Paco Imperial

Paco Imperial holds no permanent art collection, by design and by explicit institutional choice. Its director since the 1990s, Lauro Cavalcanti, has said plainly that the building's own architecture and three centuries of history are its real holdings. The single permanent installation is the Atelie Sergio Camargo, the sculptor's studio and tools kept in the smaller inner courtyard; everything else that has been shown here, from a Henry Moore retrospective to the preview of the collection that founded the Niteroi contemporary art museum across the bay, arrived on loan and moved on. That makes the record of what has passed through its galleries, documented in more than three hundred exhibitions since 1984, the closest thing the institution has to a collection.

The building now called Paco Imperial began in 1738, when the governor of the captaincy, Gomes Freire de Andrade, Conde de Bobadela, ordered a proper residence for his office built at the water's edge in Rio de Janeiro. The engineer Jose Fernandes Pinto Alpoim folded two existing structures into the new design, the royal warehouses (Armazens Del-Rei) and the royal mint (Casa da Moeda), and shaped the result after the Paco da Ribeira, the Portuguese monarchs' own riverside palace in Lisbon. The Casa dos Governadores was finished in 1743. In 1747 a fountain raised in front of it gave the open ground before it the shape of a plaza for the first time, flanked by a Carmelite convent and a row of houses attributed to the same architect. That plaza is Praca XV de Novembro today, and the old governor's house still stands on one side of it.

When the seat of colonial government moved from Salvador to Rio in 1763, the house became the residence of the viceroys and kept that role until 1808, when the arrival of the Portuguese royal family changed its purpose again. A stone quay with steps down to the water, and a new fountain built by the sculptor known as Mestre Valentim, were added in this period to supply ships and nearby houses.

Fleeing Napoleon's invasion of Portugal, Prince Regent Dom Joao arrived in Rio in 1808 and the old viceroys' house became the Paco Real, enlarged by covered passageways linking it to the neighboring Carmo convent and the old city jail so the court could move between buildings without going into the street. After independence in 1822 it kept the name Paco Imperial and continued as the working seat of the new monarchy: not a residence in the ordinary sense, since the emperors mostly lived elsewhere, but the place from which they governed and where the state staged its ceremonies. Under Dom Pedro II a third passageway connected the palace directly to the tribune of the Imperial Chapel next door, again so the imperial family need not step outside.

Two moments here are still central to how Brazilians tell their own history. On 9 January 1822, Dom Pedro I stood on the building's balcony and told the crowd gathered below that he would stay in Brazil rather than obey an order to return to Portugal, the declaration remembered as the Dia do Fico and usually read as the opening act of Brazilian independence. On 13 May 1888, with the emperor in Europe, his daughter the Princess Regent Isabel signed the Lei Aurea inside the building, abolishing slavery in Brazil without qualification. The palace also hosted the more routine business of monarchy: acclamations, coronations, royal weddings, christenings and funerals.

The Proclamation of the Republic in 1889 ended the building's political role at a stroke. Stripped of its government functions, it was handed to the postal and telegraph service and spent decades as a working post office, a use with little regard for the fabric of an eighteenth-century palace. In 1938 the newly formed national heritage service, the predecessor of today's IPHAN, listed the building for protection, but its actual recovery did not begin for another four decades.

Restoration finally started in the early 1980s under the architect Glauco Campello, as part of a wider push to revive Rio's old downtown that ran through the 1980s and 1990s. No complete original floor plan survived, so the work leaned on old photographs, archival research and archaeological digging inside the building, which turned up the old royal warehouse, a chimney from the mint, and the original water-supply well beneath the courtyard. The restoration aimed to keep visible traces of the different centuries the building had passed through rather than freeze it at a single imagined moment.

The restored building reopened to the public as the Centro Cultural Paco Imperial at the start of 1985, run by IPHAN together with the federal culture ministry's heritage and museums department, and deliberately built no collection of its own. Lauro Cavalcanti, the institution's director since the 1990s, has put the point directly: the architecture and history of the Paco are its real holdings and its real capital. That decision sets it apart from most institutions in this archive. It is not a museum in the sense of a body of objects assembled and kept; it is a listed historic building that hosts other people's exhibitions, on a program that has run since 1984 to more than three hundred documented shows.

The one exception is the Atelie Sergio Camargo, installed in the building's smaller inner courtyard: the sculptor's own works and tools, kept as a studio rather than a conventional gallery hang. It grew out of an artist-residency idea, the Atelie Finep program launched in 1994, which in its short life gave working studio space inside the palace to Beatriz Milhazes and Anna Bella Geiger in 1994, Iole de Freitas and Luiz Aquila in 1995, Waltercio Caldas, Daniel Senise and Angelo Venosa in 1996, Cildo Meireles and Eduardo Sued in 1997, and Luiz Pizarro and Nuno Ramos in 1998. Camargo's studio is what remains of that program as a permanent fixture.

Without a collection of its own, the Paco Imperial's identity has been built instead by what has passed through it. In 1992 and 1993 it gave an early public showing to the contemporary art collection assembled by Joao Sattamini, a preview of a body of work that would shortly become the founding collection of the Niemeyer-designed Museu de Arte Contemporanea across the bay in Niteroi. From December 2004 to February 2005 it hosted the 28th edition of the Panorama da Arte Brasileira, the long-running itinerant survey of contemporary national production normally associated with the Museu de Arte Moderna in Sao Paulo. That same year, from July to September 2005, its galleries held a 244-piece Henry Moore retrospective touring Brazil, organized with the British Council and the Henry Moore Foundation and billed at the time as the largest Moore exhibition ever held outside Europe; the Brazilian Association of Art Critics named it best exhibition of the year. In 2019 it took the Rio de Janeiro leg of Ai Weiwei - Raiz, sixty works by the Berlin-based Chinese artist split between the building and the nearby Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, a show already named best international exhibition of 2018 during its earlier run in Sao Paulo.

In March 2026 the center marked its own fortieth year with Constelacoes, an anniversary exhibition curated by Claudia Saldanha and Ivair Reinaldim that filled twelve halls and two courtyards with roughly 160 works by more than a hundred artists who have shown there over four decades, from Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark to Adriana Varejao and Beatriz Milhazes, alongside a memorial garden built with the estate of landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx.

Paco Imperial sits on Praca XV de Novembro in the middle of Rio's old downtown, a short walk from the Carioca and Uruguaiana metro stations and from other landmarks of the same historic district, including the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil and the Museu do Amanha on the revived waterfront nearby. Entry to the building and to every exhibition is free, every day the galleries are open. The building itself, its courtyard, bistro and bookshop stay open on Monday even though the exhibition galleries do not; the galleries run Tuesday to Sunday and on holidays from noon to six, and the building overall from eleven to six. A first-floor reference library, the Biblioteca Paulo Santos, opens to the public on Wednesday and Friday mornings and holds rare volumes on architecture and Brazilian history built from a private collection donated to the institution. Reviewers most often describe the whole visit, outside of a major touring show, as taking about an hour.

Visitors consistently describe a compact, free stop in the historic core of Rio that rewards a quick visit more than a long one: a handsomely restored colonial palace whose real draw is the political history enacted inside it, paired with a rotating program of contemporary art that many did not expect to find in a colonial-era building. Reviewers who arrive expecting a grand European-style state residence, on the strength of the name Imperial Palace, tend to note that the rooms are plainer and smaller than that.