Arabic Graffiti Exhibition - Berlin
* el Seed * Zepha * Blouzaat * l'Atlas * Monsieur Cana *

Exhibition:
23.-28. May 2011 / 12-7 pm

After the great success of the recently published book "Arabic Graffiti", the Common Ground Gallery in Berlin shows a fine selection of international artists featured in this publication.

If you look up in Stencil Archive's navigation bar, you will see that the Archives are up!

http://www.stencilarchive.org/gallery3/index.php/

Phase I of the repair is complete, so when you click over, you will see a different lay out of the Gallery3 Archives site.

There will not be a way to get back "home" here to the main page, so I suggest that you right click and "open link in new tab."

Phase II will include adding the same theme to the new Gallery3 Archives as well as updating this part of the site to Drupal7.

Then we hope to link the two parts in a somewhat seamless way!

Thanks to everyone who has generously donated towards this repair project. Every little bit helps.

PS: New uploads coming soon.... as well as photo no. 16,000

[During the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In] "paisley banners and flags stenciled with marijuana leaves fluttered in the balmy winds that seemed to be blessing fifty thousand people assembled before a single stage crowded with celebrities and Haight Independent Proprieters (HIPs)." p. 75

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/hragvartanian/

"One morning [before the Summer of 1967] San Francisco awoke to discover that walls, freeway columns, and fences had been plastered with five-foot-high posters of two enigmatic Chinese men in pajamas, lounging on a street corner in the relaxed and at home posture of hipsters everywhere. Over their heads was the Chinese ideogram for revolution, and under their feet were the cryptic words "1% Free." The poster was designed by Peter Berg, executed with stencils by artist Mike McKibbon (drawn from a turn-of-the-century photo of tong hit men found in a library book), and a group of us [San Francisco Diggers] had spent a long night pasting them up in every neighborhood in the city." p. 81

- Peter Coyote, "Sleeping Where I Fall" (1998)

[update]

I used an old PayPal button link for the donate button. If you have had trouble connecting to the donate page, the link has been repaired (my current Drupal set up does not allow me to use /form code in postings, so the "email link" as an href will work).

.........

Hey everyone,

After a week of research, discussion, and decision-making, the current break will hopefully be fully repaired by next week. 

This repair will cost anywhere between $750 to $1,500 USD (after a generous discounted rate from the folks at Mission Web Works here in San Francisco). 

When Stencil Archive was migrated to a new server, the older versions of Drupal and Gallery caused the break. Drupal 7 is fresh out of the box, so there are not many choices to integrate a module that can handle over 16,000 images. And Gallery 3 is not as fresh, but an upgrade from what was supporting the Stencil Archives. Gallery's development for a Drupal module is DOA at this point, so we have had to resort to a tethered system.

What you may see in the coming week is a Gallery 3-only version of Stencil Archive, complete with ALL the photos (and a fresh new upload of over 200 images). Then you will see the reappearance of the Drupal-based "blog" content, with the Archives linked in the navigation area. 

Let's hope that the fix is quick and easy!

For now, please consider donating to help me cover the cost of this repair. I make almost no money off of Stencil Archive. If you have enjoyed it over the years, why not consider donating to help get over this technical hurdle.

Any donations from the USA that are over $40 USD will get you a copy of "Stencil Nation," mailed to you along with an original hand-made stencil.

Any donations outside the USA that are over $50 USD will get you the same!

You can also buy a copy of "Stencil Nation" author-direct to help.

Thanks!

Russell

This is an excerpt from journalist Robert Fisk's book "The Great War For Civilasation," a well-researched, graphically-described history of the Middle East from WWI to the mid-2000s:

I remember an American search operation in Baghdad just after Saddam's capture [13 Dec., 2003], all door-kicking and screaming and fuck-this and fuck-that and, just a few metres away, finding a message newly spray-painted on a wall. Not by hand but with a stencil, in poor English perhaps, but there were dozens of identical messages stencilled onto the walls for the occupiers. "American Soldiers," it said. "Run away to you home before you will be a body in [a] black bag, then be dropped in a river or valley."  - p. 1006

Well.... turns out that the fix is a bit more work than expected.

If you have skills with Drupal CMS and Gallery, this site is in need for an update. My web admin thinks that this will hopefully fix things.

Please contact submit [at] stencilarchive [dot] org if you think you can help.

Hong Kong Graffiti Challenges Chinese Artist's Arrest

by Louisa Lim

May 4, 2011 (from NPR)

This graffiti, appearing all over Hong Kong, has become a political statement, more than a month after the world-famous artist was detained by the authorities at Beijing airport. The campaign could yet lead to a jail term for the young graffiti artist responsible. And that fact has led to fears about the erosion of Hong Kong's distinct freedoms, which are a legacy of its colonial past under the British.

As one tries to create change one finds themselves in a wrestling match of power. Change is perceived as something unknown and the unknown scares people that are used to things just being the way they are. Yet there are a million different ways to accomplish most anything, were in the end we all end up in the same place.
In this exhibit local stencil artist Jeremy Novy juxtaposes famous quotes about power and change with images of wrestlers.

When stencils that advertise corporate, and sometimes small business, products get posted in this site, Stencil Archive will usually write "advert" into the title of the jpg file. When Stencil Archive started back in 2002, there were few websites that had non-commercial stencils compiled and shared. The many hits that appeared in Google were for industrial-made, crafting stencils. The kinds you buy in art stores.

There have been many guerilla marketing stencil campaigns over the years. IBM, the TV series "4400" and several other corporate blasts paid artists to make the images, got them cut by machines, and then usually paid crews to paint them. Some of these corporations paid fines to have the ads removed off of the sidewalks. I think the best campaign was by Adult Swin. They had people put up LED-lit graffiti to promote "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" (full disclosure: Stencil Archive thinks ATHF is hilarious), prompting concerned citizens to call authorities and decry terrorism. Some of these devices appeared in San Francisco, and they were gone within hours of going up - most likely stolen by fans willing to climb up poles to take them down. 

Morgoan Spurlock, a sly critic of mainstream culture, has a new film out titled "[corporation name] Presents the Greatest Movie Ever Sold." Spurlock funded the whole documentary project by whoring himself out to anyone willing to have product placement in the film. It's a crafty film, with funny moments as well as telling moments about our culture's acceptance for advertising, marketing, and product placement. 

Spurlock needed a guerilla marketing campaign, so he got a famous LA marketing designer to give him ideas, got Ron English to make a street poster to paste up, and got JRF to make a stencil for the movie. In the movie you see the stencil getting hand-cut and then painted, most likely on LA streets. I haven't seen the stencil up in San Francisco, but did find the PDF to download and cut DIY style. Making the stencil available is similar to activists sharing stencils, Shepard Fairey's giving away the Obey stencil image, etc. 

The movie is worth watching. Painting the stencils is up to the individual! With this doc's slick marketing campaign, you'd think that I could give you a link to easily download the images. Turns out the film's flashy website won't easily share the link, so you'll have to go to the home page at look for "Download the Stencils" at the bottom (watch out for that pesky trailer pop up).