Welcome to the new/updated site, with revisions happening daily! 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.
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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!
Dropping some artist photos this post-Fourth Friday.
Over 80 stencil images from Mexico have been added to the Mexico Stencil Archive.
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:
OK. Hangry now. Must eat cereal.
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.
Atlanta BeltLine Embraces Graffiti Artists Amid Changing Urban Landscape
As graffiti morphs from real estate blight to urban amenity, Atlanta’s style writers are driving forces in a conversation about public art.
By Brentin Mock
bloomberg.com (Link to original)
Jun 01, 2024 01:15
The graffiti-slathered Krog Street Tunnel exists at a collision between old and new Atlanta. On one end, its entrance sits blocks away from the Sweet Auburn district, birthplace of civil rights legend Martin Luther King, Jr. and the site of his tomb. On the other end are Cabbagetown, once home to mill workers, and Reynoldstown, founded by formerly enslaved African Americans, both of which have undergone dramatic neighborhood change.
Markings from the various stages of the area’s transformation are etched, scribbled, Sharpied, bubbled, tagged and spray-painted all through the underpass and both tunnel entrances, in layers upon layers of unadulterated graffiti, with timestamps reaching back decades. The overarching narrative is survival.
Krog Street is one of several safe spaces in Atlanta where graffiti artists — and really anyone with a spray can — can get busy on the walls, unencumbered. Residents have not only conceded the tunnel but have since supplied additional walls for public graffiti creation and consumption.
It’s indicative of the city-at-large’s unofficial tolerance of the practice. There are few stretches of Atlanta where you won’t find elaborate graffiti pieces and burners draped across walls. Such activity was once a priority law enforcement target, under the controversial auspices of “broken windows” policing. But today, while graffiti remains illegal in most of Atlanta, priorities have shifted. As in many cities around the world, graffiti has become part of the urban fabric – once seen as a real estate blight, but now commonly viewed as an asset.
In Atlanta, graffiti artists have worked for years behind the scenes to ensure their culture’s preservation and decriminalization.
Scott Williams, ‘greatest of all stencil artists,’ dies at 67 (Original Post)
by OSCAR PALMA
JUNE 12, 2024, 5:00 AM
for Mission Local (Donate to support)
It was the early ‘90s and the Mission was boiling, fermenting with artists from all over the world. At least that’s how Clarion Alley’s Project co-founder, Aaron Noble, recalls it: An artistic melting pot. And one of the premier artists at the time, a painter fueled by coffee, tobacco and burritos, was spray-painting institution Scott Williams.
Williams, who lived at his apartment at 20th and Shotwell for 35 years, died Sunday, May 26, at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. He was 67 and succumbed to an infection, according to his family.
Williams was one of the first artists to paint a mural in Clarion Alley after Noble and other artists started the project in 1991, Noble said. The two cultivated a friendship that lasted through the ‘90s before Noble moved to Los Angeles in 2000.
“His work was everywhere, literally out on the street and indoors and outdoors, on cars driving by. You couldn’t avoid it,” said Noble. “He was a stencil artist. He was the stencil artist. He was the greatest of all stencil artists.”
Some of Williams’ stencil pieces decorated local favorites, such as Burger Joint, Leather Tongue Video, Pedal Revolution, Chameleon Bar, Armadillo on Fillmore Street, DNA Lounge, Amoeba Records and The Lab. His painting at The Lab is the only one remaining, Mission Local has found.
