Janet Attard and Martin Heath put together a great display of stencil and bike love in Toronto. Thanks to everyone who put time into this and helped make it happen. (photo by Martin Reis)

Stencil Festival is now inviting stencil and street artists to apply for the exhibition of artworks at the Yarra Sculpture Gallery warehouse in Melbourne from 1 - 10 August 2008. This year's Stencil Festival will present three separate exhibitions:

- Five Continents - Six Artists (featured artists, by invitation only)

- Stencil Festival Group Show, including Emerging Artist Award (open for applications now, see blow)

STEN & LEX show
5of june

PURE EVIL GALLERY *
108 leonard street (LONDON)

This is from Ita, a photographer who sent great photos for the Stencil Nation book project:

me ha llegado el libro de Stencil Nation
thanks
muchas gracias por el envio y la publicacion! y felicidades por el libro
i like, les gusta mucho a todos en Oaxaca que hallan salido lo que pintan, sobre la situacion que se vive.
ahora tenemos un proyecto a nivel nacional, con colectivos de todo el pais, esta es la pagina ke estamos haciendo, y ahi vienen los links de los demas colectivos, mirarli, look it!

es RCM Revuelta Cultural Mexicana in Oaxaca, DF; CD Juarez, Chihuahua, Puebla, Edo. Mexico, Merida

http://www.myspace.com/revueltaculturalmexicana

If any of you have wandered over to StencilNation.org, you may have noticed that there's a "guycon" for scrolling down and reading the content on each page. Antonio Gomez, the flash guru who put that site together, even gave him what we call the "yerba mate twitch" when you click on it to scroll.

Well, the guycon came from a project I started in February with room mate and artist Halsey Chiat. Halsey's a great ink artist, doodling some amazing pieces. When I approached him to redesign the Stencil Archive logo, he gave me a final hand-laid-out and inked work that was 1 x 1 feet! We had worked out the guycon idea over the weeks prior, so I was expecting one square with 25 guycons symbolizing stencil community. I got 25 squares of 25 icons instead! His inspiration made me rethink my logo, the masthead, the business card, etc. So I worked out the one guycon idea, floating in front of 25 squares that symbolize the Stencil Archive community (no we aren't all squares, but we are all connected via stencil art). And to show some of his other community clusters, I tried to work them into the new masthead design. And the favicon is a simple version of the guycon floating in front of the squares.

To make the background interesting, I took one of Scott Williams's crazy hand-cut stencils and floated with a blue negative space.

Halsey says he's going to cut out the whole 25 x 25 x 25 block of people and paint it. I look forward to seeing his xacto skills... and know that he has the patience to cut it all out.

Halsey has a show going up June 6 (he'll hopefully stop by the Stencil Nation thang afterwards) called "The State of Lower Haight" You should check it out.

PS: props one last time to Asaf Zulah for the original 2003 Stencil Archive logo. Tee shirts of that logo are still available if you're interested (I'll have them at the book events next weekend).

Have to post this image: Stencil Nation's homage to John Fekner (the cut-out for this stencil was made by him... hand-cut letters... and dated 1978!) The cut-out will be part of the June 6 Stencil Nation book release and stencil exhibit show. Thanks John.

Many new and updated Archives this round:

Artists

• Adam5100 had a show go up in Oakland yesterday
• Romanowski had a show go up a few weeks ago at Upper Playground
• serf gets a new Archive in the USA Artists Archive
• gurldogg in Seattle gets a new Archive
• Dri in Brazil sent a few stencils
• a1one in Tehran gets an Archive update
• Scott Wiliams gets two more stencil journals posted in his Archive (1, 2)
• Eclaricuda keeps cutting the pieces!
• So does x-sacto
• and MO-PI in France
• Pete in Oakland updates his dusty Archive

Places

• B. Rex was kind enough to give me his photos from Oaxaca and Chiapas to post
• Chris keeps posting stencil pics on his blog for me to pull and post
• A small batch from Northern California (with a DPW stencil truck!)

San Francisco

• Clarion Alley
• Valencia St.
• The Mission
• Tenderloin and Civic Center (love the gentrification one)
• Random SF locales (Bayshore for the Fekner piece)
• One from the Financial District

This update brought to you by Harvey Rabbit (thanks for the burrito) and Mark at KCDC (NPR nods to Brad Mehldau and Ali Farka Toure)

ach! Checked the Gallery/Archive comments today and nave 26 pages of new spam. Those bastards. Guess I didn't get the Permissions right (I'm a newbie with CMS). Have turned off comments until further notice....

If you really want comments back, let me know and I'll put some more time into trying to figure it out.