Favela Painting: Dutch duo and Rio youths repaint a favela - and its image

In 2005 Dutch artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn came to Rio to film hip-hop videos and kept confronting one image: favelas as no-go zones of drugs and gunfire. They wondered whether art could change what the world - and residents themselves - saw when looking at a hillside slum.

Treat a stigmatized slum as a canvas: paint its public spaces with the people who live there, so the world sees beauty and residents get pride - and jobs.

They rented rooms in Vila Cruzeiro, taught local youths to paint, and produced the 'Boy with Kite' mural in 2006. For Santa Marta's main square in 2010 they scaled up: a 7,000-square-metre design flowing across 34 buildings, with Brazilian paint firm Coral supplying materials and training and residents employed as painters. Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program then commissioned the model for 50-plus buildings on Germantown Avenue.

Santa Marta's square became one of the most colorful places in the world, drew tourists and film crews - Fast Five shot there - and fronted Cooper-Hewitt's 'Design with the Other 90%' exhibition at the UN. Residents reported a changed self-image; the model spread from Rio to Philadelphia and on to Curacao.

When Dutch artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn - working as Haas&Hahn - arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 2005 to shoot hip-hop videos, they were struck less by the violence the favelas were famous for than by how much their residents had to apologize for. Their response was to make the favela itself the artwork: not a mural imposed on it, but public space painted with, by and for the people who lived there, under their Firmeza Foundation.

The method was slow and social. They rented rooms in one of Rio's most dangerous slums, Vila Cruzeiro, and taught local youths to paint; the first mural, 'Boy with Kite', went up in 2006. In 2010 they moved to Santa Marta, where the paint company Coral - a subsidiary of AkzoNobel - supplied materials and training, and a geometric blaze of color rolled across 34 buildings around the main square, about 7,000 square metres in all. Former drug dealers joined the crews; as one told CNN, the project showed him 'an honest job can be a good thing.'

The painted square changed how the place was read from both sides. Tourists began coming to Santa Marta, Hollywood filmed there, and the image of the square became the flagship of a Cooper-Hewitt design exhibition at the United Nations. In 2011 Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program commissioned a version of the idea for Germantown Avenue, where owners of more than 50 buildings picked their own palettes from the artists' system of interlocking color bands. The artists' stated goal remains larger: painting an entire hillside favela.

It attacked stigma, not poverty directly - the visible image of the favela was the thing keeping tourism, investment and self-respect out, and paint was the cheapest possible lever against it.

The art was produced with local labor and training, so every mural doubled as a jobs program and a skills program rather than decoration dropped in from outside.

Residents chose colors and owned the result, which turned a public-art project into public infrastructure that people were proud to maintain.

Corporate pairing was precise: a paint maker funded the one input it could supply best, aligning sponsorship with the artwork itself.

Beauty is infrastructure for dignity. To change how a place is seen, train and pay the people who live there to do the repainting - the image changes from the inside out, and it stays.

Favela Painting grew from the two founders into a program that has trained painters in Rio and Philadelphia, and their TED talk on 'an art-first approach' carries the method to other cities. The Santa Marta square remains one of Rio's photographed landmarks, still operating as the artists intended: a slum the world looks at differently because the people in it made something worth looking at. The ultimate ambition - a whole hillside painted as a monument made by its own residents - is still on the studio's drawing board.