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From Marginal To Modern Culture: A Case Study On Hélio Oiticica And His Aesthetic Contributions To Brazilian National Identity, Jamesia R. Griffin

Senior Projects Spring 2023

In this essay, I follow the historical trajectory of Helio Oiticica, a visual artist from Brazil’s 1960s modern art scene, to explore how attitudes towards his artistic interventions during Brazil's most transformative era affected the social view of “the artist” as a political character. I argue that the historical effectiveness of interventionist art relies on the shifting localized and national social and political identities of the artist. In order to help my reader understand how artists gain historical relevance through interventionist arts, I emphasize contextual and relational modes of analysis to better capture the complex and complicated interactions between historical …