Historical Item
1AM Releases a Graff Pic App
1AM Mobile is a free and community driven photography app that celebrates art in the streets by letting members capture and share what they see in the streets and also view and share what others members have contributed. In essence, 1AM Mobile will tell you what’s up in the streets and let you take part in documenting street art history.
Not only does the app feature community contributed images of street art (with options to share, id tag, follow, and/or comment), but it also provides accurate directions to current and pre-existing pieces for an up close and personal experience. With the constant emergence, evolution, and removal of street art, all images are time stamped which give a historical chronology to every uploaded piece.
Alcatraz Historical Graffiti Restored
Alcatraz pays tribute to Indian occupation
Carl Nolte
Updated 1:48 pm, Monday, January 14, 2013
The National Park Service does not usually approve of graffiti. "It's a federal offense," said Marcus Koenen, site supervisor for Alcatraz, the former prison that is now part of a national park.
However, the government has made an exception for graffiti left behind during the Indian occupation of the island - and it helped restore signs painted by hand on a landmark water tower.
"PEACE AND FREEDOM WELCOME HOME OF THE FREE INDIAN LAND," the writing says in red letters 4 and 5 feet high.
"We restored it because it has a social significance," Koenen said recently. "It is part of what this park is all about."
Most of the 1.5 million people who visit Alcatraz are drawn to the island by tales of its dark past as America's most feared prison, the dead end of the American justice system.
But Alcatraz has more than one story - and one part of…
Read moreSpanish 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.
Pike’s…
Read moreArab Art Breaks Spell of Oppression
How Arab revolutionary art helped break the spell of political oppression
Graffiti, murals and other dissident art have transformed public spaces and mobilised public opinion in the Middle East
Julia Rampen and Laurie Tuffrey
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 5 May 2012 08.00 EDT
Article found here
In January 2011 the Tunisian dictator Ben Ali fled Tunisia. Ten months later, his giant smiling face appeared on the side of a building in the busy port city of La Goulette. At first people just gathered beneath it and stared. Then they started to get angry. Urged on by the crowd, a group of men pulled the dictator's image down. The poster crumpled – and revealed a second poster: "Beware, dictatorship can return. On Oct 23rd, VOTE."
Half-ad, half-performance, this was one of the…
Read moreAt 23, the Spray Man Becomes Syrian Liberation Graffiti Matyr
A Syrian Graffiti Artist, Defiant Until Death
Original Article appears here
They called him "the spray man" for his graffiti that appeared all over the Syrian capital of Damascus. But in truth, 23-year-old Nour Hatem Zahra was an activist like any other activist.
He started protesting in Syria last spring. Back then, the opposition thought it would only take a few months to get rid of President Bashar Assad, as it had in Tunisia and Egypt.
Then Syrian forces started killing protesters, detaining them, torturing them. And the people started fighting back.
But still, there was Nour Hatem Zahra and his friends — organizing protests, hiding activists from the dreaded security forces, ferrying medical supplies to those who were injured but terrified…
Read moreSyria Freedom Graffiti Week
Following examples set in other Arab Spring countries like Tunisia and Egypt, Syrian activists have taken to arming themselves with cans of spray paint and stencils to peacefully protest against embattled President Bashar al-Assad’s regime via a very public and artistic medium – graffiti.
Activists have called for “a week of graffiti for freedom” from April 14 – 21 not only in Syria, but across the Arab world. The campaign invites everyone, tagger or not, to pick up a can of spray paint and peacefully express their feelings in a public place. The project, which was launched on social networking websites by a Syrian activist living in exile and several of his peers still in the country, included an online tutorial and printable stencil models.
Create a stencil and paint it safely.
Several towns across Syria have already begun to bare traces of the project. Works of graffiti have also been spotted in Tunisia and the Palestinian Territories…
Stencil Archive Talks Mu-Ban with ROBBBB (Beijing)
Last year, Sean Leow took my Street Art tour of San Francisco's Mission District. He knew a good bit about art in the streets and eventually asked me "do you know about any stencils and graffiti in China?" My answer was no. I believed that it existed and was not that well known due to language barriers (as well as accessing evidence of a sometimes illegal art inside a tightly-controlled country like China). Leow not only knew about street art and graffiti from that part of the planet, he also was part of a group of people who were creating content for the site Neocha Edge, based in Shanghai (http://edge.neocha.com/category/street-urban-art/). He gave me links and jpgs of art from China, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. I eventually posted them up in the Asia Archive (http://www.stencilarchive.org/archives/index.php/Asia), and was happy to have two…
Read moreMad Graffiti Week in Egypt and Beyond
Graffiti week returns with calls to resume revolution
Author: Jano Charbel
Original Article Found Here: http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/618131
In the run-up to the anniversary of the 25 January revolution, a street art campaign dubbed “Mad Graffiti Week” spread like wildfire across Egypt. The call for the event was announced on Facebook, Twitter and the blogs of Egyptian street artists and activists.
A growing number of Egyptian and foreign artists and activists, male and female alike, have responded to the call. They have painted their art and their messages on walls, not only in Egypt, but also in Germany, UK, Austria, Poland and Canada.
Most of the themes center around calls for completing the revolution, deposing the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), and transferring power to civilian authorities.
Over the course of “Mad Graffiti Week,” three youths are reported to…
Read moreHST's Hell's Angels Mentions Stencils (~1964)
(NOTE: The term "stencil" has been historically known to refer to screen printing images, rather than spray painting them. In the 1960s, stencils were put inside the screens and the image was made when the ink got pushed through by a squeegee)
"An Angel known as 'the Mute' was stopped by a policeman... . The Mute was proudly displaying his colors on a ragged Levi jacket. 'Take that off,' the patrolman [said]... . The Mute stripped off his Levi jacket, exposing another Angel decal on his leather jacket. 'Take that off too.'" The Mute took the jacket off, and then had a shirt with the emblam. The cop told him to take that off, and "under the shirt was an undershirt. It had been stenciled with the club insigia... . The Mute had the last laugh. He was prepared to go all the way. His trousers and shorts were also stenciled."
(excerpt from "Hell's Angels" by Hunter S. Thompson. This story was said to have happened sometime in 1964)