In her youth, Tarsila “grew up on the family fazenda [mansion on a large and prosperous farm] and attended colégios [secondary schools] in Santana, São Paulo, and Barcelona.” Far from spending her formative years in a favela, this artist lived in a comfortable, rural environment, and attended upper-class academies in Brazil and Europe. Therefore, audiences should not assume she painted Carnaval and Operários because she experienced poverty or racial discrimination first-hand. After divorcing André Teixeira Pinto and studying artistic techniques in Paris, Tarsila returned to Brazil with skepticism towards the academic formalist school of painting. Together with her friends Anita Malfatti and soon-to-be husband Oswald de Andrade, she joined the modernist “Group of Five” in São Paulo, widely considered the center of modern art in 1920s Brazil.…