Haight Street Rat: By Banksy. On display in the window facing Montgomery Street. 8 a.m.-8 p.m. Jan. 21-July 11. 836m, 836 Montgomery St., S.F. Free. www.836m.org.

Banksy’s 'Haight Street Rat’ graffiti holes up in an S.F. gallery
By Rachel Howard (original)
Updated 1:59 pm, Monday, January 19, 2015

A graffiti work by the stealth artist Banksy is back in its original street habitat — sort of.

Through July 11, the image known as “Haight Street Rat,” spray-painted on the side of a bed-and-breakfast in 2010 when Banksy was in San Francisco for the release of his documentary, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” will be viewable to anyone who passes down the 800 block of Montgomery Street, though the 12-foot-tall work will be protected behind the glass facade of 836M, a nonprofit gallery near the Transamerica Pyramid.

The stenciled rat, which wears a Che Guevara-style cap and clutches a Magic Marker, no longer appears accompanied by the work’s original text, “THIS IS WHERE I DRAW THE LINE.” But “to me, this is as close as you can get to the intention that Banksy had, given the fact that the piece was salvaged and restored,” said Sebastien Lepinard, founder of the investment firm Next World Group and co-founder of 836M with his wife, Julie.

The Lepinards became interested in displaying the work after reading a Chronicle report on the efforts of Brian Greif, former general manager of the defunct KRON-TV, who in 2010 persuaded the owner of the vandalized Red Victorian Bed and Breakfast to let him remove 10 redwood siding planks on which the rat was painted. Greif took the painting to art-restoration specialists, who mounted the slats on corrugated aluminum. He raised $10,000 to offset costs through a Kickstarter campaign, promising never to sell the work, even though other Banksy creations have sold at auction for more than $1 million. Greif then tried to donate “Haight Street Rat” to various museums, but without a letter of authentication from the artist, the institutions said they would not accept the work.

Meanwhile, across the shores of USA

Icy and Sot (thanks BSA)

John Koleszar (just one)

Peat (just one)

Urban Soule

Los Angeles and Oakland, California

Louisiana, South Carolina and Vermont

And in the City by the Bay (thanks to Josh, Josiah, Esmeralda)

Eclair and Jeremy and Michael

>NEW< fnnch

The Mission, Clarion Alley, and on Valencia St.

SoMa, Upper and Lower Haight St., and Around Town

One #blacklivesmatter protest stencil

Happy 2015! Another year of stencil goodness begins...

Part 1 of 2: Stencil submissions and scourings and artifacts from outside the USA (photo in this post is compliments of Itandehui de Mexico)

In Media (Star Wars rebels fight with stencils; thanks Mark)

Germany (just one, but making fun of Neo-nazis)

Spain (just one, but about 40,000 years old!)

the UK

more portraits from Ha-Ha

>NEW< Tokolos (South Africa)

Mexico (thanks Itandehui)

Regan Tamanui, master stencilist (see his Archive here) and the nicest man on the planet, had a camera follow him around. Spend any time with HAHA and you will hear amazing theories about (sur)reality. While he was here in SF, we had a great discussion about giants, bigfoots, and how sporting events (the 49ers were in the Super Bowl) are feed troughs for aliens. I made sure he saw the UFO murals sprinkled around, and got him a few walls to get up on.

The Funny Man - A short film on HAHA from Artistry on Vimeo.

Props to Brooklyn Street Art for posting this video, along with photos of the work [LINK] Icy and Sot left behind during their travels.

19 November 2014
A journey deep inside Spain’s temple of cave art
In Spain Arts & Architecture By Rachel Corbett, for the BBC

I gasped at my first glimpse of a cave painting: a crude red outline of a deer with one wild circle for an eye. Its iron pigments blazed under the lamplight. The illusion of a breastbone emerged, ingeniously, out of a hump in the limestone wall. After a while, a cave becomes a long black tunnel of sensory deprivation; the sight of this tender image jolted my breath back to life.

“Can you tell you’re in a sacred place?” asked Marcos Garcia Diez, the archaeologist who had agreed to show me some of the most breathtaking rock art ever created. “This cave is like a church and that’s why ancient people returned, returned, returned here for thousands of years.”

Jutting from the base of a mountain about 85km west of Bilbao, El Castillo is one of the world’s most celebrated rock art temples. When Homo sapiens first began their northward migration from Africa to Europe around 40,000 years ago, some joined the Neanderthals here in Cantabria, a region that is home to at least 40 painted caves, including El Castillo. So magnificent are the province’s primordial masterpieces that when Picasso visited, he reportedly declared, “We have learned nothing in 12,000 years.”

Watch video here.