Art: ARTS OF BAHIA

For most of its 460-year history, Brazil was a country of Portuguese masters and Indian or Negro slaves. To harvest the sugar cane, mine the gold, and fell the mighty dyewood (brazil) that gave the country its name, slavers imported sturdy Negroes by the boatload from Africa. Greatest concentration of slave labor was in Salvador, capital of Bahia on Brazil's northeast bulge, which even today is the most African city (pop. 417,000) in the New World.

To highlight the contributions of Bahia to Brazilian culture, some 1,000 objects, ranging from gaily painted gourds and...

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