"I keep doing it, and doing it, until it seems to clear my head... It seems that a train takes your hand and then it goes without difficulty... They are our ancestors..."
Maria Lira is part of a long and fruitful line of artists in Vale do Jequitinhonha, Minas Gerais, among whom are Isabel Mendes da Cunha, Noemisa Batista dos Santos and Ulisses Pereira Chaves. As with many of these ceramists, she began in the visual arts working with the utilitarian handicraft for which the region is known. However, since she did not consider herself skillful enough for traditional pottery, she began developing her own experimental creations, seeking in the roots of popular culture the inspiration for her works. In the 1970s, Maria Lira began exhibiting her ceramic works, such as busts, nativity scenes and anthropomorphic masks, evocative of her African and Indigenous heritage.
Maria Lira traces the genealogy of her artistic vocation according to the influence of her mother, who worked as a washerwoman and exercised, in parallel, her manual gifts with pottery. In parallel to her own work with pottery, Maria Lira developed musicological research in the strong oral tradition of her region. Since the 1990s, she has dedicated herself to the body of work for which she is most well known, Bichos do Sertão, paintings of imaginary animals that compose a vast bestiary, characterized by the integration of her graphic language with the sertão landscape. These works are drawn with a mixture of clay and glue over river stones, using an earthen chromatic palette and organic textures, resulting in pictorial surfaces of strong visual impact.
Apart from being an artist with a career spanning more than forty years, Maria Lira is also a researcher, activist and propagator of popular culture, specifically that of indigenous and black roots that, as she points out, are routinely made invisible and neglected by society. “Blacks and indians are the people most massacred by society”, said the artist in a 1983 interview. “Not that oppression is only in these minorities, because it is present in general, but we can see very well and feel in our own skin that black people are not accepted by society; the indian, as you can see, is also exploited (...) and [this] is my culture.” In 2010 she participated in the foundation of the Museu de Araçuaí, in partnership with frei Xico, the Dutch friar Francisco Van der Poel, with whom she has maintained dialog for over five decades. The museum was created with the objective of harboring a collection of objects and documents registering the religion, uses, customs and trades that constitute the history of Araçuaí, one of the main poles of popular culture in Brazil.