I woke up early when everyone else was sleeping in and decided to head downtown to visit an art museum in Rio De Janeiro.

I wanted to visit the MAM, which is the contemporary museum, which features new art, but the cool thing was that it actually had a show called History of Brazilian painting which was a small retrospective of only paintings.

I hopped on the subway and got off downtown on a Sunday. It was so quiet and dead downtown on a sunday it was amazing. more peaceful than the neighborhood in copacabana. the sun was shining and i knew it was going to be a good day solo exploring the city.

new brick pattern discovered	a trash blob thing that looked cool

When i approached the museum this tree caught my attention. it thought it looked cool in the sun.

Then i got closer and i saw all these big round nut things growing on it and they looked like heads. combined with the flowers it looks like a bunch of girls with flowers in their hair kinda haha

There was a cool ledge here too:

and then at the entrance to the museum, there was actually a bunch of people involved in some kind of group that were practicing skateboarding and rollerskating. the ground here was super smooth and it was cool to see the art museum supporting this.

I went inside and it was free to the public to see the museum, every day free.

Here are some photos from the featured main exhibit.

I liked this painting, a map of the moon

Some cool textures that remind me of the city. I liked the craft oriented approach to the paintings i was seeing so far.

this struck me. look at these stairs. this would never fly in the US. the crack at the very top of the steps like that. that is probably very against building code. what if someone tripped on it? haha. i love it. it makes the staircase so much more interesting.

At the bottom of this exhibit there were some narrative paintings that i admired.

Lia Mittarakis

she painted pictures of Rio inspired by the landscape

At this point i was pretty stoked. but what i had seen so far was not all that much work. it was pretty much just one room. So i asked the desk what else was here. she said theres another building with a show in it. I walked over to the other building and the guy sent me back to the desk to get a ticket for that show. the ticket she gave me was free, and i wasnt sure why she didnt give me one when i asked her about the other show in the first place.

When i entered the building, i wasn't sure i was in the right place. it looked like an art school. a painting classroom building.

One of the doors was open and i peered inside and saw something that looked like a show of work.

I was really impressed right away. what a cool way to show work. There wasnt a single museum guard around and you could get as close to the work as you wanted. i loved that.

This exhibition was called A History Of Brazilian Art

It was a collection of the museums, and I was stoked because for me, it was kind of exactly what I wanted to see, being a tourist.

I'm always drawn to the outsider art.

I REALLY liked this one, and little did i know i would see a WHOLE exhibit of this artist's work in the next museum i went to this day.

Here is one that caught my eye. I read the title and liked it more. It was called Curved. it was made by stacking these rectangular boxes inside each other. the bottom creates a curved line. I don't think the top diagonal lines are curved but its hard for my eyes to figure it out.

That was all that was in this building.

i wanted to see what was behind that other wall so i climbed on a chair and looked through the window.

I Left the museum and saw a skatespot I overlooked before.

I enjoyed this museum visit a lot and decided I would keep walking to see where it takes me. I headed inland to the downtown, and decided that my next stop was going to be the Cathedral that looked like a Aztec pyramid that I spotted a few weeks ago. Today was bright and sunny and it would be a good day to see the stained glass from the inside. Stay tuned for my next post about that!

cheers