Recorded October 9, 2025
Below is the original description of the event.
Black Rome. The Motherland of Brazil. The Blackest City Outside of Africa. These are popular monikers for Salvador, a coastal city in Brazil’s northeastern state of Bahia. Mobilizing specific episodes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this lecture regards Salvador as a city of women, revealing the metropolis’s fundamental role in Brazil’s national story of modern identity—represented through the bodies of baianas. Unpacking the construction of the baiana as a gendered social trope of the racially coded negra—linked by turns to the seductive mulata and maternal mãe preta—I examine the notions of iconicity and continuity that reinforced the baiana’s representational relevance, making her presence implicit in the circulation and interpretation of black women’s images.
Oluremi C. Onabanjo is The Peter Schub Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, where she manages MoMA’s holdings of over 35,000 photographs spanning the history of the medium. Recent exhibitions include Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage, Projects: Ming Smith, and New Photography 2023. Currently on view is Visual Vernaculars.
The inaugural recipient of the Vilcek Prize in Curatorial Work, Onabanjo was a 2024 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow, and the 2023 recipient of the Cisneros Institute Research Grant. She is a core member of the C-MAP Africa Research Group and sits on the Photography Advisory Board for the Istanbul Modern. Previously, Onabanjo worked as Director of Exhibitions and Collections of The Walther Collection and served on the curatorial team of the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg (2022).
A 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grantee, Onabanjo is the editor of Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos (2022) and author of Ming Smith: Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere (2023). She holds a PhD in Art History and a BA in African Studies from Columbia University, and an MSc in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from Oxford University.
The event is presented by African American Studies, Film and Media, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and co-sponsored by the Arts Research Center and History of Art, as part of the fall 2025 Berkeley Film & Media Seminar Series.