Research Interests
- Modern and contemporary art of the Black Atlantic
- 20th and 21st-century Latin American and Caribbean art history
- Assemblage art/ Found objects
- Self-taught/ outlier artists
- Afro-Atlantic religious traditions
- Archive theory
- Performance
Education
MA, Art History, UNIFESP (São Paulo)
BA, Visual Arts, UNESP (São Paulo)
Bio
Maysa Martins is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS). Her research focuses on the modern and contemporary art of the Black Atlantic, centering on the production of self-taught artists, vernacular aesthetic strategies, and the role of Afro-Atlantic religious and spiritual traditions within artistic and political modernities in Brazil, Jamaica, and Angola. Her dissertation considers the production of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Lee Scratch Perry, and Paulo Kapela and how their plethora of sacred and ordinary objects offer insights into the Atlantic’s micro and macro histories from the perspective of modernity’s outliers. Martins is the 2024-26 curatorial fellow at the Visual Arts Center at UT Austin, the former Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum (2023-2024), and former educator at Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel de Araújo. She received her M.A. in Art History from UNIFESP (São Paulo, Brazil, 2021) and her BA in Visual Arts from UNESP (São Paulo, Brazil, 2015).