Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino has created a symbolic anthology that celebrates the lived experiences of Black women, exploring their pivotal role in Brazilian society and history while confronting enduring colonial narratives and stereotypes. Laden with symbolism and driven by a free flow of the subconscious, her lexicon draws profound philosophical inspiration from ancestral Brazilian spirituality, yet is firmly rooted in biology and, more specifically, botany. “I was thinking about the psychology of Black females, about femininity and its power. I started to research goodness, which has been represented since ancient times,” she tells Observer when we catch up with the artist following the opening of her U.S. debut at Mendes Wood DM in New York.
“We have Greek goddesses and others in different mythologies, but none are Black, even if we look back to ancient Egypt,” Paulino points out. “In Brazil, we have the Orishas, and all this mythology is very strong in the country.” The Orishas, Yoruba goddesses symbolizing the sacred feminine, draw from an ancient, complex cosmology rooted in Black African spiritual, philosophical and cultural traditions. Yet Paulino’s interest was not confined to culturally specific readings. She sought to tap into a more universal archetype—one that transcended these boundaries while resisting the Western lens of exoticism. “I started making drawings not directly tied to the Orishas but thinking about the psychology of Black women. And I realized it was impossible to do that without thinking about nature and its power, and how Black women have harnessed that strength to sustain their families and entire communities.”
Building on this foundation, Paulino developed her own symbolic vocabulary, which fully unfolds in her solo exhibition, where she continues to evolve her ongoing series Senhora das Plantas. Roots and branches of mangroves emerge from limbs, symbolizing fertility and nourishment, but also serving as threshold beings between worlds. These mangroves act as portals between the living and the dead, the material and the spiritual, embodying guardianship, maternal strength and resistance. As such, they protect initiation, transformation and delicate spiritual crossings. “The symbols just come,” Paulino says. “I’ve always loved nature. When I was younger, I thought I might become a biologist.”
Her visual language draws from her deep understanding of plants, and she deliberately chooses species for their social, cultural and spiritual meanings, as well as their healing and sacred roles. While Paulino grew up in the urban environment of São Paulo, she maintained ties with ancestral traditions passed down through her mother, often unconsciously. “My mother was Catholic, but even being a Catholic person, she used some medicines for practices that came from Black religions,” she says. “I think she wasn’t aware of this, but she used this interiorized knowledge—I have some initiated santo in my family—so I grew up in a family where if you go to a plant and want to use it, for example, you have to ask permission. You don’t do this without asking the plant or animals. They deserve respect.”
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A similar understanding informs Paulino’s mural The Creation of the Creatures of Day and Night, on view at the High Line through December. Part of her acclaimed Mangrove series, Paulino depicts hybrid tree-women figures that serve as mythological archetypes and symbols of Brazil’s endangered biomes, drawing poignant connections between the colonial exploitation of Brazil’s natural environment and the historical violence inflicted on Black and Indigenous peoples. She urges viewers to see humanity as part of a broader, interdependent ecosystem defined by delicate critical balances and governed by cyclical processes of life, death and regeneration.
This sense of reverence also comes to life in a series of multimedia installations and sculptures that resemble improvised votive altars with offerings to nature, feminine deities or ancestral spirits. Through these works, Paulino honors the long-neglected, erased or denied role of Black women in Brazilian society and, more broadly, in the country’s cultural and historical continuity. Her work highlights their essential role in preserving Brazil’s deepest ancestral traditions and maintaining its vital, living connection to the natural world.
As the title suggests, Paulino also turns her focus to the perpetual, vital cycle of light and darkness that nourishes specific plants with distinct properties. Some plants are meant to sustain us in waking life, while others guide us toward alternative realms: dreams, the subconscious and healing hallucinations. For her, this elemental dialogue between light and dark reflects a deeper dialectic between the conscious and unconscious, between empirical science and other equally vital forms of knowing. “Science is a kind of knowledge that Western people consider very rational,” she explains, “but we have another kind of knowledge, too—one more rooted in feeling, in sensing nature and the energies that surround us.” Her work creates a space where this ancestral wisdom, spiritual insight and the collective subconscious do not oppose science but are in conversation with it.
Despite the mystical and spiritual dimension that permeates her practice, Paulino makes it clear that a political message lies at its core—one that centers social, racial and gender issues. “Brazilian religion and spirituality have been used so much, to the point where people start to perceive them as something ‘exotic,’” she says. “But that term refers to something that doesn’t belong to a place. We are the majority of people in this country. I don’t like tying my work directly to religion. I like to focus on the ethics of it as a different way of relating to nature—something that came before.” It is an ancestral mode of thinking, shared across early civilizations that regarded human beings as part of a broader, interconnected system, equal among other forms of life, beyond notions of race or species.
For this reason, Paulino sought to anchor her artistic practice in science, undertaking a deep analysis of how specific scientific structures and colonial-era evolutionary theories have been used to construct narratives justifying racial superiority. In the exhibition, she reproduces anatomical drawings of Black women, reworking these so-called “scientific” images through her own poetic and symbolic language. In doing so, she reframes them as visual testaments to the spiritual and energetic force embedded in these bodies, not only as sensitive human beings but also as beings perhaps even more attuned to the universe and its underlying balance. More than one work directly addresses this tension between reverence for science—Amor por la ciencia—and the critique of the lingering violence of a Permanência da estrutura, a structure that has long served to justify social hierarchies and racial narratives in Brazilian society.
“Nos Tenemos” is inscribed in bold red across a large piece that features anatomical renderings of a man and a woman. A study of the brain—res cogitans, the seat of rationality—overlays the male figure, while a scientifically precise drawing of the Earth appears over the female body, as the res extensa, here conceived as an emotional, psychological and spiritual extension of the body. Between them is a visceral representation of the heart in vivid red, as if she is mapping not just the internal systems of the body but also the emotional and cosmic pulse that binds them.
The Black female body appears in the gallery as a vibrant force and vessel of care and love that sustains life. “It’s very difficult to be Black in Brazil, and even more so to be a Black woman,” Paulino reflects. “However, even in the face of all these challenges, we built a country. It’s astonishing how this group has truly contributed to building a nation and to shaping a culture, leaving such a strong imprint. There’s so much generosity in that, and there’s resilience, too.” This nurturing power is especially visible in her personal mythopoiesis, which unfolds through drawings where the female body becomes a site of rooting and germination. New plants—new life—emerge from these figures. “When we see these women, we see roots growing out of them. We carry that within us. We carry life coming from them.” Considering these symbolic images, she adds, “We have all this life emerging from them, like great trees, so generous with us. I think that’s what life is about.”
Although Paulino’s language often moves in symbolic or even shamanic registers, a closer analysis of the work reveals a framework grounded in science and philosophy—specifically in a post-structuralist critique that challenges the foundations of both anthropological and psychosocial constructions. These are the very structures that, historically, have exercised power not only through scientific discourse but also through the strategic invention of myths and cultural narratives.
As contemporary theories of archetypes remain largely dominated by Western, Jungian-centered perspectives, Paulino is concerned with the issue of archetypes and psychology—”a Black female psychology.” She aims to construct an alternative mythology, narrative and epistemological system—both scientific and political—that can shield the power of Black women from erasure and demonization. At the same time, she resists the reductive, exoticizing tendencies that frame Black femininity solely through healing or fertility, without acknowledging its full complexity and agency. “Today, violence against Black communities continues in Brazil,” she says. “This is an ongoing reality. We need to talk about it and examine the roots of the problem, including the role that science has played in militarized societies like Brazil and elsewhere.”
When asked whether her work is more political than spiritual, Paulino answers without hesitation: “Like homeopathy, where the principle is to cure with the same substance that caused the illness, I use the same visual language—those anatomical diagrams of the human body once used to justify supremacist ideologies. I think it’s much more effective.”
In these images, we discern a dual gesture: the unveiling of a visual language historically employed to legitimize racial stereotypes, while simultaneously reclaiming that same terrain as fertile ground for an ancestral symbolism that honors the true essence of these energetic, healing bodies. Bodies that, notably, may hold crucial knowledge about a different way of relating to nature and the world around us—a paradigm our civilization has largely forgotten, often to its detriment.
That’s why, Paulino emphasizes throughout our conversation, her work is grounded in a specific ethical stance, even before any spirituality. Ultimately, her work is about an ethic of care for the environment and all life forms. “It’s the knowledge of these communities that can save the world,” she says, “because we see ourselves as part of nature, not superior to it, like the Western mindset suggests. We’re just one species. One more among many, within nature. That’s the message.”
Rosana Paulino’s “Diálogos do Dia e da Noite (Dialogues of the Day and of the Night)” is on view at Mendes Wood DM in Tribeca through June 14, 2025.
