The Santander Cultural center in Porto Alegre, a major city in the south of Brazil, is the site of an exciting, monster-sized street art exhibit called Transfer. Not only does it draw the biggest names from the discipline (Ornesto, Herbert Baglione, Carlos Dias) in the country but also matches them with their international peers like Mike Mills, Cheryl Dunn and KAWS. A group of star curators including Sesper and Christian Strike has brought over the amazing Beautiful Losers tour as one segment of the show, bringing the overall participant total to 300 works by 100 artists. The other three parts of Transfer discuss street art: how it’s documented by photographs and film, accessories to the scene, such as skate and publications, and work that has transcended the street and entered more defined art and cultural spaces. The show runs until Sept. 28, but since you won’t be there to check it out in person, see skate photographer Flavio Samelo’s shots from the show here.

If Pedro Lourenco didn’t share the same name as a certain prodigy teen clothing designer in Sao Paulo, I would’ve never had the delight to come across this Portuguese artist’s impressive work. He earns his daily bread through illustration assignments with newspapers, magazines and books, but gets to inject his personal enthusiasm for comic books, music and movies into projects for clubs (Lux/Fragil in Lisbon), record shops (like Flur, “the greatest record shop ever,” he says) and concert posters (The Liars). Next on the production line is a kid’s book and fanzine. Between the two Pedro Lourenco, there should be no mistaken identity here.

We've talked about Alexandre Orion when he released his first book about his concept of Metabiotics — interaction between his street paintings and the photographs taken of them. A year and a half later the Wooster Special Edition project is releasing a new book, giving Alexandre the attention and space to define his artistic vision, and also display his work on both the street and in galleries. Aside from being a beautifully designed book, it comes with a hand cut stencil, so you can spend your summer outside tagging buildings in promotion of Orion. Copies of the book and stencil are limited to 200 … that means hurry.

Ada Pinkston at Current TV just sent over a video they just posted featuring their Brazilian host Rico (no last name) of the Globe Patrol show getting reacquainted with Sao Paulo after being away for a decade. You know we’ve always got the best coming from Brazil covered, but watching what’s going down will give you a different angle of how I see this awesome city. Rico jumps around town to the Munny exhibit at toy store/ art gallery Plastik, goes to venue Studio SP to catch up with long-lost friends and interviews the Brazilian Larry Flynt, aka the sleazy Oscar Maroni, who was arrested last year for running a brothel. More fun with Brazil here.

Die Gestalten just dropped a sneak peek of the new book by Stephan Doitschinoff — aka Calma, a Brazilian artist we turned you onto last month — titled Calma: The Art of Stephen Doitschinoff (landing in bookstores this September). The beautifully designed hardcover will feature 144 full-color pages of his paintings, which mix old Afro-Brazilian tales and religious iconography in a street style. In between his pieces are reflections of those who’ve encountered his work, such as Graffiti Brasil author Tristan Manco. More previews on the DGV site.

When Rafael Augustaitiz - a student and long-time member of Brazil’s pixacao tagging movement - staged his graduation show along with the rest of his class in Sao Paulo at the highly esteemed private art college Belas Artes last Wednesday, he took a different route that made the news and pissed a ton of people off, but did get them talking. He invited 40 to 50 (the numbers vary on all reports) pichadores to help him mount a protest about what essentially is the divide between the poor and the rich, between art and how far it can go. Pixacao, for those who don’t know much about it, is a visual form that a lot of disadvantaged youth identify with here in Brazil. During the show, the group went on a rampage using spray paint as artillery, bombing the school with their cryptic-like tags, even spraying officials in the face who tried to stop them. It was chaos and now, after the event, school administrators are thinking about pulling Augustaitiz’s financial scholarship. This insane bit of rebellion was captured on film, and you can see it here to decide whether the message came through loud and clear or just lost its gas.

Voyeurism is an art. At least with Felipe Morozini’s Last Floor Project it is. While I avert my eyes when I see my neighbor in the building next to me walking around in her underwear because I hope to god she does the same when I’m similarly careless, this Sao Paulo resident shamelessly pulls out his camera, focuses his image-capturing device on his neighbors and shoots away, using his higher-up vantage point to capture their everyday moments. Dudes sun tanning on the ledges of their balconies, people hanging up laundry— in real life, we already knew that such mundane things could be so addicting and thrilling to watch, but I’m happy someone could document it so that we can stare as long as we want.

Merda! Filho da puta! If you’re at all into learning foreign languages, you know the best way to blend-in like a native is to learn all the bad words in the local language that would shame your mother into regretting she ever gave birth to you if she ever heard you saying them. Still, in a quest to become better educated, Sao Paulo design agency Grïngo (just so you know, to be called a gringo here isn’t meant to be derogatory) has put together a teaching site of dirty phrases and single words recorded with webcams by users all over the world speaking various no-nos in their native language… like “wanker” in German and “big sh!t” in French. It’s so ridiculous it’s funny, because the site seems like it’s been afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome. While watching these moments of hilarity, keep in mind that this comes from the same agency that CocaCola Brazil hired to do their 2008 campaigns. Sounds like a f!cking great move. Go ahead, add your word to the growing dictionary, and then go wash that mouth out with soap you naughty word-sayer you.

Speaking of Brazilians and their design sense, have a peek at Naima Almeida’s new design portfolio, a nice collection of print and digital creations. What’s all this Brazilian design news telling us? We need to all plan a trip to Brazil to ride around on scooters and spend a week going through some of their design houses to catch up with all of their incredible ground breaking trends as of late. Plus, I think we could all use a couple days on the beach to kick summer off. I know Josh is ready!

Brastilo, the contemporary furniture gurus based in Brazil, just revamped their website, giving their products and other company collateral some fresh new cyberspace digs. The updated nav makes it easy to browse by category or designer, and easily whisks you away to other parts of their site where you can learn interesting tidbits about the company, including their impressive eco commitment and astute collection of designers. An authentic company offering unique, culturally inspired home furnishings? Not your everyday Ikea, and definitely worth a look.

Last year we turned you on to Brazilian artist tag team Mulheres Barbadas (that’s “bearded women” in Portuguese, just to give you an idea of this duo’s type of humor), and almost a year after the post, they just mounted their exhibit in Sao Paulo called Waxed Men (hmm, I’m seeing theme here). The show features fresh works solely in pen, a feat they admit is more time consuming than using Photoshop, but a heck of a lot more enjoyable. One of the most labor-intensive pieces took them three days to finish, and it also took that long for them to paint the wall outside of the show space — their first ever, by the way. The works have no specific subject, but instead are about “chaos, mayhem and toast.” Though they are looking forward to painting more outside spaces, team member Julio Zukerman was reported to be suffering “drawing spasms in his sleep after [their] little drawing marathon,” so they’re resting easy for a while. The exhibit runs at Rojo Magazine’s Sao Paulo art space in Livraria Pop until June 28th. Check out their website to see the collaboration in action.

These are close-up preview shots (after the jump) that we got of the super-special Nike Dunk Electrico that won’t be fully and officially revealed until tomorrow in Sao Paulo. Nike appropriately picked the famous half-Brazilian, half-Japanese tattoo artist and jewelry designer Jun Matsui — who was born in northern Brazil but spent most of his time in Tokyo before moving back to his home country, a story not so uncommon from where I’m writing this post — to lend his design skills and mark the 100th anniversary of the Japanese immigration to Brazil. He’s come up with a sleek brown leather shoe, with both Japanese cultural symbols and his own signature glyphs in gold (such as a ferret and rat). Four hundred signed pairs were made and, yep, will be sold only in Brazil and Japan.

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The combination of glitter, resin and Japanese pop iconography are the three characteristics that put Japanese artist Atsuo in his own realm. There isn’t a whole lot of info on the guy, and even the Sao Paulo gallery that supports him, Choque Cultural, admits they don’t know much about the elusive artist. But it’s clear Atsuo doesn’t work in a vacuum, because his work refers to the world around him. It received a lot of play in a recent group show at the street art venue, an exhibit that showcases Japanese pop art renditions from native artists. Whether or not you can find him, at the very least Atsuo seems to be destined for transatlantic greatness.

An interview with artist/local hero Herbert Baglione and a hardcore-turned-samba musician Kiki Dinucci are just two of the stories in the packed new issue of the Sao Paulo free bimonthly magazine Mais Soma from JoshSpear friends Kultur Studio. With a distribution of 10,000 in a city of 16 million people, you can guess copies disappear fast. The glossy is a superbly done publication putting alternative and lesser-profiled subjects in front of the public eye. Plus, they have the occasional international star, like Shepard Fairey, who did a substantial Q&A in the last issue. We know many of you (ok, so plenty of you) don’t live in Sao Paulo, but you can still watch special videos on their site via Somacast, and download previous issues as PDFs for digital perusal.

50 Graus — the heads we told you about last year who put ice penguins under the hot sun in a Sao Paulo park to make a point about global warming — is on our radar again (thanks to the same Marco Monteiro who tipped us on the original post) with another intelligently conceived campaign. This time they’re targeting, cough, smokers. In “Smoking Kills More,” they juxtapose the death rates of well-known historical happenings with the fatalities caused by smoking-related diseases, using cancer sticks as their medium to create both non-moving and moving images. Watch their incredibly well-done stop-motion animation vid spot of a war scene created from cigs here. The controversial art piece you see pictured was made with 13,000 cigarettes and was built and displayed in front of curious passersby in the city’s center for full effect. Imagine trying to wash the smell of all of those out from your clothes. Nasty.