Welcome to the new/updated site, with revisions happening daily! Since 2002, your old-school website for all things stencils. Please consider donating what you can to support the much-needed upgrade. Photo, video, links, and exhibit info submissions always welcome. Enjoy and stay curious.
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<<< Photo from the 12 Hour campaign, by M. Subay
Subay started drawing in 2001. His second campaign was ” The Walls Remembers Their Faces”. This campaign was launched as a reminder of the forcibly disappeared politicians and people. It lasted for about 7 months and its activity reached the provinces Sana’a, Ibb, Taiz and Hudidah.
ALIAS | FRAGMENTS
Vernissage & Opening Ceremony
Thursday March 26th. 19:00 - 22:00
The exhibition will be open Wednesdays to Saturdays from 13:00 – 19:00 or by appointment. Guided tours will be held daily at 17:00 and private tours may be organized on request.
More information:
info@openwallsgallery.com
https://instagram.com/alias030
http://www.openwallsgallery.com
In the end it’s all a matter of perception, isn’t it? “Five years“ doesn’t sound as dramatic as “half a decade“, and what is regarded as a well-deserved timeout for some, could be described as sabotaging a career by others. Fact is, Berlin based Alias is finally back after a way too long hiatus of five years with a solo show titled “FRAGMENTS“ at OPEN WALLS Gallery.
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 and put it in storage for temporary safekeeping. What's left on the walls are stickers, tagging, and remnants of art — including faces of Native American men, a monkey with a sign imagining a battle between two well-known street artists ("Hektad vs. Banksy"), and an impressive work by muralist Joel Bergner. Even in its current state, 2050 Bryant's art potpourri inspires passers-by to take photographs for posterity.
But what about the art that was taken down? Howze, whose own CELLspace work is among the preserved art, and Jacoby are trying to find a patron who will buy the works and display them again. The art includes Bergner's De Frontera a Frontera, a lyrical, red-splashed work about haves and have-nots in the Dominican Republic, and Icy and Sot's collaboration with Regan "Ha Ha" Tamanui, Super Hero with Portraits, which has a caped boy standing alongside a gallery of orange-tinged smiling faces.
S.F. cops say they caught prolific tagger 'Cryst’ admiring his own work
By Kurtis Alexander
Published 6:24 pm, Friday, March 13, 2015
An 18-year-old San Francisco man was arrested Thursday for allegedly painting his “Cryst” signature in many parts of the city.
One of San Francisco’s most prolific graffiti vandals was arrested Thursday while taking admiring photos of his work in Dolores Park, authorities said.
For months, police have been trying to track down the tagger, now alleged to be San Francisco resident xxxx, 18, who has painted his hallmark “Cryst” signature and other etchings from the Mission District to Treasure Island.
“This guy has tagged businesses, people’s homes, public property, Muni stuff, a lot of city property,” said police Capt. Dan Perea. “There are thousands and thousands of dollars worth of damage done by this one person … We’re very happy that we grabbed this guy.”
Police caught up with xxxx after someone phoned police to report tagging along upper Market Street at about 11 a.m Thursday, Perea said. Officers didn’t find anyone matching the suspect’s description, so they went to nearby areas that had been hit with graffiti recently.
Near the tennis courts at Dolores Park, where vandalism has occurred at a city-run improvement project, officers spotted xxxx taking pictures of a wall with his cell phone, Perea said. He was positively identified by the caller on Market Street as being the same person tagging earlier, according to Perea.
Police detained xxxxx and found that a bag he was carrying was filled with “multiple containers of different kinds of paint,” Perea said. Authorities say their follow-up investigation linked xxxx to several other taggings.
Thanks to: Josiah, Josh, Brooklyn Street Art, Antonio.
Tunes by: the great late, Daevid Allen, compliments of Radio Gnome from the Planet Gong.
Banksy
http://www.stencilarchive.org/archives/index.php/Europe/European_Artist…
>NEW< Czarnobyl (DE)
http://www.stencilarchive.org/archives/index.php/Europe/European_Artist…
>NEW< Hugo Kaagman
http://www.stencilarchive.org/archives/index.php/Europe/European_Artist…
>NEW< Kurar
http://www.stencilarchive.org/archives/index.php/Europe/European_Artist…
France
http://www.stencilarchive.org/archives/index.php/Europe/France
Italy
http://www.stencilarchive.org/archives/index.php/Europe/Italy
In Media
http://www.stencilarchive.org/archives/index.php/Stencils_In_Media
Bundling up a slew of street art cliches “Best of the Worst” sees the poor man’s Banksy ditching gallery assistance and exhibiting all new work in an abandoned bank on the Lower East Side. Similar to his 2014 abandoned building takeover entitled “Surplus Candy,” the space will be completely transformed with unique installations and a large number of hand-painted pieces on reclaimed Brooklyn wood. In addition to a new series of Hanksy originals, “Best of the Worst” will house a notable group show cashing in on local and national urban artists (featuring over 20 up-in-coming blue chip art stars of tomorrow). All work will live alongside your favorite 90’s arcade games and TMNT/Foot Clan inspired skate ramps since, we all know, no one actually goes to art openings for the art.
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 of interrogative sentences scrawled on the city’s walls, the vigilante editors have intervened repeatedly over the past three months to expose the orthographic shortcomings of would-be poets, forlorn lovers and anti-government campaigners.
Interview with IRL, anti-tech graffiti artist
22 Feb 2015 Renzo (for the Wildernist)
I’d been seeing anti-tech graffiti around my town [Chapel Hill, NC] for the better part of a decade. Over the course of months it would appear in bursts, then slowly fade as the authorities cleaned it. Some places, images, or slogans only seemed to appear once, while others were clearly contested territories where cleaning and painting happened regularly. For years I wondered who the vigilantes that made my walks and bike rides so much more exciting could be. In a funny synchronicity, I finally met “IRL” through a mutual friend the same week another friend of mine started an anti-technology journal. We wandered for an hour all over town, behind warehouses, down train tracks, and beneath bridges discussing this very particular subset of graffiti. Some edits have been made for clarity. — Renzo
Renzo: So, you're an anti-technology graffiti writer. What's that mean?
IRL: I'm a graffiti writer who believes that technological society is the greatest threat to human freedom and that's reflected in my art or vandalism or whatever you wanna call it.
Renzo: What kind of graffiti do you do?
IRL: I play with everything I can. Tagging, scrawling, stenciling, stickers, billboard defacement, wheatpaste posters. It really depends on the image or message and the surface or neighborhood.
Why Stencil Typography Is Here To Stay
(from fastcodedesign.com; photo by Louise Fili)
DESIGNERS LOUISE FILI AND STEVEN HELLER COMPILE 60 YEARS OF STENCIL TYPE FROM 8 COUNTRIES AND REVEAL WHY THE PRIMITIVE STYLE STILL REIGNS.
The stencil is one of the world’s most primitive printing techniques. It dates back to prehistory, with stencils found in caves, in the art of ancient China and Japan, and in the crafts of indigenous people worldwide. Stencil typefaces are still popular today, whether in the form of new, witty takes on the genre, like Der Weiner Stentzel’s sausage shapes for letterforms, or vintage typefaces redrawn as stencils, like Bodoni or Century.
Stencil Type, a new book by design gurus Steven Heller and Louise Fili, compiles 60 years of this universal typographic style with photos from around the world. It reveals why the stencil has been and remains such a valuable tool for designers and typographers even in the age of digital printing.
Compared to other forms of typesetting, stenciling has always been a low-cost, easy-to-use medium for bold, clearly legible mass communication. This made it ubiquitous in the military and transportation industry (think of the stenciled labels on shipping containers and burlap bags); in populist and rebellious movements (in occupied France, the stenciled letter "V" for victoire became a powerful symbol of resistance; much of the Occupy movement’s poster art is stenciled); and in magazine and poster design, especially in the Bauhaus, Futurist, Constructivist, and Art Deco movements.
"SYNERGY"
duo show : JEF AEROSOL & LEE JEFFRIES
opening / vernissage : 6 mars 2015 - 18.00 > 21.00 (entrée libre)
Galerie Mathgoth, 34 rue Hélène Brion 75013 PARIS
From March 6th to April 4th 2015, Matgoth gallery is welcoming stencil artist Jef Aérosol and photographer Lee Jeffries. The two talented artists have joined hands to produce the duo show : SYNERGY.
Since the very first time Jef Aérosol stumbled across Lee Jeffries' works, he's been fascinated by the portraits of homeless people that the British photographer magnifies and brings into the light.
Jef immediately saw that they could lend themselves to a stencil rendition and he could revisit in his own style those wearied faces, pregnant with meaning. In early 2014, he got in touch with Lee and they met up a few weeks later in London. They got on well with each other at once and decided on the spot about a duo show.
