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.
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.
In his ongoing street art series “The Living Wall,” Russian artist Nikita Nomerz brings life to decrepit buildings in Russia by painting faces on them. Nomerz travels extensively around Russia and makes an effort to paint a character in each place he visits. He talks about his art in this interview with Global Street Art.
Baadal Nanjundaswamy, a Bangalore based artist who works at an advertising agency uses his art to embarrass the civic authorities into fixing the potholes that litter the roads of Bangalore.
Conceived and curated by Bushwick native Joe Ficalora, the Bushwick Collective has evolved into an extraordinary open-air gallery since its first mural surfaced in 2011.
Attracting a wondrous array of local, national and international artists, it showcases first-rate street art -- from legendary Blek Le Rat stencils to huge collaborative walls by such world-renowned artists as Case Ma'Claim and Pixel Pancho.
In a twist on the Broken Windows Theory, street artists are using their skills to combat urban blight in Baltimore with "The Slumlord Project". By drawing the attention of neighbors to abandoned and vacant properties and giving pertinent ownership information to take action on, 17 artists are spray painting and wheat-pasting in a D.I.Y.
"I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we'll turn the world...INSIDE OUT."
– JR, TED2011
The Acción Poética movement is a literary phenomenon that began in Monterrey, Mexico in 1996. It was founded by Mexican poet Armando Alanis Pulido and involves painting and intervening abandoned walls in cities with fragments of poetry. The content is usually love poems or optimistic phrases. Also, some phrases refer to the current situation in the cities (though one of their rules is to not talk about politics or religious beliefs).
You’ll find Johanna Toruno on the streets of NYC plastering pictures of her flower-filtered poetry, Kendrick Lamar, and Selena on blank walls, street lights and buildings. When I came across The Unapologetically Brown Series on Instagram I was intrigued not only by the name but by the concept of being unapologetic and brown as the premise for a body of street art.
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.
There are few artists more innocuous, more neutered, more universally loved and reviled than Thomas Kinkade. His soft-focus images present an idyllic vision of America and of Christianity, like Norman Rockwell without the blue-collar populism, where everything is beautiful, nothing hurts, and there’s always a warm fire going in the Lincoln-Log cabin just down the trail.
The website 'Street art utopia' has an amazing collection of pictures of street art from Belgium, NYC, to Brazil and Israel Palestine. Talented people sharing their art publicly for the streets and the world to see!
Activism: reclaiming a public space, maybe...not sure, but it is public art with various messages...
An intervention created by the April 25 2015 Queer Crisis Collective organized by the Helix Queer Performance Network (HQPN), and part of an ongoing queer resistance project mentored by Avram Finkelstein. Over a period of 2 weekends, 8 artists met at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics to design a creative intervention during Pride month in NYC.
Google entered the art game in 2011 with the introduction of its Art Project, working with 17 museums and expanding further to over 150 institutions in 2012. Last June, Google added 5,000 images of street art from around the world to the project and today it has announced that it will be doubling that number to 10,000 with the launch of the second edition of its Street Art Project.
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.
The Neistat Brothers first attracted public attention in 2003 with their blatantly critical work, iPod’s Dirty Secret. After being refused a replacement battery for an 18-month old iPod, [they] took to the streets of Manhattan on their bikes to sabotage iPod’s omnipresent advertising.
Wallhunter's Slumlord Project is an innovative project in Baltimore, Maryland that will use street art to expose and publicize vacant and dilapidated housing and the responsible parties for those conditions. The project will use different street art forms to display art that will attract community interest and support community identity.
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.
Reverse graffiti is form of street art that involves carving into the dirt and dust that surrounds us. Artists subtract from a surface in order to create a negative image within the positive, often quite dark layer of grime.
On the Internet people only look at pictures of kittens.
British street artist Banksy has posted pictures and video of works made during a trip to the war-torn Gaza Strip.
One shows a figure reminiscent of Rodin’s “The Thinker” — though, set in a still-standing doorway surrounded by nothing but rubble, the figure seems more distraught than contemplative.
"Myanmar has been engulfed in protest since February 1, when Burmese army general Min Aung Hlaing seized control of the government in a military coup, refusing to accept to the landslide election victory of the National League for Democracy and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
In 2007, anonymous French photographer JR embarked on the Face2Face project - the largest unauthorized photo exhibition ever conceived. JR and his collaborator Marco engaged Israelis and Palestinians employed in the same profession to be photographed making funny faces. They then enlarged the photos to grand proportions and wheat pasted juxtaposed portraits onto both sides of the security Separation Wall and in surrounding cities.
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.