Welcome to the new/updated site! Since 2002, your old-school website for all things stencils. Please consider donating what you can to support the much-needed upgrade. Photo, video, links, and exhibit info submissions always welcome. Enjoy and stay curious.
Before we head into some more San Francisco-based archive updating, a few friendly submissions got the ball rolling on some more European Stencil Archive updates. Today's updates also include Polish legend M-city as well as the late and great Miss.Tic. Sucht was pulled from the recent Germany archive update, and Nick Walker has been added thanks to the social streams. We cannot remember our 2009-2012 Polish stencil photo connection, but most of the photos in this archive are thanks to him. OK, back to work on some SF updating!
Updating the Stencil Archive for Germany was filled with pleasant memories of wandering the streets of Berlin - one of the capitals of Stencil Nation - over the years, snapping photos and leaving a few stencils and stickers behind. Even with all the gentrification taking place in Berlin, stencils still run and appear. Going back to 1995, before any idea of documenting stencils and creating Stencil Archive germinated, the above Brecht poem graced the wall of/near the Reichstag. Three stories tall, and maybe our first-ever snapped stencil photo, the power of using stencils was organically felt! Years later, just about 700 Germany photos run on this site. This does not include the 100s in the recently-updated Hamburg Archive. Germany's stencil nation is serious!
Topping off this weekend's update, here are a few new photos (one for DE) from the EU zones. Thanks for submissions: BeneRegoef, Rob C., Jeremy Novy, @Louniki_, and @radicalgraffiti
With over 400 images, the Italy Stencil Archive has been updated for the recent new wave redesign. About 5-6 new images were also recently uploaded, pulled for the social streams, thanks to rad accounts like @Louniki_ and @radicalgraffiti. We are forever grateful!
Heading into Guadalajara from the airport a few weeks ago, the taxi occupants became sharp-eyed observers of the moving walls outside the car. As we got closer to our temporary Stencil Archive HQ, the seen stencils became more common. And just across the street from our lodgings, an empty building covered with graffiti. And stencils. Recent women's march(es) had gone down the Av. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, painting walls and sidewalks with messages, images, and proof that stencils, as a tool of protest, give voice to those that cut their ideas out. The Colonia America district did not disappoint. Other stencils were found here and there in Tlaquepaque and the City Center - even in Calvillo, Aguascalientes - but our discovery team did not have to walk too far to fill up the camera roll!
After having my own site blocked by my internet provider (firewalls must work!) while working hard on the site, time for breakfast. But first, a few back-end updates:
Scott Williams' Stencil Archive updates are complete. While double-checking work, we realized that about 100 photographs were not given credit to Carrie Galbraith. That is corrected, and Carrie's photos - dating back to the early 1990s Carmanic Convergence - have their own Archive. A dozen photos from Carrie did not get uploaded back in 2006, and that has been corrected as well.
Jeremy Novy's social media link to that Bloomberg article about Atlanta accepting graffiti got things moving to update the Georgia Stencil Archive. Then there was last night's "debate". And Soul Coughing just announced a new tour, when the only time we have seen this band was in Little Five Points at The Point in 1994. I guess Atlanta, GA is on our minds. No matter what went down last night, we had a good time looking at early 2000s photos from Krog St. and the L5P. And we scored tix for Soul Coughing in September!
While a serious online archive is coming that "will provide scholars, students, and the public access to the graffiti and a reasonably large collection of ancillary archival material associated with the graffiti," Dr. Stephen Robertson has a basic website up that does a great job discussing types of Civil War-era graffiti, mapping the examples, giving interpretations, and even featuring some of the soldiers who marked up walls. Below is Dr. Robertson's text from his About page. Make sure to navigate the drop-down links under the "Types of Graffiti" to see photos. - Stencil Archive
Soldiers in the American Civil War left graffiti in many of the places they spent time, including homes, churches, hospitals and caves. Using charcoal, pencils and knives, they commonly wrote their names, usually adding their regiments and the date they wrote. Soldiers also drew pictures of battlefield scenes, political images and sexual material. Very few of these soldiers wrote anything else that has survived, so they represent Americans whose wartime experiences and lives have attracted little attention from historians. But they have left other traces in the historical record from which their lives can be reconstructed.