Instituto Moreira Salles

The institute

The Instituto Moreira Salles, known as IMS, is a cultural institute with large collections of photography, music, literature and pictures. It was founded in 1992 by the banker and diplomat Walther Moreira Salles, who lived from 1912 to 2001, and it runs centres in Poços de Caldas in Minas Gerais, where its first centre opened in 1992, in Rio and in São Paulo. Born in Pouso Alegre, Minas Gerais, he led the bank that grew into Unibanco, served twice as Brazil's ambassador in Washington (1952 to 1953 and 1959 to 1960) and was finance minister in 1961 and 1962.

Its Rio home is the family's former house in Gávea, which opened as a cultural centre in October 1999 and is a short drive from São Conrado, about 10 to 15 minutes from the villa. It opened seven years after the Poços de Caldas centre, and the institute's current São Paulo centre on Avenida Paulista followed in 2017. The institute also publishes the photography magazine ZUM and serrote, a journal of essays and ideas.

Closed for renovation

The Gávea house closed to the public after 26 March 2023 for a renovation expected to take about four years, and in late 2026 it was still closed, with no reopening date announced by the institute. The work is meant to give visitors better spaces for exhibitions and events and to enlarge the storage areas that keep the collections. When it was announced in 2023, the plan was to restore the modernist house and to replace the building beside it, which held a gallery and part of the storage, with a new one holding two exhibition rooms, an auditorium and a restaurant.

In the meantime the institute takes its Rio programme to partner venues, and researchers are received at an administrative office in Glória. Check the IMS Rio page before you plan a visit to Gávea; this guide covers what the institute holds and where to see IMS shows in Rio while the house is closed.

If you are in Rio over the 2026 to 2027 summer, the Gordon Parks exhibition described below is the way to see the institute's work in the city. Its calendar of talks, screenings and shows across all its centres is on the IMS website.

The house

The house stands at Rua Marquês de São Vicente 476, in the upper part of Gávea, on a plot of about 10,000 square metres surrounded by the Tijuca Forest. The architect Olavo Redig de Campos designed it in 1948 for Walther Moreira Salles and his family, who began living there in 1951, and the institute calls it a landmark of 1950s modern architecture. The architecture critic Guilherme Wisnik has described it as a chácara, a country house set in the city.

The institute's collections of photography, music, literature and pictures are kept in Rio, and the renovation will also give them more storage space. Until it is finished the house is closed to visitors, and the archive collections are held at the administrative office in Glória.

The gardens

Roberto Burle Marx designed the gardens around the house, with a plan dating from 1951, and the landscape architect Isabel Duprat's restoration was completed in 1999, close to half a century later. The institute's Rio page reproduces his 1951 garden plan.

Photography

Photography is the largest of the collections, with about two million images. The institute began collecting 19th-century photographs in 1995, and its holdings include the work of Marc Ferrez, Marcel Gautherot, José Medeiros, Augusto Malta, Alberto Henschel, Guilherme Gaensly, Thomaz Farkas and Otto Stupakoff, along with Claude Lévi-Strauss's photographs from the 1930s.

Marc Ferrez was born in Rio in 1843 and died there in 1923. He photographed railway building, mountains, waterfalls, plantations and the Botocudo people and, above all, panoramas of Rio as it grew, and Emperor Pedro II named him photographer of the Imperial Navy. In 2016 the institute added the photo archive of the Diários Associados newspapers, including O Jornal, Diário da Noite and the Jornal do Commercio, founded in 1827.

Augusto Malta, the city's official photographer from 1903 to 1936, recorded the Pereira Passos reforms, the levelling of Morro do Castelo, the opening of Avenida Central and the inauguration of Christ the Redeemer in more than 80,000 photographs. The institute holds part of his work.

Marcel Gautherot, born in Paris in 1910, settled in Brazil in 1939 and spent 57 years photographing its people, festivals and architecture, including the construction of Brasília, and worked for the Museu do Folclore. The institute keeps more than 25,000 of his negatives.

Music, literature and pictures

The music collection holds about 21,000 recordings and a large set of 78 rpm records, with the archives of Chiquinha Gonzaga, Ernesto Nazareth, Pixinguinha, Baden Powell and José Ramos Tinhorão. In 2019 it took in the collection of Leon Barg, more than 31,000 records at 78 rpm. Chiquinha Gonzaga, born in Rio in 1847, was Brazil's first woman conductor and wrote the carnival march Ó Abre Alas in 1899, and Pixinguinha wrote the choro Carinhoso. In 2016 the institute revealed documents showing that Pixinguinha was born on 4 May 1897, although Brazil still marks National Choro Day on 23 April, long taken for his birthday.

The literary archive includes the personal papers of the writers Clarice Lispector and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. The iconography collection gathers 19th-century watercolours, engravings and drawings, including work by Charles Landseer and Von Martius.

Gordon Parks at the CCBB

The IMS exhibition Gordon Parks: America Is Me is scheduled to run at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, the CCBB, at Rua Primeiro de Março 66 in the Centro, from 9 December 2026 to 8 March 2027. It is a retrospective of about 200 works by the American photographer, from the 1940s to the 1970s, shown with his films, magazines and books and curated by Janaina Damaceno.

Parks, who lived from 1912 to 2006, joined Life magazine as a staff photographer and writer in 1948, stayed with it until 1972, and directed the film Shaft in 1971. He has a Rio story of his own: in 1961, on assignment for Life, he photographed 12-year-old Flávio da Silva, who was looking after seven younger brothers and sisters, and his family in the Catacumba favela, on the hillside above the Lagoa that is now Parque da Catacumba; a fundraising appeal in Life helped the family buy a brick house in Guadalupe, and Flávio went to Colorado for medical treatment. In 2018 IMS Rio told that story in the exhibition O Caso Flávio, curated with the Getty Museum and Toronto's Ryerson Image Centre, which hung 30 photographs by Parks and by Henri Ballot, whom O Cruzeiro magazine sent to New York to reply.

The show ran at IMS Paulista in São Paulo from October 2025 to March 2026 before coming to Rio. The CCBB is a longer drive from the villa, about 40 minutes to an hour depending on traffic, so pair it with a morning in the historic centre, and check the CCBB's own site for hours and entry.

IMS Paulista

If your trip continues to São Paulo, IMS Paulista, at Avenida Paulista 2424, is the institute's centre there. The institute had worked in São Paulo since 1996, first in the Higienópolis district. The Paulista building opened on 20 September 2017, after about six years of work, with 6,000 square metres over nine floors, three exhibition rooms and a 150-seat cinema, and its Gordon Parks show was free to enter. It also has a photography library and a restaurant, Balaio, so check its hours on the IMS site before you go.

When it reopens

When the house reopens it will be an easy museum morning from the villa, about 10 to 15 minutes away by car. Exhibitions were free to enter before the closure, so check the official site for the new hours, any booking and the first exhibitions when the doors open again. Plan an hour or two for the exhibitions and the garden.

Until then, the streets around it are still worth an afternoon. Our Gávea guide covers the neighbourhood, and our rainy-day guide has other indoor ideas for a wet day.