U-M Creative Currents

Colorism: Art by Professor Rogerio Pinto

• Arts Initiative • Season 3 • Episode 7

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In this episode of U-M Creative Currents, Mark Clague sits down with Professor Rogério Meireles Pinto, artist, scholar, and social worker, to discuss his powerful multimedia exhibit, Colorism. Through video, photography, sculpture, and audience interaction, Colorism questions the ways skin color has been used to assign value, separate communities, and reinforce biases—both across and within racial groups.

Pinto discusses his personal and professional journey, from growing up queer and poor under a dictatorship in Brazil to merging art and science in his work on social justice. He shares insights on how humor plays a role in his critique of racial constructs, the power of autoethnography in healing and activism, and why conversations about colorism are more relevant than ever.

About Our Guest:

  • Rogério Meireles Pinto is the University Diversity Social Transformation Professor, Berit Ingersoll-Dayton Collegiate Professor of Social Work, and Professor of Theatre and Drama at the University of Michigan. Born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, he uses art-based methods in community-engaged research in the U.S. and Brazil, focusing on improving healthcare access for marginalized groups. His award-winning solo play Marília explores personal loss and identity, while his art installation Realm of the Dead examines his experiences as a gender non-conforming, mixed-race Latinx immigrant. His work has been presented internationally and funded by the NIH and other organizations.
  • Learn more about Colorism
  • Learn more about Rogério Pinto


Season 3, episode 6: Rogério Pinto

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[00:00:06.753] Mark Clague:
Welcome to Creative Currents, a Michigan arts podcast where we explore collaborative creativity and the power of the arts to spark meaningful conversations. I'm your host, Mark Clague, and today we're joined by a unique and remarkable guest, visual artist, playwright, actor, filmmaker, writer, social activist, and scholar, Professor Rogerio Pinto. Professor Pinto's primary faculty appointment is in a program where we might not really expect to find an artist at the University of Michigan. He is a professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Welcome, Rogério, to Creative Currents 


[00:00:39.482] Rogerio Pinto:
It is a pleasure to be here, Mark.

[00:00:41.005] Mark Clague:
Yeah, great to have you here. So my first question is, I mean, how did art become part of your research practice as a professor of social work?

[00:00:48.091] Rogerio Pinto:
It was a long time ago. I think I have always been interested in the arts even before I became a professor.

[00:00:56.220] Mark Clague:
So you were an artist first and then a social scientist? Or did they all sort of come up together?

[00:01:01.165] Rogerio Pinto:
A little bit of each. So, I mean, growing up in Brazil, there was just no possibility that I well, maybe there was a possibility, but I never thought about being an artist. Even though I painted, my mother painted, and I was interested in the arts, but never imagined that I could be an artist for a very simple reason, which I grew up extremely poor in Brazil, one of eight siblings, the youngest of eight. There was never enough of anything. And so art didn't strike this child during a dictatorship to be the thing to do. because it wasn't very promising in terms of making a living. as an artist. That's what I thought, right? And many of us did. And so I think that that kind of stifling is very common in places where resources are scarce and places where people are telling you that if you become an artist, you're a sissy, you're gay, and so on and so forth. And that's basically how I grew up and having to, you know, clean up all, you know, the terrible debris that those kinds of things leave behind to get to a point where I began to imagine that, yes, I could be an artist, and yes, I could be a social worker, and yes, I could be a biologist, which is what I studied as an undergraduate.

[00:02:25.796] Mark Clague:
So how did those come together? Is there something sort of, you know, we talk a lot in the arts initiative about the arts can be part of everybody's practice, and they're part of being human, you know, they're part of It's not just something specified and rarefied just for artists, but art and creativity could be accessible to all. And you seem to be living that mantra.

[00:02:45.598] Rogerio Pinto:
And I think that like the moment that I think of, there was like a click, was in college. As I was studying biological sciences, I decided that I was going to do a minor in education because I wanted to teach biology. And so I went to this school of education and I took many courses to get this. education minor. And one of the things that I learned was about critical consciousness. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator who created the term critical consciousness. And the way Paulo Freire worked around critical consciousness to define and to study it was by creating possibilities for critical dialogues usually among three, four, five, whatever the number of people might have been, are people who were living under the dictatorship in Brazil under really awful conditions, who didn't particularly understand that what was making their lives awful was the dictatorship, was the social conditions that they were living under, and the appalling economic conditions that they were living. And what Paulo Freire did to create the possibility for those critical dialogues to use illustrations. And he would provide people illustrations about social conditions and economic conditions and ask them to talk about it. And through those dialogues, something happened where people began to talk about things that they never had talked about before, ask each other questions that they were not thinking before the critical dialogue. And so by creating very specific questions and facilitating those conversations, he realized that something was happening. And what was happening was critical consciousness, what he called critical consciousness, which is the possibility of awareness, of the impact of everything that is around you in your life as an individual, as a family, and so on and so forth. So the idea of using art to create critical consciousness is It starts that early. And then, of course, it took many years for me to be able to get where I am now.

[00:05:07.475] Mark Clague:
And I can see how Padre Ferre starts to open up issues of the audience being a participant, being actively changed by the experience, being in dialogue with the artist, and how, in a sense, something that's very personal and expressive to you can also become part of the community, can become social. Because what's inspired our conversation today is your new exhibit, which is up at the Duderstadt gallery here on the University of Michigan campus, the North Campus, called Colorism. And so, well, let's start off. What is colorism?

[00:05:40.125] Rogerio Pinto:
So colorism has been defined in many different ways, but Alice Walker, one of the people who I probably first encountered the term in the United States, was from Alice Walker, who says that it is, and I'm paraphrasing now, a form of racism right? Thank you. The need to do it now and the urge for me to work on an exhibit about colorism, it's a very personal one to start with and then a social one. One, it's because I come from a family of eight siblings and two parents who have very different colors. So all of us have different colors as well. And I saw even within my family the kind of treatment and obligations and work that were given to those who were women and sometimes darker than the other ones, right? And at the time, it didn't seem to me to be that important. But today I can look back and it was just not my family. I mean, it's many families where people have different colors. Many families tend to reproduce the colonial days of where, you know, white people were colonizing places and enslaving and bringing people from Africa to serve them in the new colony, and many times going through genocide to kill the native population.

[00:07:53.184] Mark Clague:
So in your family, you're saying that, or in the social world that you were in growing up, people who were darker were not

[00:08:00.331] Rogerio Pinto:
people who were lighter. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And there is a lot of evidence, which probably did not exist when I was growing up in Brazil, but there's a lot of evidence today that people clearly demonstrates that it's not about black or white. I mean, it's about being darker. And in many societies, this dichotomy that I see in the United States doesn't really exist in the same way because there's just so much else in between, you know, two polarized colors 
[00:08:28.701] Mark Clague:
tend to think in black and white terms, and yet multiculturalism, and there's many, many different people from many different places. But in the American consciousness, race is sort of a pretty peculiar thing.

[00:08:40.033] Rogerio Pinto:
Well, the United States has an obsession with race. like many other cultures. And in this particular case, it has such a powerful connection and makes such a powerful connection between race and color, which isn't necessarily what happens globally. And part of what I would like to do with colorism is to bring a more global perspective to understanding racism, especially in this moment that we are living where everything is so polarized and it's done on purpose And I don't think that there is any advantage of isolating different groups of people especially based on skin color. Because the more you do this, the more you parcel this out, the smaller those groups become. And each one of those groups will have zero power. But if they are seen as a force to contend with, then maybe there will be some change that we can make, at the very least, bring some social justice to people who are darker than other people.

[00:09:48.554] Mark Clague:
I love that vision. Let's talk about the exhibit. So it's basically in one large room that's sort of divided into different places, and you have a wide range of artistic practices. I mean, there's photography, there's sculpture, there's sort of fashion and fabric, there's film, there's an installation, sculpture. It's all brought together. And what's interesting to me in particular is the way the audience interacts with that experience. And in some ways, it's almost as much as a work of theater. as is the work of visual art. So can you talk, just describe the elements of the exhibit and how you envision the audience sort of interacting with it?

[00:10:28.758] Rogerio Pinto:
I'm very pleased that you said it is theater because it is. It was the intention. So one of Paulo Freire's pupils, Augusto Boal, developed from the pedagogy of the oppressed the idea of the theater of the oppressed. So a lot of the things that I do come from that that understanding of theater of the oppressed, which says something very simple, which is your audience has to be part of what it is you're doing. You know, just sitting in there and watching something. If you have any intention of creating the possibility of developing critical consciousness, the audience has to be somewhat involved in what it is that is happening there. And so many of the things that I have done in my life require that kind of participation, including the way I teach. I mean, I teach with a lot of participation and many exercises where students move around and I move around and we act for each other, but we are in each other's play. That's really how I see it. So the exhibit comes out of this idea that all of us human beings have what Paulo Freire called an innate curiosity. And that innate curiosity gets chipped on, devastated by the oppressor. Whomever we would like to consider the oppressor to be, he was talking about the Portuguese colonizer in Brazil who brought enslaved people from Africa and created a culture that taught some people that they were superior and connected that superiority with light skin and being from Europe and taught the other group of people that they were inferior, connecting that inferiority with being from Africa or having more color in their skin and not being European. That curiosity, as it gets over and over again, devastated by the oppressor, makes people less curious about what's happening around them. And so colorism is a way of helping people to engage in conversations that otherwise they probably wouldn't or would have been more difficult to engage with.

[00:12:56.524] Mark Clague:
So you're making a kind of social dynamic visible that might be taken as somehow natural or correct.

[00:13:03.230] Rogerio Pinto:
And as we saw... In the opening reception, I mean, everybody was talking, right, to one another. My class was there the day before and very naturally began to have different kinds of conversations based on what they were seeing, based on the experience that they were having from each one of the elements of it, which, like you said, I mean, it involves many different kinds. It's a multimedia exhibit that starts very, and I have so many people to thank and I'm going to choose not to thank each one of them, as I did during the reception.

[00:13:40.671] Mark Clague:
We take the rest of the episode.

[00:13:42.131] Rogerio Pinto:
Very easily. So there are many people out there. But I do have to, because I want to, I want to speak about Chris Bichakian, who is the chair of dermatology at the University of Michigan, without whom this could not have been done the way it was 
[00:14:02.394] Mark Clague:
Because your skin is part of the exhibit.

[00:14:04.336] Rogerio Pinto:
My My skin is part of the exhibit, and it was with Chris that I found a partnership where he actually did a biopsy of my skin, and we worked on the slides of that biopsy to demonstrate that my skin before a regimen of tanning looked the same as it was at the end of four months of going to the sun for an hour every day. The point of doing that was to demonstrate in the same human body that the same human body can have different colors. All you need is the excitement of the melanocytes in the skin to produce pigmentation. But the pigmentation, even though it's produced and it shows as color in the eyes, Outside, there's nothing morphologically. The structure of the skin is still the same, and you still can see different colors. It doesn't mean that we are all the same, and I'm not suggesting at all that we should be colorblind or that we should say that everybody's the same under the microscope, but I am suggesting that the differences between us are much less than the similarities. There's 99-point-something percent of similarities among us, human beings, then there are differences. And the absurdity of using skin tone as the thing that we have been using for centuries to denigrate each other and to super value people who don't have those colors, it is the thing that this exhibit is trying to do by using fabric, by using the print of my skin cells in silk so that people can have an idea as to how it might feel, the silk on the skin and the skin on the on the silk, it is the fabric that I used to create this fashion thing that I hope everybody comes to see because it's quite beautiful. yeah. By using silk in the print of the skin. And then one thing that I was very into doing because I did when I was a student, when I was studying biology, we had like this science fairs and where people came who had never seen a microscope and could ever understand what it is. can see inside of a microscope so there is a microscope as part of the exhibit and a lot of people who have come had never seen a microscope had you know looked inside of one right and they are very amazed to see an image inside of the microscope to see the silk and all the fabrics that I used to do so and watch a video demonstrating that the

[00:16:49.457] Mark Clague:
yeah that's fascinating well this brings up a really interesting issue. And I think your exhibit is speaking so much to the current moment in the world that's so destabilized and where sort of the culture war and issues of race and equality and the existence of racism itself is being debated or denied. And one of the questions is, what's the role of education? What's the role of the university in talking about racism? Like, is this something we should be learning about or something we should be putting aside as if somehow putting it aside makes it go away. And I think what your work is saying is that we need to learn about racism. We need to learn about skin pigment. We need to understand these things in order to understand how oppression sort of functions and the way in which it's culturally created. Because I think that one of the fascinating things you said in your remarks at the gallery opening was that in the Brazilian context, when you were growing up, you were told that you were white. And in the United States context, Here, you're a man of color. And yet you haven't changed.

[00:17:57.730] Rogerio Pinto:
haven't changed at all.

[00:17:59.432] Mark Clague:
But the cultural context and the way you're interpreted and the way people treat you is different. Because I think so many of my people I know think of race as something that's genetic and not cultural, that it's something absolute and not invented to categorize people and to put people into a higher and lower status. But I think what your exhibit is showing, I think, is really the power of a deeper understanding to really be able to combat racism and combat oppression.

[00:18:31.426] Rogerio Pinto:
And to create a conversation that is more global. I mean, it can get very, very local. And local conversations are great. And they can provide social support. You know, you can even create social capital from local conversations. But they are not the most enlightening ones because it's It's excluding way too many people and way too many different ways of thinking. For example, in Brazil, birth certificates do not have anybody's race. But when you die, your death certificate carries your color, not your race. So, and I'm saying this to really separate the two things, because in the United States, race and color basically can be understood as the same, at least socially we do, right? I mean, we don't think before, should I say color or should I say race? We say whatever it is and we make an assumption that the other person that is talking to us knows exactly what it is that we are talking about. Well, that's not true because when I'm saying color or race, I may not necessarily be saying because I'm saying that from the perspective that I grew up with, right? And the reality of Brazil not having race in any documentation that says what the race is. Because your color, I assume, can change along the way. So my mother has a birth death certificate that says she was white. My father has a death certificate that says he was pardo, which is a catch-all color that involves all kinds of ethnicities, indigenous colors, and so on and so forth. So it's not very specific. It's a catch-all color. And my little sister, who died when she was very young, she was not even three years old, hers is non-identified. So it's just like a little fact that I think should make us stop and think about how people interpret color and race very different and ask the question, is the color of somebody's skin the best way to understand who they are socially, culturally, historically, and otherwise. And I just said it in a class that was facilitating yesterday, one group that visited my exhibit. I think what colorism is doing is something that I dreamed of being able to do, which is to help people who are people of color like me. I'm very proud to be a person of color in the United States 
[00:21:14.082] Unknown:
Thank you.

[00:21:14.753] Rogerio Pinto:
But if I arrive in Brazil today, when I look my darkest in the United States, I am still white in Brazil because it is part of their culture. It is what my family is. When I go to my family, nobody's going to see me as a race. They're going to see me as someone who has a color, right? And I think that having a color that is different from my siblings and people who have different colors in the United States and elsewhere, we have been told. that having color is a bad thing, right? It makes you inferior. This is the colonizer, you know, way of oppressing and taking away any sense of agency. And then one begins to internalize those things and actually believe that there's something wrong with them. And then you put all the other layers of identities. You know, you have color, you're queer, you're a woman, you are, you know, and you can keep adding and you are an immigrant and you're going to be deported because there's a situation now that immigrants are considered to be illegal, are called illegal, no matter who they are, right? So all those layers coming together to define how one lives one's life. And if we concentrate on color alone, as sometimes often we do, we completely erase people's identities. When in truth, People are an amalgamation of so many identities. And the more of those oppressed identities one has, the bigger the chance that they might internalize those things. And I hope that colorism, if nothing else, sparks dialogues, not necessarily, I mean, I would love to spark dialogues across all kinds of populations, but more than anything else, I would like that dialogue to occur among people who are people of color who like me many times have internalized the idea that there was something wrong with me that made me extremely anxious or made me very sad and many times have put me in an emotional state that made it almost impossible to function but you get up and then you function because

[00:23:43.906] Mark Clague:
well I love how your exhibit takes that personal struggle and all those messages that you've had to wrestle with and to sort of triumph over and turns it into something beautiful and something really as a model for anyone coming to the exhibit to see how the complexity that is Rogerio Printo as a human being in all the multi-dimensions that you exist really sort of comes to life and becomes colorful in that exhibit because there's so much The exhibit is so vibrant and so alive and I think really, really amazing. So people have about another month or so to see it?

[00:24:24.810] Rogerio Pinto:
People have until March 12th. I think we finish on the 12th.

[00:24:30.497] Mark Clague:
So it's at the Duderstadt Gallery on the University of Michigan's North Campus. And what are the hours? Is it during the weekday or is it open in the evenings?

[00:24:38.965] Rogerio Pinto:
So I am there. So if anybody wants to be meeting me on Mondays, I'm there from 1 to 4, even though the gallery is closed, but I am there. People can visit as individuals or they can visit as a class or as a group. I probably made it very confusing. Go to my website.

[00:24:57.465] Mark Clague:
Although you can, even if you come after hours, you can still, that's glass, right? You can still peek in.

[00:25:01.911] Rogerio Pinto:
Yeah, so, you know, Slypop, the people who actually did all the technological pieces for the exhibit, so they created this very interesting thing where all the pieces are on all night long. So when we leave the gallery, all we do is turn off the sound. So the images in the evening are just beautiful because it continues on, but everything is closed. But it's like there's a life that's going on in there. And then when you open the door and you turn on the volume, then it's a whole different thing with sounds and so on and so forth.

[00:25:35.365] Mark Clague:
Well, it's really magical. And it's also just magical, the energy you're bringing to our School of Social Work. And you and your colleagues, there's a whole sort of coterie of arts and arts research researchers and artists at the School of Social Work. So we're really proud of the work you do. And thank you so much for making Michigan one of the leading places in the world where arts and social work are coming together.

[00:25:53.388] Rogerio Pinto:
Well, and it is my pleasure to be here talking to you and to the audience listening to us. Thank you so much.

[00:26:09.473] Mark Clague:
Creative Currents is a project of the University of Michigan Arts Initiative. Please subscribe to hear more great conversations with artists, scholars, and arts leaders from across the campus and across the globe. Send your comments and suggestions via email to creative currents at umich.edu. This episode of Creative Currents was produced by Mark Clague and Jessica Jenks, and our audio engineer is Audrey Banks. Our original theme music is composed and performed by Ansel Neely, a student at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater, and Dance. To learn more about the University of Michigan's Arts Please visit our website at arts.umich.edu. Thanks for listening.