Meet Shamsia Hassani. At age 24, she is one of Afghanistan's first female graffiti artists.
An associate professor of sculpture at Kabul University, she was first introduced to graffiti in 2010 by British artist, Chu, during a week-long course in street art.
Meet also Malina Suliman, 23, who has been receiving threats from extremists due to her work in graffiti.
Last week, a dozen of female artists turned the walls of a downtown parking lot in Cairo into a street art gallery. Colourful group murals carrying personal stories and spreading messages to increase women’s visibility, and positively affect public consciousness.
A toothless garbageman who once wandered Hong Kong’s streets with dingy bags of ink and brushes tied to his crutches is now the subject of a major retrospective. About 300 calligraphic works by the late Tsang Tsou-choi — who is best known by his self-dubbed title, the King of Kowloon — are showing at the ArtisTree art space in a high glass tower.
Cut and Paint is a website with free access to a wide variety of visual designs that can be printed out, cut, and used as graffiti stencils anywhere. Access to a variety of resolutions of each design is free for all, and there is a standing invitation for artist-activists to contribute their own designs for others to use.
Visual artist Alexandre Orion removes soot in an artful manner to produce skulls in the tunnels of the polluted city of Sao Paulo. Orion does so in an attempt to create intervention, raise awarenes, and decrease pollution. "From the ocular cavities of so many dead, his work looks out on the living and interrogates people passing by; it quietly criticizes our omission, our comfortable acceptance of pollution." ( Jose De Souza Martins)
These graffiti artists were given carte blanche over an entire warehouse to do with what they wanted. The result? Everything from the soundtrack from the videography, editing and the painting is just absolute brilliance.
In 2001, Peter Gibson, a street artist, began by painting bike additional bike lanes onto the streets in Montreal because he was tired of how cars dominated the road. This transferred into more works criticizing car culture in general. Some of his work includes a crosswalk turned into a large footprint and lines on the road transformed into life lines.
Fifty-six-year-old Dan Witz — who originally hails from Chicago but lives in Brooklyn — has been producing street art in New York since the seventies. And not just any street art. Wondrous works that trick the eye and often elude passersby altogether. Oh, but when one realizes what he or she is seeing, it’s pure revelation.
Prague's Lennon Wall is a tourist attraction to some, and a participatory street art haven for others. Directly opposite of the French embassy, the wall has been filled with evolving art and graffiti since the 80s. The wall received its first public inscription, a tribute to John Lennon, following Lennon's assassination in September 1980.
I went on a graffiti tour that went through NOHO, SOHO and the Lower East Side last weekend. We saw works by street artists - Space Invader and Roa - that were remarkable. Roa had created a commissioned mural of a bird on the side of a building, and the former artist derived his work from the unforgettable arcade game, Space Invader.
New York Times
January 28, 2012
By SIMON ROMERO
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — This mega-city’s authorities have waged war for years against what they call “visual pollution,” banning billboard advertising, demolishing abandoned skyscrapers and planning to raze concrete eyesores like the elevated highway known as the Big Worm.
Maha ElNabawi
Amid the bleak backdrop of a revolution-riddled Egypt, a beacon of positivity shone on downtown Cairo Friday during the launch of one of the most exciting, social-conscious street art collaborations to happen this year.
Mayor Gilberto Kassab passed a Clean City Law that banned all public advertising in Sao Paulo, one of the world's most populous cities. The mayor gained the support of the city's elites in pressing the law as an anti-pollution measure targeting "visual pollution". The city was quickly stripped of its ubiquitous billboards, signs, graffiti and other public ads.
In the "D", "D" doesn't really stand for "Detroit", but "Demolition." Take a look around and you'll notice a great number of buildings marked on the front with a circled "D" in faint chalk. Off to the side, many of these same buildings will also have a noticeable dot, courtesy of our own native son, Tyree Guyton.
Last week, Tunisia's tallest minaret went under the brush of the country's hottest muralist. On the Jara Mosque in his hometown of Gabes, 31-year-old eL Seed painted a verse from the Quran preaching tolerance, a message meant for Salafist Islamists who protested "provocative" pieces at an art exhibition earlier this summer.
A French illustrator/painter/graphic designer from Nice who also has had shows in galleries in Monaco, Mr OneTeas is known to some as a graffiti artist who samples pop culture on his canvasses and appropriates commonly recognizable images of Hollywood names like Liz Taylor, Princess Grace, and Alfred Hitchcock. He also presents 80s television culture ironically (spotlighting Gary Coleman, Alf, Mr.
ATHENS — The young man climbed a 30-foot scaffold on a building in central Athens and dipped a brush into a tray of gray paint. With rapid flicks of his wrist, he outlined a haunting image: a baby with two faces, looking simultaneously into an abyss and toward the sky, its vacant eyes searching for a future that was not there.
Creative Graffiti at the Urban Culture Festival in Germany
By Loredana Loy
A street art project by by KD Key Detail from Minsk, Belarus--created and featured at the IBUg 2013 Urban Culture Festival in Zwickau, Germany.
The project is entitled "Bon Appetit." Images speak louder than words. Links and photos below.
Typical mediums of street art include spray paint, stickers and stencils. But mobilized digital media projection has become the latest tool in some activist's artilleries. Vanguards of this innovative technique include members of The Illuminator project. Created in March 2012, The Illuminator is a cargo van equipped with audio and video projection capabilities.
Racist adverts promoting hatred against Muslims are currently being run on buses in San Francisco - but someone has started covering them up with anti-hatred messages from Marvel's première Muslim superhero, Ms. Marvel.