriculum of Brazil. He was the dissertation adviser of the daughter of the President of Brazil , Fernando Henrique Cardoso. They determined 3 components: creation, appreciation and contexctualization , while the Triangular Approach considers Making, Reading the Art Work or the Image and Contextualizing. My ex students at the Ministery invited me as consultant , but they didn’t have the last word themselves.
In 1997 I taught one term at The Ohio State University. I made there, very good friends Pat Sturh, Michael Parsons, Arthur Efland, Don Krug, Christine Morris, Holly, Vesta Daniel and Jakie Chanda ( they are not there any more, only Christine is ) The invitation was a kind of consolation prize. One of the friends nominated me to send my curriculum to a search committee for chair of the Department. The Dean and Terry Barret went to Brazil to interview people who I worked with, etc. At the end I was not chosen, but the consolation prize was very stimulating.
I published 22 books. I like most , one on Postmodernism, another based on 5 programs about Art Education for TV that I coordinated. It was broadcastered in 1999 with great success and finally one about a Brazilian artist Alex Flemming. My last book “Redrawing the Drawing” got the famous (in Brazil) Jabuti Prize in 2016 .
I curated several exhibitions, among them , two of Alex Flemming for the Banco do Brazil Cultural Center in São Paulo and other in Brasília.. It was a kind of Dialogue Curatorship that I intended to discuss at the World Congress of INSEA in New York , but I could not.
My research on History of Art Education is going on. Presently I am teaching Art and Design at a Private University named Anhembi Morumbi. The group of professors in this program is very stimulating
I lectured around the World; the most difficult one was at the Museum of Modern Art ( MOMA, New York) because the tremendous importance that the artists in Brazil give to that Museum .The most frightening but at the same time the most pleasant it was this one.
Ana Mae Tavares Bastos Barbosa
Ana Mae Tavares Bastos Barbosa is retired Professor from the São Paulo University, Visual Arts Department, research line of Art Learning and Teaching, created by her. At the present, she teaches and is in charge of the Design, Art and Technology Master and Ph D Courses, at the Anhembi Morumbi University, since their creation. Ana Mae Barbosa got a B. A. degree in Law (1960), a M. S. in Art Education (University of Connecticut - 1974), an Ed. D. at Boston University (1978) and had post doctoral experience at the Teachers College of Columbia University (1992) and at the University of Central England. Her art teaching practice is very broad. In the last 30 years she has been teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels at several Universities and is involved with "in service" teaching training and historical researches. The Law School gave her some flexibility as art administrator. She created and directed in São Paulo a private Art School for children, adolescents and adults with emphasis in teaching training (1967-72).Many Brazilians young artists who exhibit today in the USA, Japan and Europe were students at this school. Before, she had directed an Art School in Recife at the time that Paulo Freire was the president of the same school. At the University of São Paulo she has been member, alternatively, of all the high administrative boards like: Congregation, Graduate Commission, Board of Research, Board of Culture and Extension and University Council . She has organized the Master and Doctoral Programs in Art Education at the University of São Paulo, the first one of the country. Besides that she has also organized at the University of São Paulo, an Art Education Specialization Course (graduate program without dissertation) that has been active for twenty years already, and a Museum Studies Specialization that she directed for two years (1992 - 1993). She coorganized a Specialization Course in Cultural Studies and took part in many temporary specialization courses in Art Education in several universities in Brazil. Finally she directed the Museum of Contemporary Art, the second most important Art Museum in Brazil and the most important European Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art in Latin America. She was successful enough in fund raising to build a new building for the museum and develop the collection and to initiate a collection of Contemporary American Prints. Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, Ed Pasche, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselman produced special prints for the Museum
Exhibitions
In seven years (1986-1993) she idealized and/or organized more than 200 exhibitions being curator of shows of artists such as Christo and Barbara Kruger, and of several others of Brazilian Artists to be sent to countries in Latin America and to the United States. Under her direction the Museum got every year the prize of the best exhibition except in 1989 that received the prize of Communication for the exhibition of Arthur Bispo do Rosario. As curator her last exhibitions were Alex Flemming: corpo coletivo at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center SP. ,presented with great success from July, 14th till September, 2nd, ,2001; Alex Flemming: Conflit and Identity ,CCBB, Brasília, 2004; Between Cultures, SESC,2006; Josely Carvalho, Northwest Bank Center, 2007; MARIA Amelia, Cultural Center UFA, 2008
Art Education in the Museum of Contemporary Art
She organized an Art Education Department (12 teachers) that became the leader for the reconstruction of art teaching in Brazil. The Art Education Department worked very successfully in parternship with other institutions as the Secretary of Education of São Paulo (under Paulo Freire's direction), Iochpe Foundation, Roberto Marinho Foundation. In 7 years the Department received the visit of more than 70 foreign art education specialists, historians and curators for courses, lectures and consultation.
Ana Mae Barbosa organized several and large International Congresses (3.000 to 1.000 participants) in Brazil
At the Federal level Ana Mae Barbosa took part of the National Committee of Incentive to Culture a decisive organ of the Ministery of Culture (1990-1994) and she was president of the first Commission for Evaluation and Reorganization of the Arts Teaching at the Universities (Undergraduate level). After 3 national meetings with teachers and coordinators of the 249 Arts courses federally recognized in the country, patterns of evaluation were stabilished and a pilot experience of evaluation initiated in 9 Universities (nov.1994).
She published 22 books (17 on art education 1 about the Museum of Contemporary Art and 3 on Art Criticism ) and more than 204 articles about Art Education and critical essays on artists. Her most recent
books are: Abordagem Triangular no Ensino das Artes e Culturas Visuais (with Fernanda P Cunha, Cortez, 2010; and: A imagem no Ensino da Arte (Perspectiva, 2009, tranlated into Spanish)Redesenhando o Desenho: Educadores, Política e História (Cortez, 2015. Got the Jabuti Prize 2016, the most important for books in Brazil
The invitations for lectures in congresses produced about 469 speeches she delivered in all the Brazilian States and in Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Venezuela, Colombia, Equator, Mexico, and USA, (at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia Universities The Museum of Modern Art, etc) Sweden, Nigeria, Spain, Portugal, France, England, Philippines, Canada, Taiwan, Japan, Korea,Hungary, etc.
Her researches are concentrated on History of Art Education and Museum Education but she conducted and oriented others on Art Education and Literacy,on Visual Cultures,on Art and Design Education, on Interculturality and Art Teaching, Art Education and Ecology/Environment, on Philosophical and Methodological Foundations of Art Education. She got fellowships for her researches from Brazilian Foundations (FAPESP, CNPq, CAPES, IOCHPE); Ford Foundation, (1973-74) to write the book Art education in Brazil; Fullbright (December 1991 to may 1992) for post doctoral work and research at the Teachers College; and Rockefeller Foundation (November 1994) at Bellagio Center, Italy. (chapter about multiculturality and social class published in a book organized by Dr. Rachel Mason)
She got several personal prizes: the Edwin Ziegfeld Award,from The United States Society for Education through the Arts in 1992 ; the Herbert Read Award, 1999 ; The Great Prize of Art Criticism given by The Association of Art Critics of São Paulo, 1989 ; the gold Medal Augusto Rodrigues, Rio de Janeiro, 1999 ; Olho Latino a award for her work in making visible Latin American Art (1999), the High Achievement and Leadership Award for her contribution in the United States in the discipline of Art Education, Miami University, 2002 and the Medal of National Scientific Merit given by the President of Brazil in 2004.In 2016 got the Comenda of Cultural Merit from the Minister of Culture; the Prize Icon of Education; the the Doctor Honoris Causa by the Federal University of Paraiba and in 2017 the prize of the Itaú Cultural
Barbosa organized the Association of Art Education of São Paulo and several State Associations. She was president of the International Society of Education Through Art (1991-1993)
Teaching Experience outside of Brazil
The Ohio State University – Visiting Professor - 1997
Teachers College- Columbia University (New York) – Fullbright Professor – 1991 / 1992
The University of Texas at Austin (USA) – 1986
School of Art Education – Birmingham Polytechnic (England) – Visiting Professor– 1982
Yale University (USA) – Assistant Instructor – 1972
