Museu Afro Brasil

This guide to Museu Afro Brasil traces a small 1810s sketch by French artist Jacques Arago of an enslaved man forced to wear an iron mask, and how Brazil later renamed the image after an invented saint, Escrava Anastácia. It follows how copies of that mask, and real ones like it, ended up displayed in these galleries, filed as art beside paintings and sculpture. The guide raises the question of what a museum owes an object built to hurt someone rather than to be looked at.