News Articles

Splasher Manifesto PDF Download

From the NY Times article:

Two days after Mr. Cooper’s arrest, a group of people showed up at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in Chelsea, where a reception was being held for Mr. Fairey. Without identifying themselves, they distributed copies of a 16-page tabloid with the title “If we did it this is how it would’ve happened,” with a cover photograph of an image created by Mr. Fairey defaced with paint.

Inside were reproductions of the communiqués that were pasted next to the sites of many paint attacks and appeared to draw inspiration from the writings by the Situationists, a group of political and artistic agitators formed in the 1950s, and a 1960s anarchist group called Black Mask.

In often bombastic language those fliers condemned the commercialization of art and included statements saying that the wheat paste used to affix the fliers had been mixed with shards of glass. An essay in the paper given out at the gallery scoffed at those who had difficulty… Read more

Banksy Was Here: New Yorker Article

Dept. of Popular Culture
Banksy Was Here
The invisible man of graffiti art.
by Lauren Collins May 14, 2007

The British graffiti artist Banksy likes pizza, though his preference in toppings cannot be definitively ascertained. He has a gold tooth. He has a silver tooth. He has a silver earring. He’s an anarchist environmentalist who travels by chauffeured S.U.V. He was born in 1978, or 1974, in Bristol, England—no, Yate. The son of a butcher and a housewife, or a delivery driver and a hospital worker, he’s fat, he’s skinny, he’s an introverted workhorse, he’s a breeze-shooting exhibitionist given to drinking pint after pint of stout. For a while now, Banksy has lived in London: if not in Shoreditch, then in Hoxton. Joel Unangst, who had the nearly unprecedented experience of meeting Banksy last year, in Los Angeles, when the artist rented a warehouse from him for an exhibition, can confirm that Banksy often dresses in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. When…

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Crime-free creativity

After-school program teaches the art of graffiti

BY Chris Jasmin for the San Francisco Bay Guardian
culture@sfbg.com

A couple dozen of San Francisco's best young graffiti artists, many dressed in black hooded sweatshirts and baseball hats, huddle around long tables littered with markers, blank books, pens, and stickers. The artists crowded around the white paper–draped tables do a little talking and joking, but mainly they're drawing and writing, some at a fever pitch. Bright colors and stylish lettering abound. There is a sense of concentrated creativity in this large studio space — something rare in classrooms these days. But this not your run-of-the-mill art class. This is Streetstyles, a free course that focuses on the misunderstood medium of graffiti and street art. Its aim is multifaceted, concentrating on the production and repercussions of urban art. The class attempts, as instructor Dave Warnke explains, "to separate… Read more

NYPD Intel Op Targets Dot-Matrix Graffiti Bike

For WIRED: Ryan Singel 04.10.07

Joshua Kinberg's internet-connected, sidewalk-printing graffiti bike got him a lot of attention ahead of the 2004 Republican National Convention; he was Boing Boinged, Slashdotted and featured on CNN and in Popular Science.

Though he didn't know it at the time, his gadget also landed him a spot in secret files being compiled by the New York Police Department's intelligence arm against protest groups across the country.

"The existence of these files show that there was a premeditated desire to prevent my project and arrest me to avoid having embarrassing messages on the streets during the convention," Kinberg said.

Kinberg's invention was a bicycle equipped with a line of spray cans pointed at the ground, and activated by individual computer-controlled solenoids. If all had gone according to plan, Kinberg would have ridden the bicycle around the streets of New York during the RNC, while users submitted messages… Read more

'El Barto' graffiti vandal sentenced

San Francisco Chronicle Staff Report

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

A Santa Rosa graffiti vandal was sentenced Monday to 1,000 hours of community service and three years of felony probation after he pleaded no contest earlier this year to two counts of felony vandalism, prosecutors said.

Saif Axxxx, 19, who tagged under the name "Bart" or "El Barto," will also pay restitution to his victims, said Sonoma County Assistant District Attorney Diana Gomez. Prosecutors dropped seven felony counts in exchange for Axxxx's plea.

Police said Axxxx, who was arrested in October, was a prolific vandal, tagging several hundred spots in the North Bay.

He will perform graffiti abatement as his service to the community, Gomez said.

Defacer With Mystery Agenda Is Attacking Street Art

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

The evidence is the bright green and purple splashes of paint that began appearing on walls in Brooklyn and Manhattan more than a month ago. The carefully aimed blobs obscured or disfigured dozens of pieces of street art created by people who may not be household names, but who have achieved the esteem of peers and some recognition from the mainstream art world. The targets of the paint attacks have included posters, paper cutouts pasted on walls, and images stenciled on the sides of buildings.

Many of the paint splatters were accompanied by messages printed on plain white sheets of paper and pasted near the splatters. Those communiques appeared to condemn the commodification of art, but it is difficult to be sure what the messages really mean. One reads, in part, "Destroy the museums, in the streets and everywhere.â" The author has kept his or her identity a secret.

Word of the covert actions spread quickly through the… Read more

Pixnit was here

Her urban-art spores adorn public and private property. But some see her as a menace.

By Matthew Shaer, Globe Correspondent | January 3, 2007
[Link to actual article]

CAMBRIDGE -- At 2 a.m. on a Monday in November, this stretch of Massachusetts Avenue, from Plympton Street to Harvard Square, is lit up like a vintage pinball machine. So it's testament to Pixnit's experience that even in the neon glow cast by nearby storefronts she can vanish, almost completely, into the smallest of shadows. There's a practiced grace to every motion: the stencil fitted to the dark slice of pavement, the aerosol yanked from a black backpack, and then three passes with the blue paint. By the time a passerby kneels to examine the art -- a small, pastel flower Pixnit calls a "spore" -- Pixnit is halfway down the block, her hands, covered in black fingerless gloves, in her pockets.

"Why… Read more

Taggers spread gang image

Here's an article about gang graff from my temporary home town:

Des Moines, other cities wrestle with rise in graffiti reports, costly cleanups

By TOM ALEX
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
October 24, 2006

The writing is on the wall: Des Moines police expect 2006 to be a record year for graffiti.

Officers have fielded 942 graffiti reports this year. That compares with 740 last year, 441 reports in 2004 and 357 in 2003.

"We'll top 1,000 for the first time" this year, Detective Michael Stueckrath said.

Even more disturbing than the damage and the cost of cleaning it up, police say, is the source of the malicious art: street gangs, who are using the spray paint to send messages.

Gang-related graffiti was reported in at least nine locations on a single day last week.

"It's really disturbing," said City…

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SRJC student arrested as prolific tagger

By BOB NORBERG
AND JEREMY HAY
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT (Santa Rosa, CA)

A Santa Rosa man suspected of being the prolific tagger "El Barto," whose widespread graffiti has caused about $100,000 in damage, was arrested Friday, police said.

xxxx, an 18-year-old Santa Rosa Junior College student, is suspected of several hundred graffiti incidents throughout Sonoma County and in other parts of the Bay Area during the past year, making him one of the region's most active vandals, Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Lisa Banayat said.

His tag has been prominent on freeway railings and overpasses, homes, commercial buildings, fences and signs.

"I even saw him once on Lombard in San Francisco," Banayat said.

After a monthlong investigation, xxxx was arrested at a first-floor, one-bedroom Ridgway Avenue apartment where he lived with his father, xxxx, across the street from the Santa Rosa City Schools District administrative offices.

Youth soccer… Read more

Writing's on the wall for graffiti guerrilla

Writing's on the wall for graffiti guerrilla Notorious S.F. tagger hit with $20,000 fine

Cecilia M. Vega, Chronicle Staff Writer

Original Article Link

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Carlos Romero left his spray-painted graffiti marks around San Francisco for years, tagging everything from fences and walls to street signs and trash cans with such monikers as CREAM and QUESO (which in Spanish means cheese).

And it wasn't just dairy products he had an affinity for. When police linked Romero to one tag name, city officials said, he would simply switch to another, and in addition to CREAM and QUESO he left a trail…

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