Historical Item
Hong Kong Graffiti Challenges Chinese Artist's Arrest
Hong Kong Graffiti Challenges Chinese Artist's Arrest
by Louisa Lim
May 4, 2011 (from NPR)
Video: The (de)Appropriation Project Archive (SF, CA)
For well over 10 years now, I have been documenting stencils on Bruce Tomb's wall on Valencia Street (If you search the Archives for "DAP" they will appear). I have also put art up there and enjoyed all the other art that I do not document. Tomb may not confess to actually owning this wall, because over the years it has become a wall of Free Speech for many artists, neighbors, and organizations. Some call it the Democracy Wall, but Tomb named it the (de)Appropriation Wall, especially since he resides in a former SF Police Department building. The building had a literally tortured past (Chicanos and Latinos were treated poorly by the mostly Irish police in the last century), and a bomb was placed at its back door during the violent era of radical factions in the Bay Area. Tomb decided to use the facade of this building as a force of freedom, more specifically of speech.
Tomb had a brief tussle with the City authorities over his free access to whomever wants to get up on…
MOCA LA... Art in the Streets
"Art in the Streets" Brings Fire to MOCA
The show is an audacious multi-platform and colorful endeavor; part history lesson and part theme park bringing about 50 years of graffiti and street art history, it's influences and influencers, under one roof. Then there is the stuff outside. Engaging and educational, "Art in the Streets" makes sure visitors have the opportunity to learn how certain tributaries lead to this one river of swirling urban goo, mapping connections between cultural movements, communities and relationships within it. When it does this, the museum system effectively differentiates its value apart from a mere gallery show.
"It…
Apr 28 : Wooster Collective presents 41st Parallel
On Wednesday April 28th from 7-10pm, Wooster Collective and Drago will present a hot and heavy round table discussion and Q&A session to explore the current happenings in today’s art movement with nine of the top names from the streets of New York: Chris Stain, Elbow-Toe, Ivory Serra, Logan Hicks, Pax Paloscia, Swoon, WK Interact, as well as Drago Publisher Paulo von Vacano and Wooster Collective’s Marc and Sara Schiller at their super chic venue Meet at the Apartment in SoHo.
Ivory Serra (The Serra Effect), Logan Hicks (Arrivals and Departures), Pax Paloscia (Let the Kids Play), and WK Interact (2.5 New York Street Life) all published books for Drago’s 36 Chamber Series box collection. Chris Stain, Elbow-Toe, Swoon, and WK Interact contributed their work to The Thousands: Painting Outside, Breaking In, a book and exhibition curated by RJ Rushmore and…
The Art of Lotte Reiniger (Video)
Cutout shadow art from the famous animator Lotte Reiniger.
Graffiti's Story
Graffiti’s Story, From Vandalism to Art to Nostalgia
Original NYTims article appears here
Eric Felisbret stood by a chain-link fence, watching three men spraying graffiti on a backyard wall in Upper Manhattan. One man smiled and invited him over.
“You can go around the corner and when you see a sign for a seamstress, go in the alley,” the man said. “Or you can jump the fence, like we did.”
Mr. Felisbret, 46, chose the long way. Not that he is unused to fence-jumping. In the 1970s, that was one of his skills as a budding…
Read more1976 Street Lightnin' Gang Stencil Bust, Illustrated
David Willis just emailed scans of drawings, artifacts, and photos of his 1976, Street Lightnin' Gang, stencil-graffiti bust (the written story is here):
David Wills in Street Lightnin' Gang uniform outside Camden Town Underground station
Wills sprays the traffic light control box in Notting Hill Gate.
Busted by Sergeant Bootsy!
Bootsy says, "OK. Keep your hands on the back of the seat in front of you."
…
If these scrawls could talk - Tom Sevil and Melbourne's Alt History
If these scrawls could talk
September 23, 2009
Original Article Here
Urban activist Tom Sevil leads a tour of political graffiti in search of an alternative history of Melbourne. Andrew Stephens reports.
TOM Sevil is up a laneway inspecting some 1970s graffiti. He likes these places. He's a stencil artist, graffitist and graphic designer, but also something of an archaeologist, because the work at hand here is but a fragment, partly buried beneath rich layers of history.
In white house paint applied with a brush, not an aerosol, this graffito no longer makes sense. It says: Frazer is a bottled toad in a trust - and there it ends, forever to remain a mystery, its final words obscured by years of others' graffiti.
This fragment, a bastardisation of a phrase from Shakespeare's Richard III, is more… Read more
The Teleport Caper: Beyond the Pale (1976)
The Teleport Caper: Beyond the Pale
by David Wills
One grey day Sunday in January 1976, after I had been visiting with the graphic-designer Barney Bubbles, I walked from The Barbican four miles to stay at what had been my old flat on Basset Rd. with the vivacious Lucinda Cowell*, whom I had met one Saturday in the Bridge kaff on Portobello.
Somewhere on the journey, around Camden Town, I found a sombrero that added to my somewhat odd appearance. By the time I got to Notting Hill, and having sprayed my recently cut stencil in a couple of places, I got too careless and was busted, literally red handed, spray paint dribbling, as I stenciled, on a traffic-light control box, “Street Lightnin’ Gang Rules Easy, OK.”
This art was one of a series of cardboard stencils I had designed that related to SLG President Molly (now Mrs. Mark Bode) Rodriguez’s ‘World Teleport’ system of world free transport. It was an…