News Articles

Saving Murals from the SF Condo Boom

Submitted by russell on

Icy & Sot with Ha-Ha (CELLspace, SF, CA)Various Works: 2050 Bryant, CELLspace
Know Your Street Art, SF Weekly by Jonathan Curiel
<< Photo: Icy & Sot with HA-HA (CELLspace, SF, CA)

On a wall just inside the building formerly known as CELLspace, an artwork delivers a defiant message: "NOT for Sale!" But the message is a lie — the building, whose exterior walls once featured some of the best street art in San Francisco, was sold and is slated for development. Last summer, two volunteers — artist Russell Howze and art editor Annice Jacoby — took down much of the outside art…

Read more

Grammarians are Pissed (Quito, EC)

Submitted by russell on

Ecuador's radical grammar pedants on a mission to correctly punctuate graffiti

(Eduardo Varas in Quito and Jonathan Watts, The Guardian UK)

A pair of anonymous vigilantes are cleaning up Quito’s graffiti; by adding accents, inserting commas and placing question marks on sentences scrawled across city walls

In the dead of night, two men steal through the streets of Quito armed with spray cans and a zeal for reform. They are not political activists or revolutionaries: they are radical grammar pedants on a mission to correctly punctuate Ecuador’s graffiti.

Adding accents, inserting commas and placing question marks at the beginning and end…

Read more

Banksy's Upper Haight Rat Back in SF

Submitted by russell on

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…

Read more

Taking a Tour of El Castillo Cave, Seeing Ancient Hand Stencils

Submitted by russell on

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.”

Read more

SF Banksy Tests Value of Street Art

Submitted by russell on

Back when Banksy was in SF promoting his documentary, I got to meet Sami Sunchild and talk about the large rat that was on the side of her Red Vic bed and breakfast building (read about it). I introduced her to Banksy via my book as well as the artist's own. And her manager let me go onto the roof for exclusive shots of the socialist rat (see my photo below). Ever since I saw the empty space on that wall get replaced with plain wood by a work crew, I've wondered who took the rat and what it's fate was. At long last the SF Chronicle tracked the owner down. And Sami asked him to never sell it. End of story?

 

Quest to display an S.F. Banksy tests value of street art
By Evan Sernoffsky

June 20, 2014 | Updated: June 21, 2014 10:24pm

Art restorers…

Read more

Google Adds Graffiti to Its Art Portfolio

Submitted by russell on

Google Adds Graffiti to Its Art Portfolio
By RACHEL DONADIO ::: JUNE 10, 2014

PARIS — There’s a portrait of an anonymous Chinese man chiseled into a wall in Shanghai, a colorful mural in Atlanta and black-and-white photographs of eyes that the French artist JR affixed to the houses of a hillside favela in Rio de Janeiro. These are among the images of more than 4,000 works included in a vast new online gallery of street art that Google is unveiling here on Tuesday.

Called the Street Art Project, the database was created by the company’s Paris-based Google Cultural Institute. Using images provided by cultural organizations worldwide, some of which were captured with Google’s Street View camera technology, it includes street art from around the globe, including work that no longer exists, like the 5Pointz murals in Long Island City, Queens, or the walls of the Tour Paris 13 tower in France.

With the initiative, Google is the latest organization…

Read more

SF Graffiti taggers could face a much bigger price tag

Submitted by russell on

 

Graffiti taggers could face a much bigger price tag

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nevius/article/Graffiti-taggers-could-fac…

Graffiti in San Francisco is a mess - literally and figuratively. That's not a scoop, it is merely a discouraging reality.

It begins with the city being a mecca for spray paint vandals from across the…

Read more

SF Takes Aim at Graffiti Vandals

Submitted by russell on

SF takes aim at graffiti vandals, tries to lessen burden on victims
Posted by Joshua Sabatini on Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 7:29 PM

Supervisor London Breed has introduced legislation targeting graffiti vandals; police made 203 graffiti-related arrests in 2013, most of them adults.

San Francisco’s $20-million-a-year graffiti problem has seemingly caused more problems for victimized property owners and public agencies than for the vandals.

But now the City Attorney’s Office could be allowed to go after graffiti vandals in civil proceedings that would force them to pay for the damage and perform community service.

Supervisor London Breed and other city officials say the current process does not work and penalizes the victims, since property owners must remove graffiti within 30 days or face fines.

“We estimate that over 90 percent of the graffiti offenses are committed by the same people,” Breed said Tuesday, when she also introduced…

Read more

A Parodist Who Calls Himself Hanksy

Submitted by russell on

A Parodist Who Calls Himself Hanksy
By JOHN LELAND
FEB. 14, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/nyregion/a-parodist-who-calls-himself…
The street artist who calls himself Hanksy, on Orchard Street in Lower Manhattan with his piece “Walter Flite.” Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

This is a story about art in the age of social media — about anonymity and self-promotion, about feral cats and viral cat videos.

In April 2011, a law school dropout in Bushwick, Brooklyn, newly arrived from the Midwest, had an idea that he thought might make a splash. He admired the street artist Banksy; he grew up on the movies of Tom Hanks. Why not mash up the two? Using simple computer software, he downloaded a Banksy painting of a rat holding a paint roller, then added an image of Mr. Hanks’s face. The whole thing took 10 or 15 minutes to create. He printed a cutout and…

Read more

The Not Art Stencil is Meant to Inspire Wonder

Submitted by russell on

The ‘Not Art’ Stencil Project Is Meant to Inspire ‘Wonder’
The tagger responsible for one of the most prominent outdoor art stencils talks about his motivation behind the paint.

By Steve Annear  | Arts & Entertainment  | January 20, 2014 3:01 pm

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/blog/2014/01/20/not-ar…

Some people view it as a message that calls attention to bland, often ignored objects in plain public view, while others have said that it’s pointless tagging that merely defaces local property.

But it’s that conversation between two sides of the argument, and the confusion that leaves people wondering what it means, that the creator of the “Not Art…

Read more