Street Art Brazil – from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia

I had told you that, when sorting through photos and naming them, I found a lot more street art photos from Brazil. To end the year, and to finish our reports from Brazil , this will be our last post of streetart images from Brazil.

This header image shows a stunning street art piece on a garage door in Brasilia. When you look though the other photos from Brasilia you will find more motifs from the same artist.

The first part are photos shot in Rio de Janeiro, mainly in and around Santa Teresa. If you have read our previous Rio post you will know that we didn’t see that much of this city . I’m sure that you can find a lot more street art in other parts of the city – most likely near ‘favelas’. But it’s not always wise to enter these.

Please click thumbnails below for a larger photo with description.

On a retaining wall in Urca, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro.

A colourful wall near Lapa Arches, just below Santa Teresa in Rio.

Street vendors display their wares in front of a wall covered in street art.

Commissioned mural on a freshly renovated apartment building in Santa Teresa.

A beautiful piece in a small passage leading to a pedestrian stair in Santa Teresa.

A colourful wall in Santa Teresa/Rio

Garden wall with mural

The facade of a restaurant

One of the tram stops in Santa Teresa – eye catching with its tram mural.

This is so Rio de Janeiro: the bright yellow Santa Teresa tram on a garden wall with people waiting for the next tram to arrive.

Along the coast road, going north, we didn’t really notice much graffiti worth photographing. The same was true driving inland through the state of Minas Gerais and further west.

Most of the beach pavilions, which sell food and drinks, or rent out chairs and umbrellas, are decorated with murals.

Lucky for me, I had to stop at a traffic light – it gave me the opportunity to photograph this colourful piece in Campos dos Goytacazes.

It was a different story once we came to Brasilia: in the residential sections of the inner city we found more than we could photograph. This was in part because we couldn’t find a convenient car park, or art pieces were too far apart. Along the main roads, Brasilia is not really a pedestrian friendly city. Sometimes pedestrian traffic lights are completely missing on major intersections or nearby. So you take your life into your own hands crossing a road – nobody will stop for you…

We spent considerable time along one of the residential ‘wings’ of Brasilia. If you want to understand what I mean by ‘wing’, please have a look at the drawing of the town plan in our Brasilia blog post . We needed to go there to find shops and also, one day, we were invited out for lunch.

The large residential apartment blocks have 24 hour security and are, in general, free of any graffiti, be it tags or real art works. Larger supermarkets, restaurants, and a few other specialty shops are located in a sort of ‘hub’ in the centre of apartment building clusters. But the main roads along the axis of the wing are lined with small single family homes or commercial properties, mostly small shops or banks.

These small properties, which don’t have security, attract a lot of illegal tagging and other graffiti. It appears that, as a response and a form of ‘protection’, many house owners choose to commission a street art piece by a professional artist.

Please click thumbnails below for a larger photo with description.

A small kiosk in Brasilia. Notice the Brazilian spelling!

A cool monkey in Brasilia. Unfortunately a parked motor bike blocked the frontal view.

This really colourful and detailed tag was next to the monkey. Both were in an alley, with small kiosks, which led to residential apartment buildings.

The facade of a family home in Brasilia

Isn’t this a stunning garage door? (The same artist as our header photo.)

This street art was on a new building: a colourful toucan.

To the left of the toucan was this woman’s head; by now you might recognise the street artist.

We had noticed before that these legal street art murals seem to be mostly respected by illegal taggers and the like (that most people call vandals)… Anyhow, I found a number of really stunning pieces along the one ‘wing axis’, where we had gone to visit an Oscar Niemeyer church and a supermarket.

After Brasilia I didn’t see a single piece of street art, which made me get my camera out – so this is all from us for the country of Brazil.

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