Museum Afro Brasil, Ethnographic museum in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, Brazil.
Museu Afro-Brasil is an 11,000-square-meter building designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer located within Ibirapuera Park. The exhibition spaces display over 6,000 works including historical objects, photographs, and documents spanning different periods and cultural areas.
The museum opened on 23 October 2004 in the Pavilhão Padre Manoel da Nóbrega, a building inaugurated in December 1953 as the Palácio das Nações and used by the city government from 1961 to 1991. Its founder, Emanoel Araújo, lent 1,100 works from his private collection as the initial holdings. The project was funded by Petrobras and the Ministry of Culture through the Rouanet Law, with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva attending the inauguration.
The collection is organised into sections such as Africa, labour, slavery, sacred and profane, Afro-Brazilian religions, history and memory, and the arts. In 2014 the museum marked its tenth anniversary with the exhibition O Negro no Futebol Brasileiro, on players such as Pelé, Garrincha, Didi and Jairzinho, shown alongside football votive masks by the Beninese artists Aston and Kifouli.
The museum occupies the Pavilhão Padre Manoel da Nóbrega, one of the Niemeyer buildings in Ibirapuera Park; the pavilion is reached on foot from the park entrances and the surrounding avenues. Inside, the collection is organized into sections such as Africa, labour, slavery, sacred and profane, religions, history and memory, and the arts, so allow time to move between them. A theatre and the Carolina Maria de Jesus library are part of the building.
The museum's library, opened in 2005, is named after Carolina Maria de Jesus, the Afro-Brazilian writer. Its holdings were later enlarged by the donation of the Escravidão-Tráfico-Abolição collection, assembled by Ruy Sousa e Silva and Leonardo Kossoy and described in the sources as the rarest set of titles on slavery in Brazil.
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