Black Mountain College Prize Awarded to Rosana Paulino

Rosana Paulino was selected as the recipient of the $20,000 annual grant for international or national artists working in the spirit of Black Mountain College (1933-1957). This year's committee of nominators included Beverly Adams, Johnny Gandelsman, Tina Kukielski, Helen Molesworth, and James Oles, who selected Paulino after a thorough search process across creative disciplines.

BMC Prize artists have the opportunity to develop their practice in a context that is rich with artistic and cultural significance and ongoing contemporary relevance through a guided site visit to the historic Black Mountain College campus at Lake Eden with BMCM+AC staff, transportation to Asheville, and a four-day stay to spend time at BMCM+AC, with a tour of the exhibitions and archival support at the museum and neighboring Western Regional Archives.

About Rosana Paulino

Rosana Paulino is an artist, educator, and researcher based in São Paulo, Brazil. She creates work centered around social, ethnic, and gender issues, foregrounding especially the histories, myths, narratives and images of Black women in Brazilian society. Her practice spans drawing, embroidery, engraving, printmaking, collage, sculpture, and installation. Paulino explores the history of racial violence and the persisting legacy of slavery in Brazil, illuminating the impact of memory on psychosocial constructions. She introduces archetypes and documents, blending personal and archival recollections, in order to deconstruct remnants of European colonialism which influence the cultural consciousness today.

From the Artist: “What drives me is the desire to question how images, archives, and scientific devices have constructed and naturalized narratives about Black bodies, especially those of Black women, and how these narratives continue to operate within contemporary perceptions and social relations. My practice began with historical photographs, scientific reports, and colonial documents. From this material, I have developed visual and material strategies such as drawing, printmaking, digital printing on fabric, stitching, video, collage, sculpture, and installation that subvert and rearticulate these traces. Through working with these materials, I perform a symbolic gesture of repair, restoring depth, voice, and corporeality to figures once turned into "models" for racist theories, while making visible the marks of trauma and the persistence of resistance within bodies and memories. The works function through formal and poetic displacement, challenging images of scientific and mythological authority in which the trace of the body and the manual gesture become antagonistic to the rationalism that once pathologized Black lives. My practice is simultaneously research, manual craft, and pedagogic methods. By analyzing images and memories, I bring craft to the forefront as a critical language, just as BMC elevated collaborative and manual practices to the level of aesthetic and intellectual invention.”

Paulino is the recipient of the inaugural 2024 Munch Award from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway and the 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, from The Vera List Center for Arts and Politics, NY. She also received the Konex Mercosur Award in 2022. Her most recent exhibitions include Diálogos do Dia e da Noite, Mendes Wood DM, New York (2025); Novas Raízes, Casa Museu Eva Klabin, Rio de Janeiro (2024); Amefricana, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires (2024). Recent group exhibitions include Cartographies for after the end, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz (2025); Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2024); Ancestral, Museu de Arte Brasileira / FAAP, São Paulo (2024); 35th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo (2023); The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2022); Afro-Atlantic Histories, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, (2022). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Centro Cultural São Paulo, Frank Museum of Art, Museu AfroBrasil, MoMA, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Museu de Artes de Buenos Aires, Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Museu Salvador Allende, Pérez Art Museum, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Tate Modern, The Studium Museum, Harvard Art Museums and University of New Mexico Art Museum.

Paulino holds a doctorate in Visual Arts from the University of São Paulo, School of Communications and Arts and a specialization in printmaking from London Print Studio.

Jeff Arnal, Executive Director of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, remarks, “Rosana Paulino's selection as the 2025 BMC Prize recipient extends Black Mountain College's radical experiment across continents, recognizing a practice that, like the College itself, resists easy categories and sees art as a tool for inquiry, responsibility, and change. Paulino's work resonates with the College's enduring commitment to social engagement and transformative interdisciplinarity.”

Raleigh Awards - Live Stats

Best Musical - Top 3

1. WAITRESS: THE MUSICAL (Theatre Raleigh)

17.4% of votes

2. LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (Playmakers Reperatory Company)

12.1% of votes

3. TUCK EVERLASTING (Studio 1)

9.5% of votes

Vote Now!