A story of the power of art~

Summer 2012 I started FlutuArte (with my friend Maxine Nienow), a project in Brazil that transformed the rooftops of sixty fishing boats in a harbor in Rio de Janeiro into a floating sea of painted color. Our team was there day after day painting on the tops of the boats. A local woman who had grown up in the harbor would shoot us a disapproving sideways glare from her rowboat whenever she passed. We tried week after week to befriend her to no avail. We would ask each fisherman what he wanted painted on his boat and one of them decided he wanted a black pearl (her nickname) painted as an homage to her. When she saw it she became so proud of the painting. It was the first time we saw her smile. Her boat was the last unpainted one in the harbor but in the end, to our surprise she came and asked us to paint hers too, the 60th boat. It was the greatest victory of the project to witness the power that art has to dissolve boundaries and bring people together.

Six of sixty boats painted for FlutuArte.