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.
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.
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.
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.
Actor and comedian Bill Cosby is a household name to the American public. But in the last year alone, Cosby's name has been tarnished by decades of hidden scandal. Allegations against Cosby as a sexual predator have recently gained new media traction. Much of this attention was spurred over Twitter thanks to a Cosby "meme generator". The generator allowed for visual representation of past predatory allegations against Mr. Cosby.
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).
"It appears that Banksy has struck again, this time painting the brick wall of the former Reading Prison in Berkshire, England, where Oscar Wilde was jailed for two years over his “indecent” affair with Lord Alfred Douglas.
In March this year, less than 100 days since he took office again, Luis Castañeda Lossio, Mayor of Lima, announced that the Municipality would remove the street art murals painted on the walls of downtown Lima’s historical city streets. “Lima has to recover all the architectural quality it has. They have chosen us and we will comply with the obligation that the population has consigned us,” said the mayor.
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.
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.
Stop Telling Women to Smile is a street art project by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh that addresses gender based street harassment.
Street harassment is a serious issue that affects women world wide. This project attempts to take women's voices, and faces, and put them in the street - creating a presence for women in an environment where women are a lot of times made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe - outside in the street.
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.
Have you ever wanted to see current or potential innovations for poverty or the environment without having to do a lot of researching or reading? Have you ever thought of an idea and wanted to tell the world about it and get feedback? Howitcouldbedifferent.org was founded for these purposes - to enable people to easily see, share, and suggest ideas in different categories.
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.
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...
"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
On the 6th February 2013, 40 activists across 6 states plastered 110 ANZ ATMs with 'Out of Order' notices, sharing them on social media the following day. The objective was to use a hoax style action to exploit mainstream media sensitivity around ANZ Bank's unethical funding of fossil fuel projects that had been generated by Jonathan Moylan's Whitehaven Hoax a week earlier.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.