Abstract

Olly emerged in the artistic field in the 1950s. She amassed positive reviews about her production. However, in the artistic universe, claiming quality is not enough. It was necessary that her work dialogued with some of that universe’s significant proposals: they had to make sense. What was that sense? Recognized while producing, but forgotten after her death, it is to Olly’s trajectory the author seeks to assign meaning. Olly: Race, Class, and Gender in the Invention of Rustic Modernity is a tribute to the author’s grandparents and a critique of the attitude of much of the white Brazilian middle-class towards peripheric groups. Looking at the artist’s subjects, the author identifies in her web of relations the creation of the idea of a sensibility that was intended to be universal, but even though it was based on different peripheric groups, it was produced and consumed by a certain white middle-class audience.