We’re back with another #BlackExcellence365 Artist Spotlight! Meet Asaph Luccas (@asaphluccas), a Black Brazilian portraiture artist who has been uploading his art to Tumblr since 2012 (!). We got to talk to him a bit about his career trajectory and Negritudes Brasileiras, his documentary about colorism in Brazil. Read on below.
Your art focuses on highlighting dark-skinned women and men in São Paulo. How important is it for you to highlight the Black diaspora as an artist?
Actually, I try to portray a lot of the diversity of blackness. I mean, not only in shades but in shapes, sexual orientation, hair, style…I love drawing people and with time I saw how powerful art can be so I started adding more and more variety of people in what I do. My art helps me to understand and be proud of who I am and by that, I hope it catches on the people seeing it.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be an artist and filmmaker? How has Tumblr been a place for you to find your voice?
I’m Asaph, a 24 years old Brazilian multidisciplinary artist. At heart I am a visual creator, painting what I live through my lens. It’s really awesome to answer that question because I started posting my art on Tumblr when I was 17! Tumblr had a huge influence on my trajectory as an artist because it was the place where I connected my art with other people. You can actually see all my growing as an artist and as a person of color scrolling through my archive. First, I used to draw mostly white characters. I created what people made me believe was the “art beauty” and that came with years and years of self-loathing and trying to fit into white standards. It only started to change when I connected with my roots and started studying more about racism in Brazil. You see, we are more than 54% of the population but when you turn on the TV there are no black TV hosts, no black protagonists in the telenovelas. So I stopped trying to portray something that I’m not, something that doesn’t represent the reality of the place I live,.
What communities do you identify with both online and IRL?
I’m black, a really femme gay boy and I lived almost my whole life on the Brazilian periphery. This holds such an important part of who I am. Most of my friends are also black and part of the LGBT community and we started a film collective named Gleba do Pêssego and get to create films together talking about marginalized identities that usually we don’t see being represented here. We as queer individuals get the opportunity to create our own families and also create our own references, so my support system is basically friends and other Brazilian artists doing great things right now, such as Edu Reis, Oliv Barros, and Ione Maria.
How did you come up with your featured piece and how might this relate to the broader conversation surrounding the #BlackExcellence365 campaign?
I started my Black I-d series because I didn’t have [any] other illustrators to look up to and inspire me to draw black characters when I started. I wanted to inspire younger artists (including myself) to know that drawing black people is beautiful and YES, we can be artists! As a light-skinned black person living in Brazil, a country where most mixed people spend a lot of their lives trying to pass as white and where there’s almost no representation of the variety of the black experience, I had to find a way to say “hey, there isn’t one way of being black, we came in a lot of shades, shapes, colors, and souls and we need to be represented!” and I’m so happy that I got to inspire people with it.
Your documentary Negritudes Brasileiras examines the conversation around racial identity and colorism in Brazil. Why was that documentary important for you to create?
In our journey we make films bringing light to marginalized identities and this year we got to make a documentary with Nátaly Neri, one of the biggest voices in the young black community right now, about racial identification since Brazil is such a racially mixed country. I got to say everything that my paintings couldn’t, exploring my art in many ways, and I’m proud of what this represents.
What are some of the challenges you face as an artist and a filmmaker?
Support. Definitely support. Emotionally because when you grew up poor you’re not allowed to dream about being an artist, about being a filmmaker. Education in those areas is so expensive that must of us can’t afford it and we have to teach ourselves how to do everything. By not being part of the academy, a lot of times people don’t see us as real creators. Financially because I have to work on other things to provide for myself because it’s so hard to live as an artist/filmmaker here and that means I don’t have the time to invest as many other artists have.
Thanks for chatting with us, @asaphluccas!
Tumblr artists, what kind of challenges have you faced when making your art? Can you relate to Asaph? Make a post, tag it #BlackExcellence365, and share it with the community.
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