Escadaria Selarón

This guide to the Escadaria Selarón in Rio de Janeiro follows the Chilean painter Jorge Selarón, who settled above this crumbling public stairway in the early 1980s and began covering its two hundred fifteen steps in broken tile without a permit, funding the work by selling copies of the same painting over and over. It traces how strangers around the world began mailing him tiles from home, and how the project consumed the next twenty-three years of his life.