Waldemar De Andrade

Waldemar

(Waldemar de Andrade e Silva)

1933 – Timburi, SP 2015 - Embu, SP

Waldemar was a farmworker, commercial employee, boxer and theater actor. He embraced the subject of the life of the Indigenous peoples in the Xingu, region of Amazon, to develop his artistic work in 1968 and became known as the artist who painted the native Indians. Since his childhood, he had felt attracted by the subject due to his origins, and always considered himself as though he were one of them. Thanks to the Villas-Bôas brothers, famous anthropologists, he was able to have contact and get to know the Indians closely, in their intimacy. He went to the Xingu in 1971 and throughout the next eight years he frequently visited the Indians to observe their way of living, their day to day, their rituals and their festivities. 

He carried out 60 exhibitions in Brazil, 14 in the United States, and 57 in Europe, mainly in Germany which he visited on 14 occasions. The book Lendas e Mitos dos Índios Brasileiros, illustrated with his paintings and published in Germany, is in its eighth edition and in its second edition in Japan. This book was finally published in Brazil by FTD Editor in São Paulo, in 1998. In 1996 an educational game, containing 110 playing cards related to indigenous culture was released in Germany. The game, which was in thirteen languages, contained teaching proposals and each card had been painted by Waldemar. Transformed into a researcher of indigenous culture, Waldemar created the Museu do Índio in Embu, a municipality of the state of São Paulo, in 2005, which is still open today. The artist has paintings on exhibition at the Anthropology Museums of Indiana and Michigan, USA, at the Museum of Skopje in the Republic of Macedonia, one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia and at the Museu de Arte Naif de Assis, São Paulo.