"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Princess Hijab is an anonymous female street artist working primarily in Paris, France. Her art centres on veiling the main characters of subway advertisements using black paint. Few facts are known about Princess Hijab.
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 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.
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.
Africa has had a devastating history of blood diamond wars. Blood diamond refers to a diamond mined in a war zone and then sold to finance an invading army's war efforts, usually in Africa where more than two-thirds of the worlds diamonds are extracted.
This site specific social / political word play was painted on the exterior wall of Johannesburg's largest diamond trader Jewel City.
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.
JAY SHELLS DROPS “RAP QUOTES,”
HIS MOST SITE-SPECIFIC STREET ART PROJECT YET
By Aymann Ismail | March 25, 2013 - 12:30PM
After schooling New Yorkers on etiquette via numerous unsanctioned interventions, artist Jay Shells channeled his love of hip hop music and his uncanny sign-making skills towards a brand new project: “Rap Quotes.”
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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).
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 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...
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.
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.