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Around 2004, word was out that Australia (with an all fresh and updated archive here on Stencil Archive) had cities covered in painted walls. Melbourne is one of the cities where the modern street art wave took off, and the 2005 book "Stencil Graffiti Capital: Melbourne" proved that the modern era had begun. Earlier, just after the Stencil Archive project started as a low-skilled DIY site, a group of folks with serious web design skills started Stencil Revolution (RIP, but here is a Wayback archive of the 2003 site) in Australia. That site, more than mine, really propelled the online image and info sharing that is now taken for granted. Things were happening fast way down in Melbourne!

Here in San Francisco, stencils had been on the streets since the 1980s, but nothing here compared to the wave in Melbourne where every artist was collaborating and cutting out images to cover full alleys of walls. Inspired, we started organizing walls and stencils exhibits. Russell "Klutch" Short started his career in earnest, curating awesome Vinyl Killers shows up in Portland, OR. Peat EYEZ really started getting into it, along with many other artists. Banksy headed to Melbourne to paint some stencils around 2003, and I did too in 2008 for the Stencil Fest. 

By 2008, Australian artists had become known and represented. Many had moved on from the cut-out images still going up and others considered moving to other cities to grow their art careers. While meeting amazing people who all seemed so nice and affable, I managed to spray a few stencils while biking around taking 100s of photos. At the few Stencil Fest events I went to (my trip was cut short by an emergency back in USA), I enjoyed working together on random scraps of media to make interesting collab stencils. I managed to sell some copies of "Stencil Nation" and even ride a Critical Mass on a hilarious chopper bike that the Blender Space loaned me.

Even in 2008, the walls were covered with 1000s of stencils. I did not have the time to identify and describe all the stencils because I had taken almost 500 photographs while riding a borrowed fixie bike. For the 2024 AU Archive update, these images are a bit larger, but still just numbered.

I ended this new wave update last night with the legendary Regan Tamanui, probably the nicest person I have ever met. During my visit to Melbs, he gave me his bed and room to live in and anything in his studio. He fed me, gave me beer, loaned me a bike, drew me maps of where to find covered walls. When I had to suddenly fly back to the USA, he and Doyle from the Blender space managed to borrow a car to take me to the airport. 

Prior to my early departure from Melbourne, I never saw my beer glass empty. If I turned around to talk to someone, and went back to the glass, it was always full. I was almost always fed when there was pizza or food to be had. This is a great metaphor for the fullness of the too-brief trip to Melbourne back in the heady early days of the stencil/street art wave, and I have never forgotten it!

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While somewhat a cesspool of opinions, lies, racism, and other eye-rolling behavior, social media can help Stencil Archive find images from across the world. We try to give credit to the photographer, but that usually only happens when images are found on Reddit. Over on Twitter - er - X, we have followed three solid accounts that continue to share stencils from around the world. We have given them proper thanks over the years, but thought the time was good to drop their links over on the blue bird site: Louniki, Radical Graffiti, and sometimes Street Art Utopia. As for subreddits, there are stencils and streetart to visit for looking a pics and having conversations about all things stencils.

This update is almost entirely brought to you by the awesome folks over on the blue bird site. Thanks, as always!

• Peter Kuper
• Sweden
• Mexico
• Colorado
• Finland
• Pennsylvania
• Greece

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Regan Tamanui reached out to me a few weeks ago, asking about leads for Native American stencil artists. I recalled catching Douglas Miles' work at the de Young here in SF a while back, but dug a bit more for any other artists working with cut outs. I found a few more, giving them NEW Stencil Archives:

• Brad Kahlhamer (NYC)
• Steven Paul Judd (OK)

Another NEW Stencil Archive goes out to UK's Masvandal, and Faile just got an upgraded archive with one photo added by Jaime Rojo from Brooklyn Street Art. Worth noting here that Faile's archive dates back to 2011, but the photo backups are dated even earlier to 2005.

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We have updated the NZ archives, including the artists archives and the 2005 Sliced exhibit archive. While going through the Sliced images, two artists were pulled out for their own NEW archives: milarky and welly chick.

You are not imagining the smaller size of milarky's featured image. Back in the early 21st century, there wasn't a cloud storage option and hosting plans were more expensive. Images are much smaller from this era, and these are the only copies backed up from the site. Do not let the size keep you from checking out an amazing slice of early street art works. 

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Shepard Fairey's just-updated stencil archive may be small, but the artist has always used stencils with his groundbreaking street art projects and style. I was fortunate to see Fairey's original, and controversial, Obama "Hope" collage rendering at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC during my Stencil Nation tour. That collage incorporated stencils. Watching Fairey and his crew put up large billboard-sized portraits here in San Francisco years later, they incorporated paper cutting into the process: cutting out parts and taping them on the wall to mask spraypaint and then taking that piece off to paint a different color. It was fascinating to watch, and fnnch has told me that he's picked up that method for his larger murals.

Fairey's tools and methods have basically defined street art since he threw up his first stickers in the late 1980s: stickers, posters, stencils, skateboard/hip-hop, political, etc.. He made stickering a must have cultural practice, and used stencils and posters to define his message and esthetic. I first saw Andre the Giant stencils in NYC years before I started Stencil Archive. Unsure if Fairey actually painted these viral images, I've put most of these photos in geographic archives rather than crediting the artist.

Nonetheless, this weekend's efforts here on Stencil Archive have allowed me to revisit some of the legends' varying styles. It has been a pleasure looking back over these great works of art while considering how Jef Aerosol, Fairey, and Banksy have helped define "street art" since the early 1980s. 

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Not to bury the lede, Stencil Archive's Banksy archive has been updated with one new image added.

Banksy may be the most famous artist of the 20th century, complete with a couch gag on the Simpsons and rip offs of his artwork by anyone who wants to make a buck off the artist's popularity. Some of this ripping off literally happened across the world, and here in San Francisco, one man somehow thought he was saving Banksy by taking a large rat stencil off an Upper Haight wall... and into a storage space somewhere out of the public eye.

Speaking of the public eye, theories abound about the actual identity of Banksy. While I was poking around the location of the Upper Haight rat piece, the manager of the Red Vic Bed and Breakfast swore that Banksy checked in when the piece went up. "We had a guest from England the same time," the manager excitedly said. Just after Banksy wandered through SF that last time, I knew an artist from Europe that knew Banksy's people. She was a bit cagey about details, but did say that Banksy liked to find locals to help set up logistics, scope out sites and walls for art, and most likely pretend that they were the artist. I'd even guess that they'd get arrested for Banksy. My contact said that the local folks worked 24/7, sometimes spending hours at walls to check for cops, security, crowd traffic, etc. It was unclear if they all got to meet Banksy, but my contact had. She said has a nice person who was into collaboration.

I have been asked many questions about Banksy, even in front of audiences and video cameras. The most asked question is "do you know Banksy?", followed up by "do you know who Banksy is?". I do not know Banksy, nor know who he is, but he did directly email me once! My claim to fame came when I was reaching out to artists I was featuring in my 2008 book "Stencil Nation". 

I had an email for Banksy (still do!) that he used for an early-2000s email newsletter. Back then, I had just started Stencil Archive and was still learning how the rules of illegal art worked. Someone emailed me with a link to photos of Banksy getting up in Jamaica, saying that we all now knew what the already-infamous unidentified artist looked like - basically a pale bloke from England. I was craving content for Stencil Archive, so I posted the email text and the link to the photos. Soon after, via that official Banksy email address, I got a very polite "cease and desist" email from Banksy, saying it wasn't proper to expose the identity of a vandalizing artist. The email asked to please take down the post, and I did, learning a great lesson that exposing the identity of vandals can get them in big trouble. 

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Sublime sunlight just outside the window here in SF, beaming down on a few fresh images and another round of updated archives. Click on through....

Thanks to: TXMX
Spinning: Taylor Swift on vinyl, Pink Floyd 1970 live at BBC, 1990 Dead live in NC

• >NEW< Toastoro
• The Legendary Jef Aerosol
• Sol (Mission)
• Liebsein
• stikman

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One more quick post of updated archives this morning before the busy day gets started.

Thanks to: Jaime Rojo and Brooklyn Street Art

• >NEW< Vanessa Platacis (GA)
• Norway
• Praxis (NYC)
• Florida