RUÁ Coletivo transforms São Paulo's concrete walls into living canvases. Since 2016, we've painted over 420 murals across the city — every stroke a rejection of the gray, a burst of collective imagination that cannot be stalled.
Lead Artist
a.k.a. TARSILA
Founder and creative director of RUÁ Coletivo. Born in Madalena, raised on the walls of Vila Madalena. Her work fuses Afro-Brazilian iconography with hyper-saturated mural compositions that swallow entire building facades. Inspired by Tarsila do Amaral, the Modern Art Week of 1922, and the raw energy of pixação — she paints like the city is breathing through her cans. Exhibited at MASP, MASPyramids São Paulo, and墙上 in Lisbon, Berlin, and Mexico City.
Stencil Master
a.k.a. PICHO
Stencil and wheatpaste technician from Osasco. Picho's layered portrait work explores displacement and urban memory — each piece contains 15–20 hand-cut stencil layers. His "Invisible São Paulo" series — oversized portraits of homeless residents painted directly onto the walls they sleep against — was exhibited at MASP and sparked a citywide conversation about visibility.
Geometry Queen
a.k.a. KRIOLA
Geometric abstraction meets Afro-Atlantic visual language. Kriola's murals are mathematical and primal simultaneously — tessellated patterns in hot magenta and electric lime that reference both the parquet floors of her grandmother's house in Salvador and Yoruba textile geometry passed down through four generations.
Typography
a.k.a. PNEU
Rollers and house paint on architecture. Pneu paints buildings as if they were typographic compositions — letters, numbers, and punctuation marks scaled to fill entire walls in a single confident gesture. His "Letreiro Vivo" series transforms architectural lettering into monumental abstract art.
a.k.a. DENTI
Photorealism with a spray can. Denti creates enormous hyper-real portraits on São Paulo's crumbling facades, transforming forgotten walls into galleries of neighborhood faces. Her portrait of Dona Maria — a 92-year-old resident of Santo Amaro — became the most-photographed mural in the city in 2023.
a.k.a. TREM
Train writer turned muralist. Trem spent a decade painting São Paulo's metro and freight trains before moving to legal walls. His style is raw letterform architecture — massive chrome pieces that feel structural, like the letters are holding up the building they're painted on.
Our community workshops aren't just about learning to paint — they're about reclaiming space, telling stories, and building identity through color. Every Saturday, we open our studio in Vila Madalena to anyone who wants to pick up a spray can for the first time or push their wall technique further.
Since 2017, over 1,200 young artists from São Paulo's peripheral neighborhoods have trained with us. Many now paint alongside us on commissioned murals and city-funded public art projects. Three of our current collective members started as workshop students.
Inscreva-seLearn can control, line weight, fill techniques, and layering. We cover the physics of aerosol paint — pressure, distance, speed, angle — and practice on 2m × 3m panels. All materials provided. No experience necessary. Ages 14+.
12 vagas restantesDesign and cut multi-layer stencils with Picho. Explore paper and digital techniques,learn registration marks, and practice application on different surfaces. Walk away with a 3-layer stencil set you designed yourself.
8 vagas restantesHow to design for large walls — gridding, projection, proportion, and the logistics of working at height. Intermediate level. Bring your sketchbook and a proposed mural design for critique and planning.
5 vagas restantes
Our flagship annual festival returns to the Marginal Tietê corridor. 40 artists, 12 walls, 4 days of non-stop painting. Live music stage, open studios, and a 2km open-air gallery along the river. This year's theme: "Water Memory" — exploring how rivers shape the city and its art. Last year's festival drew 45,000 visitors. This year will be bigger.
An all-night painting session under UV lights and projection mapping. Artists work with fluorescent paints while DJs and sound artists create an immersive audiovisual landscape. The walls transform every hour as new layers are added. Viewers walk through the process, not just the result. Bring a headlamp and comfortable shoes — the paint will find you.
A full day where teenagers from São Paulo's peripheral neighborhoods take over a wall in the city center. Mentored by RUÁ artists, they design and execute a collaborative mural from concept to final clear coat. Lunch, materials, and transportation provided free. Previous editions produced murals in Sé, República, and Barra Funda that still stand today.
A gallery exhibition at SESC Pompéia exploring the dialogue between street and studio. RUÁ artists present new canvas works alongside documentation of their mural process — sketches, color studies, action photos, and removed wall fragments. Includes a site-specific installation painted directly onto the gallery walls during opening night.
RUÁ Coletivo was born in 2016 from a simple act of defiance. Six artists — Tarsila, Picho, Kriola, Pneu, Denti, and Trem — met at Vila Madalena's Beco do Batman at 3 AM on a Tuesday morning, cans in hand, tired of painting alone. They decided that night to stop competing for walls and start building something together. The first collaborative piece took eight hours — a 15-meter mural of tangled letterforms and faces that covered the entire side of a condemned bakery on Rua Harmonia. That wall was demolished three months later, but the collective never stopped painting.
The name RUÁ is "Rua" (street) broken in half and reassembled — a mirror that reflects the city back at itself. In eight years, the collective has grown from six to twenty-three active artists, painted over 420 murals across São Paulo and seven other countries, and trained more than 1,200 young artists through free community programs in peripheral neighborhoods. We've been arrested twice, invited to City Hall four times, and once painted a mural so large it was visible on Google Earth.
"A parede não é nossa. A parede é da cidade. Nós só damos cor ao que já pertence a todos."
— Ana 'Tarsila' Rodrigues, Fundadora do RUÁ ColetivoOur approach is radically collaborative. No single artist owns a RUÁ mural — each piece is designed and executed collectively, with every member contributing to the composition, color decisions, and physical painting. We argue about palette for hours. We paint over each other's work mid-process. We trust the wall, not the ego. Street art is community practice, not individual branding.
We partner with neighborhood associations, public schools, Indigenous communities, and city government to identify walls that matter — not just walls that are visible. Sometimes the most important mural is the one painted on the side of a community kitchen in Jardim Ângela, not the one on Paulista Avenue. We believe art should meet people where they are, not wait for them to buy a ticket.
We're always looking for artists, organizers, photographers, writers, builders, and dreamers. You don't need to be a trained painter — you need to care about the streets and want to transform them. We meet every Wednesday at 7 PM in our Vila Madalena studio. Walk-ins welcome.
Studio address: Rua Harmonia, 84 — Vila Madalena, São Paulo
Open studio: Wednesdays, 19h — 22h
Email: contato@ruacoletivo.com