March 2, 2008
Heads Up | Berlin
One Wall Down, Thousands to Paint
By ANDREAS TZORTZIS
SPRAY cans clink in Ali’s bag as he walks down a cobblestone street in Berlin’s post-hip neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg. He stops in front of a grocery truck parked near a children’s playground and pulls out a can. With a fluid motion, he strokes his name in bubbly, bright red letters, before leaving his mark on a telephone booth, a dozen doors and a concrete wall next to the train tracks.
"It’s a great feeling doing a piece at night and coming back the day after to look at it,” said Ali, 31, an industrial designer who was dressed in baggy pants and a black hoodie and didn’t want his surname used to avoid prosecution. “I also see it as reclaiming the city and shaping my urban environment.”
What qualifies something as unusually geeky street graffiti? In some cases it is the content but in many instances it is the methods employed in its creation. Here are seven more geek graffiti projects that comment on and employ tools of the digital age to reinterpret traditional street art approaches or convey contemporary messages via new media.
Time Out speaks to the people who’ll decide whether the art scene needs a new Banksy or not
‘People made money overnight with Banksy and that’s led people to panic buy and try to find the next Banksy,’ says Eleanor Forster, owner of the Forster Gallery. ‘That will subside but what’s positive about all the attention is that it’s highlighted how talented street artists are and made clear that they…
(CNN)
-- British graffiti artist Banksy has launched an art exhibition in Bethlehem that he hopes will focus attention on the poverty of the West Bank and draw tourists to the traditional birthplace of Christianity.
As part of the project, Banksy has adorned the controversial security barrier around the West Bank town with spray paint and plaster works of
art in a comment on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Israel says the purpose of the barrier is to prevent terrorist attacks being launched from the West Bank. Palestinian leaders however say the
barrier amounts to an illegitimate land grab by Israelis,…
By DREW JUBERA The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 12/02/07
Original Article
Totem arrived unarmed: no spray can.
Dressed in evening tunnel formal — black stocking cap, black down vest, black pants, black shoes — he strolled the dark, dank Krog Street tunnel, beneath the tracks at the edge of Cabbagetown, like a night-crawling curator.
At 30, Totem doesn't work the tunnel anymore. But as one of the earliest artists to spray paint Atlanta's most talked-about illegal canvas, he knows the work of many who do: Teach, Baser, Drue.
KQED's vidcast
Gallery Crawl spotlights art that doesn't hang on gallery walls. Some
great shots of stencil art, as well as other forms of street art, here
in San Francisco.
Note: The two stencil murals featured in this video are not by
Scott Williams. Got that one wrong on both accounts (Scott's stencils
are in the second one, along with Claude Moller, Stephen Lambert, Josh
MacPhee, and others). The first stencil mural is by Claude Moller, Josh
MacPhee, along with myself. You can see part of Scott's amazing mural
while they're featuring Clarion Alley works.
Update: Hi Russell: Sarah Skikne passed on the email (below)
regarding the misinformation in our Streets of San Francisco Gallery
Crawl episode. Sorry it took so long for me to correct the error -- I
was out of town due to a death in the family. Anyhow, I have corrected
the video and that new…
(Original profile appears in the New Yorker and is not online. A treatment of the profile is reprinted below.)
Shades of Meaning (a slide show, including photos of Walker's cut paper pieces).
In this issue of the magazine, Hilton Als profiles the artist Kara Walker, whose travelling retrospective, “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,” will open this month at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. Walker “combs the mansions and swamps of the antebellum South to find her characters, whose surroundings are a visual corollary of their fetid imaginations and musty souls,” Als writes. Here is a portfolio of work from Walker’s thirteen-year career. Hilton Als, Profiles, "The Shadow Act," The New Yorker, October 8, 2007, p. 70
October 8, 2007 Issue
PROFILE of artist Kara Walker. Writer dines in a restaurant in Paris with Walker and her family two…
Jonathan Curiel, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, August 3, 2007 Original article with photos
Warm Water Cove is a park on the southern waterfront of San Francisco that doesn't get much traffic from tourists, or even San Franciscans. It does have a devoted group of regulars, however - dog walkers, musicians who enjoy the acoustics, and graffiti artists who have transformed walls into a cacophony of scribblings and images.
It's the graffiti that has led to a battle in the park on the far edge of the Dogpatch neighborhood. The city plans to provide volunteers with buckets and paintbrushes Saturday to whitewash the walls as part of a broader attempt to make the park a cleaner place where someone might want to bring a family. The graffitists' defenders say the cleanup is another attempt to gentrify San Francisco and erase its unique character.
A few corrections, just regarding the bits about me:
• I took my first stencil photo in 1995, and then dozens more when I moved to San Francisco in 1997.
• My current research for the book shows that street stencils really began around 1976, when John Fekner hit NYC for the first time. I told the journalist that stencil art fits certain situationist beliefs regarding breaking up your daily urban routine. Why commute the same way to work when there might be a new stencil a block over?
By JOE ESKENAZI and Zoneil Maharaj
Published: August 1, 2007, SF Weekly, San Francisco, CA
Original article, with photos, here.
Choose Your Own Adventure books used to be a staple of rainy-day recesses at the grade-school library. And yet, on an otherworldly beautiful San Francisco day in July, there they were… Read more
