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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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Ryan Moore (NZ)

White stencils on skateboard griptape... from New Zealand.

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Ryan Moore (NZ)

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Artists

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Vandal Stencils Original Picasso (Video, TX, USA)

Police are investigating after a vandal defaced an original Pablo Picasso painting at a Texas museum last week and it happened to be captured on video by another museum-goer.

A grainy cellphone video on YouTube shows a man in a suit spray-painting a stencil of a bullfighter killing a bull on the 1929 Picasso painting "Woman in a Red Armchair" at Houston's Menil Collection museum. The man also wrote the Spanish word "Conquista" (meaning to conquer) before he fled.

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Legal Information

Stencil Videos

Links Out in the www

More great chances to click through and discover the broader, international stencil community (please let me know if any of these links take you to error pages, dead sites, etc.):

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Stencil Archive News

Casey Gray (SF, CA)

Also: https://www.instagram.com/caseygraysf/

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Casey Gray

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Artists

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Spanish Hand Stencils May Be 37,000 Years Old

European cave art gets older
Ancient illustrations in northern Spain date to more than 40,000 years ago
By Bruce Bower
Web edition : Thursday, June 14th, 2012

Red disks, hand stencils and club-shaped drawings lining the walls of several Stone Age caves in Spain were painted so long ago that Neandertals might have been their makers, say researchers armed with a high-powered method for dating ancient stone.

Scientists have struggled for more than a century to determine the ages of Europe’s striking Stone Age cave paintings. A new rock-dating technique, which uses bits of mineralized stone to estimate minimum and maximum ages of ancient paintings, finds that European cave art started earlier than researchers have assumed — at least 40,800 years ago, say archaeologist Alistair Pike of the University of Bristol in England and his colleagues.

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Historical Item

9 June: Public Provocations IV (DE)

http://carhartt-gallery.com/en/exhibitions/current-exhibition/public-pr…

PUBLIC PROVOCATIONS IV shows the beginning of a provocation and what becomes of it. A single artistic language, being more contemporary than ever, finding itself not only in galleries but even making its way into museums. A cross section of the current works of the scene is exhibited, concentrating on displaying the true pulse, creativity and power of the art. PUBLIC PROVOCATIONS IV feeds on colours and their performers – international legends and explosive young talents from Europe, the US or right up to the Middle East. This kind of art and expression with its urban origin, combined with much character and authenticity, minds both its provocative and its inspiring side. A vibrant and unique exhibition that can be experienced from June till October 2012 in the Carhartt Gallery.

Artists in exhibition
A1one / IR
Bezt / PL
Czarnobyl / PL
Dave the Chimp / GB
EME / ES
Honet / FR
Jef Aérosol / FR
Klaas Van der Linden / BE
Maoma / NL
Marco Zamora / US
SatOne / D
Tasso / D
The London Police / NL

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In the Galleries

oi, Stencil Archive v.Tours...

Over on Google+ and the FaceCrack, er Facebook, I will randomly post search strings via the Stencil Archive. I call them v.Tours (yeah, virtualTours) of the site. It gives people a way to see the breadth of the photos on here (almost 18,000 pics). Themes vary and usually have something to do with whatever comes up in my mind. Valentines in USA? Why not a v.Tour of heart stencils. I just read an article about birds. Why not a v.Tour of bird stencils? Uprising in Greece? Why not a v.Tour of anarchist "A" symbols? etc.

Some of you may not even know that you can search the Stencil Archive. There's a search function for each side of the site. You are currently reading this post on the Drupal side of the site. The Drupal "search" field will only get results from the posts on the index, and other Drupal pages.

Click the Archives link in the mast head and you will go to the Gallery side of the site (where the photos live). Once you get to the Archives, you will see a box that says "search the gallery" with a GO button. Search for random words in the filenames of all the photos (I am still trying to figure out how to search tag words) to see what's in the Archives. Links can easily be copied and shared for the searches, which is the basis of the v.Tours.

So.... in (dis)honor of E. II, here is a v.Tour of mostly illegal work from the streets of merry London (once the capital of a world-wide empire). Sure, there's Banksy in the mix. But there are also other treats on the walls of London.... enjoy this current v.Tour and have fun creating your own "walks"!

http://www.stencilarchive.org/archives/index.php/search?q=london

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Stencil Archive News

9 June: Adam Feibelman's Between the Sheets (SF)

"I Call the Shots" and "Between the Sheets"
Opening Reception Saturday, June 9th, 7-11 PM
Exhibitions run through July 7, 2012

http://guerrerogallery.com/shows/ben-venom-previewfeatured-solo-june

The Project Room in June will feature “Between the Sheets,” an exhibition of new works by Adam Feibelman. In this series of works, the artist explores ideas of utility function and context with intricate hand-sewn stencils. Starting with imagery of objects that used to serve a specific function and have now been put to pasture waiting to find their future utility, these works are a meditation on value, echoed in the artist’s process of deconstructing and reassembling. The works explore the process of searching and imagining new uses, or of the challenges of finding a value in objects in reference to their former context.

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In the Galleries

Knoxville, TN: AC Stencils DIY Bike Route Arrows

http://www.metropulse.com/news/2012/may/30/anonymous-cyclist-blazes-bik…

EXCERPT

Earlier this spring a small stenciled image of a bike appeared on the pavement at the intersection of Glenwood Avenue and Luttrell Street. An arrow painted beside the bike pointed to the right. What’s this? I thought.

Later, I noticed more of the small stenciled bikes zigzagging through North Knoxville, leading the way down quiet neighborhood streets and little-used roads near industrial parts of town. They perfectly matched the route my husband takes when he bikes our child to school in the bike trailer.

“You did this!” I said.

He denied it.

Still, it must be a personal route, I thought, marked by a cycling enthusiast with an anarchist streak, pointing the way to a party; or maybe it was part of a whimsical scavenger hunt. But, the marks were quite consistent, the distance covered was large...could it be a city-sanctioned route? And yet, the stencils were a little low-tech to be official. They seemed to hover in a gray area somewhere between city traffic markings and graffiti.

After going through a short list of suspects, I got a promising tip, and one day I received a call from a man I’ll call “AC.”