Rosana Paulino Wins Munch Museum’s Inaugural $25,000 Award Celebrating Artistic Freedom

The Munch Museum in Oslo will present Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino with its inaugural Munch Award honoring artistic freedom during a ceremony on Thursday. The prize includes $25,000 and “recognizes an artist who has distinguished themselves with courage and integrity throughout their career.”

The institution holds the world’s largest collection of works by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, and the award is meant as a tribute to his legacy of upholding “artistic expression” and creative liberty, the museum said.

Paulino’s work centers on social, ethnic, and gender issues faced by Black women in Brazil due to racism and the legacy of slavery. She told ARTnews that she was doing researching for new work in a mangrove outside Rio de Janeiro when she got the call from the the museum’s director, Tone Hansen.

“The phone signal wasn’t very good because I was in a mangrove. At first, I didn’t believe what Tone was telling me, so I asked her to call me back an hour later,” Paulino said. “When I found out for sure, I felt incredibly strong emotions. It was a huge surprise because I thought that my work was so Brazilian that people from other countries wouldn’t be interested.

“For the last 30 years,” Paulino said, “I have been focusing on Black females and the Black population in Brazil, and not everyone understands [the challenges we face]. Brazil is often seen as a kind of racial democracy, but it’s absolutely not, so we have to fight. [The award] shows that the world is paying attention to what is happening in my country.”

Hansen told ARTnews that she “had the honor of making the call” and that it was “strange convincing someone I’ve never met that on the other side of the world that it was a genuine call and that Rosana had won.”

She said there was no public shortlist for the first MUNCH Award: “Each of the three external jurors proposed two candidates to the group, who through a process of debate and discussion came to the unanimous decision to award Paulino.”

The jury comprised Hansen, artist and curator Wanda Nanibush; Yvette Mutumba, cofounder of art magazine Contemporary &; Cosmin Costinas, curator at Haus der Kulturender Welt Berlin; and Munch Museum curator Tominga O’Donnell.

Paulino said she plans to use the prize money to create the Rosana Paulino Institute in São Paulo. The institute will include a library and a basement studio for her, and “will focus on the Black image—we have to study the impact of this in our population,” she said. “The project is approved and building will start next year. We don’t have specialized art libraries in the area. The institute will not be in the center of the city but on the outskirts, where there are many Black artists.”