BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
Welcome to Brazilian summer in Amsterdam.
In the evolving global dialogue of street art, it’s not often that two hemispheres collide with this much color, conviction, and cultural force. This summer in Amsterdam, STRAAT Museum hosts a rare and vital encounter: a comingling of Brazilian street expression in two distinct but interconnected exhibitions — Pixação: Resistance and Rebellion and NaLata X STRAAT. It is a vivid, timely lens on one of the world’s most influential street art cultures, bringing political urgency, spiritual depth, and unfiltered humanity into focus.
Born from the informal laboratories of public space, Brazilian urban art has long pushed boundaries — formal, legal, aesthetic — and nowhere is this more pronounced than in the uniquely raw language of pixação. The exhibition Pixação: Resistance and Rebellion opens a door onto this homegrown form of dissent, of visual style, and socio-political act. Featured artists like Cripta Djan, Eneri, and LIXOMANIA!.zé carry the weight of a movement that refuses erasure, climbing the vertical concrete of Brazil’s cities to inscribe messages in the margins, on the margins. Stark texts, monochrome, often illegible to outsiders, declare existence in a society rife with inequality.
Using archival photographs, personal ephemera, and newly created large-scale canvases now added to the STRAAT collection, this show documents and transmits a living code of resistance, still pulsing.
Later in the season, NaLata X STRAAT will aim the lens toward the international scope and creative exuberance of Brazil’s broader street art scene. Originating from the NaLata Festival in São Paulo, often described as a sprawling celebration of muralism, community, and expression — this collaboration brings works by Enivo, Magrela, Dolores Esos, Priscilla “Pri” Barbosa, Deco Treco, Lobot, and Mundano to the museum’s monumental walls, alongside new commissions from well-known and respected artists Speto and Tinho. These are paintings and dispatches — narratives from favelas and city squares.
At a moment when the world reckons with crumbling institutions and questions of equity, environment, and voice, these artists remind us that the public wall remains a crucial platform, not of power, but of people. Their color palettes burst with optimism, even as their messages carry critique. They are playful, poetic, personal, and political — sometimes all at once.
