About the Brillo Project.

Lucca Schmidt, Samo Darwish, and Zachary Greez are the founders of the Brillo Project, a global public art initiative founded in 2024 that promotes democracy, freedom of expression, cross-cultural communication and mutual respect. Working alongside local artists in each community, the team creates murals, which are designed to evoke themes of freedom, democracy and universal access.

In July 2025, the team completed its initial project in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Proceeds from the 2025 project went to developing a software development center in the Complexo da Maré favela. They are currently working on the second project in the South Bronx, where the team is painting a new mural in the Access Bronx Charter School. Completion is expected at the end of July 2026. Proceeds from this project will support new arts and classical music programming at the school.

Our Inspiration — The Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty, dedicated in 1886, was conceived by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi as a monument to the Franco-American alliance and the abolition of slavery — but its enduring meaning was authored after the fact. It was Emma Lazarus’s 1883 sonnet, mounted inside the pedestal in 1903, that recast the statue as a beacon for “huddled masses” and made it the symbol of refuge that millions of immigrants saw first upon arriving at Ellis Island. The object never changed; the community that encountered it gave it meaning. The Brillo Project operates on that same principle, inverted by design. Rather than imposing significance onto a community, we place public art within one — a mural in Complexo da Maré, another at Access Bronx Charter School in Mott Haven — and let the people who live alongside it make it their own. A work of public art matters not because its creator declares it should, but because a community claims it. That is the conviction Brillo is built on: that the right to author public symbols belongs to the people those symbols are meant to serve.