CRIOLA

The Brazilian ‘artivist’ Criola uses graffiti and public spaces to empower black women and ancestrality in the streets of Brazil. She makes of urban art her political manifesto.

The street expressions drew attention of the Minas Gerais native even as a child. In 2008, at age 18, she enrolled in an art school and, a little later, in 2012, began to create her own paintings. She says that graffiti was the kind of art that was closest to her reality of life: “It goes where conventional art doesn’t dare to go where the state only acts to suppress.”