Guest Blog from Portugal: Lisbon Art
Art can be found all over the world, and our fabulous art teacher, Jennifer Shaby, wrote today’s post from her trip to Portugal this summer. Ooh! Ah! She found art everywhere, even where you might not expect it…
I always like to check out art museums when I travel. While in Lisbon, Portugal, I visited two fantastic museums: the Berardo Collection & the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum. I saw everything from Ancient Greek coins, illuminated manuscripts, Impressionist, Surrealist and Pop Art pieces by artists whose names you would recognize (or else I have failed as a teacher….), and works by Portuguese artists. Check out this painting by Portuguese painter Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso called The Life of Instruments.
I feel pretty confident that you can identify the movement that this piece represents. But, the most surprising, and perhaps the most interesting, art I saw was not in a museum. During my taxi ride from the airport to my hostel, I noticed tons of graffiti tags lining the walls on either side of the highway and asked the driver about it. He told me that there is, indeed, a lot of graffiti around Lisbon. 
On Friday evening I joined up with a group going on an urban art walk, which was led by a guide from my hostel. He explained that there is a lot of street art in Lisbon that has been commissioned by the municipal government, and so the illegal element that we often think of when we see “graffiti” does not necessarily hold true here in Lisbon. There are plenty of tags and stencils around, too, and we wandered around the dilapidated walls of an old building that have been covered in graffiti. While this particular “collection” is not supported by the city, they don´t seem to be actively getting rid of it, either. One mural we saw covered the sides of a couple of buildings and was inspired by Fado, a style of Portuguese singing.
We ended our tour in a parking garage, where several artists were each given a floor of the structure to work on. While I don´t typically enjoy my time spent in parking garages, it was very cool to discover the colorful and whimsical paintings covering the walls and posts as we spiraled down the ramp. I love that the city is supporting these artists and that the government appreciates the value that this work provides to the community and to its visitors. Wandering the streets in search of the next historic site listed in my guidebooks, the pleasure of being surprised by quirky, humorous art on the city’s walls only increased my enjoyment of the city. Don´t get me wrong – 
I´m not suggesting that you go out and start painting the walls of the parking garage in your downtown, or spray paint the sides of abandoned buildings – it is illegal. But, I do think it’s worthwhile for us to reconsider what we think of as “art” sometimes, and keep an open mind about the ways that art can enrich our public spaces and create some unexpected joy.
~ Ms. Shaby
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Did you like Ms. Shaby’s post? Add your comments and questions here, and you might feel like you are sitting in art class. Do you know which art movement she is writing about?
