When in Doubt, Barbeque

In a Brazilian favela community of 60,000 people in Rio called Vila Cruzeiro, Holland artists Dre Urhahn and Jeroen Koolhaas had an idea. What would it look like to plaster and paint these hillside houses as one big, designed work of art?

After the okay from a friend in the community, Dre and Jeroen moved in with a local family. “Unfortunately, during that time,” says Jeroen, “another war broke out between the police and the drug gangs. We learned people really stick together during these times of hardship; we also learned about the importance of barbecues. When you throw a barbecue, it turns you from a guest into a host, so we decided to throw one almost every other week, and we got to know everybody in the neighborhood.”

A year later, after their work in Rio went viral, the pair received an unexpected phone call from the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. Administrators wondered if their approach would work in North Philly. “We immediately said yes. We had no idea how,” said Dre in their TED talk, How Paintings Can Transform Communities “but it seemed like an interesting challenge, so we moved into the neighborhood and started barbecuing.”