Malagoli began with almost empty hands. He collected paintings dispersed among state institutions, then used the funds he was given to buy works in Sao Paulo - stars of Brazilian painting alongside some European masters - and to acquire pieces from Rio Grande do Sul's own contemporary artists. The museum opened to the public in 1955 in the foyer of the Sao Pedro Theatre, showing roughly 120 first acquisitions. It was modest, even makeshift, but it was alive. When Malagoli resigned in 1959 the state funding stopped, and from then on the collection grew chiefly through generosity - over a thousand works by the time the museum settled, in 1978, into the building it occupies today. The institution carries his name still: the Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul Ado Malagoli, MARGS for short.

MARGS occupies one of Porto Alegre's most admired historic buildings, an eclectic pile on the Praca da Alfandega built in 1913 as the headquarters of the federal revenue office. Its design is usually credited to the German-Brazilian architect Theodor Wiederspahn, whose facade sculpture defined an era of the city's architecture, though the local historian and artist Fernando Corona attributed it instead to Germano Gundlach. Either way it is a national heritage building, all carved stone and stately proportion, the kind of structure that lends an institution instant gravity. In the 1990s a major restoration modernized its equipment and made it capable of hosting international shows - tapestries from the Musee d'Orsay, paintings from the Uffizi, decorative art from the Petit Palais.

The collection has grown to more than 2,600 works spanning nearly every form of visual art, and its heart is the art of Rio Grande do Sul. Here are the gaucho masters: Ibere Camargo, the prodigious printmaker Pedro Weingartner, the sculptor Vasco Prado, Joao Fahrion, Carlos Scliar, Glenio Bianchetti. Among them hangs Weingartner's Tempora mutantur of 1898 and Malagoli's own work. Beyond the local, a smaller but choice selection reaches into the broader story of Brazilian art - Candido Portinari, Emiliano di Cavalcanti, Lasar Segall - and into nineteenth-century Europe. Strongest of all are the paintings and the works on paper, the drawings and engravings that record how artists of the south saw their world. It is, in sum, the visual memory of a state, assembled piece by donated piece over seven decades.

Then came the flood. In May 2024 the Guaiba rose to a height the city had never recorded, and water poured into the ground floor of MARGS until it stood two meters deep inside the historic building. Around four thousand items by more than seven hundred artists were touched by the water or by the long, creeping damage of humidity - hundreds of photographs, a thousand drawings, some 2,400 engravings, roughly a hundred paintings, seventy sculptures. Conservators raced to pull the collection from beneath the surface, rescuing what one Brazilian outlet called the memory under the water. Recovery took 5.6 million reais and seven months. The museum reopened in December 2024 with an exhibition built from the disaster itself - a show about the flood, the loss, and the painstaking work of saving a collection that had begun, after all, with nothing, and had survived to be worth saving twice.