This essay began as a paper presented at the 1st International Meeting on Education, Art and Functional Illiteracy, which took place in Rio de Janeiro, December 1–3, 2008. The meeting was sponsored by Daros Latin America and co-organized by Eugenio Valdés, Director of Casa Daros in Rio de Janeiro, and myself as Pedagogical Curator of the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre. After the meeting it was decided that we would pursue several objectives within a continuing project we named Art-phabetization: a) to study institutional dynamics in existing organizations like the Samba schools to fight illiteracy among their members; b) to blur the borderlines between schools and their neighborhoods and between schoolwork and leisure; c) to study the role of errors in the generation of metaphors and new knowledge; d) to create a literacy or alphabetization laboratory to explore methodologies to be tested in institutional settings; e) to study the possibility of the creation of mobile laboratories; f) to create a blog and an interactive databank of exercises and games that connects the laboratory with literacy teachers.