Lineage through Landscape: Tracing Egun in Brazil by Fran Siegel is a multifaceted drawing project developed during the Los Angeles-based artist’s research residency in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and the island of Itaparica, a vibrant center of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé.

A vast, forty-foot-long, irregular “weaving” made of strips of sun-exposed and patterned fabric crossed by lengths of delicate drawings of sacred plants on translucent drafting film and cyanotypes, the work will wrap around three walls of the Museum’s “Fowler in Focus” Gallery. Finding inspiration in the worship of ancestral spirits, or Egun, in the natural environment associated with Candomblé practices on Itaparica and in the vexed history of colonialism and slavery in Brazil, Siegel’s project can be read as a highly charged landscape of black Brazil, built from fragments that embrace its African roots.

Lineage through Landscape: Tracing Egun in Brazil by Fran Siegel is organized by the Fowler Museum and curated by Marla C. Berns, Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director. The exhibition is made possible thanks to a grant from the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation. Fran Siegel’s research for this project was supported by a Fulbright Social Sciences and Humanities Award and by a residency at the Instituto Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil.