Mapping Brazilian art in public collections across the UK

This thesis analyses acquisitions of art from Brazil by public museums in the UK. The aim is to understand the motivations behind museums’ decisions to permanently invest in artworks from that country and to reflect on museums’ agency in producing knowledge and defining art canons and art historical narratives through the objects they collect. Both acquisitions and museums’ agency are analysed through the lenses of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Decolonial Theory, paying attention to the actors and networks that contribute to both collecting practices and canon formation.

This research was based on three premises: that museums are colonial institutions, that the objects in their holdings are the material culture used for art historical research, and that their collecting activity contributes, therefore, to the production of knowledge. To undertake this analysis, I carried out a comprehensive survey to map art from Brazil in the UK, contacting over 500 public institutions to ask whether they held any artwork from that country. The results of this quantitative data collection led me to choose two case studies to investigate closely, namely ESCALA – Essex Collection of Art from Latin America, and Tate.