We went into town yesterday and checked out the national art museum we first visited on our city tour.
This is the Oscar Niemeyer dome wherein is housed the museum which we first visited on our city tour. Upstairs in the mezzanine there were the woodcuts on display of a rural Brazilian artist. 
It’s not exactly the same but it put us in mind of the artwork of Mario Sanchez in Key West.
Layne mentioned it to me as well so I figured the comparison made sense. 
Like Sanchez, Jose Francisco Borges was born into a working family and did the kind of day labor jobs that did not look like anything artistic was locked away inside him. 
The museum had a biography only in Portuguese which I can read more or less and it said he fathered 16 children and adopted several more for a total of 23 which apparently put pressure on his artistic output. Interestingly he lived a good long life and stayed in his rural small town where he died. 
There wasn’t any explanation of the woodcuts other than brief titles so if they tell stories like the Mario Sanchez artwork I wouldn’t know but I did notice in the collection above one looked unused with no ink on its face. 
I leaned over the white line holding my wide angled lens but I am a rule follower unlike some of my Brazilian neighbors who at least did not actually touch the artwork. The security guard said nothing. 
The plan was to get some skewers to take home.
In Portuguese “pasteles” are empanadas whereas in Spanish that word means sweet cakes. Just to remind you how confusing similar languages can be. 
For some reason we settled on this vendor who it turned out was Jose a refugee from Venezuela. A Spanish speaker! Praise be. 
He’s lived in Brasilia, in a suburb an hour away actually, for the past three years. His cousin lives in Michigan in an auto assembly plant and he’s been thinking of giving it a try.
And of course this exhibit was in the mezzanine of the dome shaped building.
It hangs from the ceiling and I know I’ve posted it here previously but the mezzanine is pretty cool. 
It features the architect Niemeyer’s love of compound curves. 
Then we went to the basement, more curves,
To check out an exhibit of modern Italian art. It’s a mobile exhibit first shown in Milan in 2023. 
And wasn’t I surprised to find a huge mural from my neck of the woods in Umbria. 
It’s called Vallefredda a CB locality near Terni in Italy apparently used as a backdrop for spaghetti westerns hence the cacti in the picture which are not native to Umbria. Next time I go back to visit my sisters I’ll drive by to see if I can find the old man sitting reflecting on his life:
Out into the sunshine. 
And in the distance you can see the tents across the plaza where we went to buy dinner.
I endeavored to dissuade him but the lure of America still burns bright. Then he asked if I thought an invasion of Venezuela was imminent like I have a clue. After weeks of not being able to speak to the locals I got thrown in at the deep end.
