Hélio Menezes has been dismissed from his position as director of São Paulo’s Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo after just over a year in the role.
In a lengthy social media post, Menezes hit back on what he alleged as ‘decision-making structures shaped by informality, personalism and a lack of transparency – structures still predominantly composed of individuals disconnected from the diversity and Black leadership that the museum represents (or should represent) and lacking engagement with the world of visual arts’.
The museum says that Menezes’s departure stemmed from ‘a lack of consensus regarding the terms of the director’s performance. Despite mutual efforts, it was not possible to reach an agreement that balanced the expectations of the former director with the budgetary limits’. The museum also decried ‘personal attacks directed at the chair of the board of directors’.
Menezes says his departure has occurred during a period of illness without ‘even minimal standards of respect and care’. In response to his sacking, board members artist Rosana Paulino and Wellinton Souza resigned their board positions in support.
Menezes took over the role of director from founder Emanoel Araujo who died in 2022 (and was then memorialised in the institution’s name). Located in one of the several modernist pavilions of Ibirapuera Park, the museum houses an extensive collection of six thousand works of Black-made art dating from the fifteenth century to the present day, previously focussing on objects made by self-taught artists and within folk or religious traditions.
Menezes, a curator and anthropologist, was tasked with instilling a more contemporary focus to the programming.
He was one of the four co-curators of the 2023 Bienal de São Paulo, alongside Grada Kalomba, Manuel Borja-Villel and Diane Lima.
