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Driving around Los Angeles, New York or any city you may be dismayed by all the graffiti that covers buildings and over passes with unintelligible scribbling. If you’re going to make graffiti make it a work of art, like these awesome creations celebrating Star Wars. Link
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Move over, Banksy – there’s a new avant garde graffiti artist prowling the streets. Behold, Hanksy! via Wooster Collective
Previously on Neatorama: T.HANKS: The Tom Hanks Trash Bin
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This work of work of art, according to Neatoramanaut chriskayTO, can be found in a subway station in Toronto. Examined from the correct angle, it looks like a staircase.
Link via Geekosystem
When you and I see a crack in the wall, we probably think of grabbing some spackle to fix the eyesore … but not French artist OakOak, who grabbed some art supply instead. Check out more here: Link
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts rented a billboard sign for their exhibition “Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting.” It featured a portion of the nude painting Venus Rising from the Sea. It didn’t stay nude.
Apparently, someone thought it was just a little too nipple-y outside. Even if this is some kind of Midwestern modesty thing, at least the vandal did grant Venus a saucy red strapless deal–hardly sensible blizzard-people attire.
The MIA’s PR staff held a little pow-wow with Clear Channel, who offered to take the billboard down immediately. But head of PR Anne-Marie Wagener was tickled.
“Without those words it did look as though someone’s trying to censor it,” she says. “But with ‘Brrrr!’ it has that whole sort of funny element. Because it is cold!”
They’ve decided to leave Venus and her new wardrobe up.
Link (contains art nude) -via reddit
This picture shows a school restroom stall on which someone has written the entire first chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Schools have much nicer restrooms now than when I was a student. Link -via The Daily What
This video game is guaranteed to move very slowly. Kimi Spencer and Marko Manriquez created an interactive mural that uses moss to depict Space Invaders:
Moss invaders comprises a living graffiti mural and a capacitive sound installation into one piece. The moss mural is made using laser cut stencils to mold a moss milkshake concoction of our own devising. The moss paste is “painted” onto the stencils to grow directly onto the brick wall surface. The sound installation aspect takes the moss invaders into the intergalactic realm. Each moss pad is a capacitive sensor which plays 8-bit musical sounds when touched.
Link via DVICE | Photo: Core77 | Previously: DIY Moss Graffiti
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Famous faces in public places, but these aren’t advertising bill boards. Web Urbanist rounded up pictures of street art that incorporates celebrities you know and maybe love. This image of Jack Nicholson was painted in Berlin a few years ago. Link -via Rue the Day
(Image source: Lost At E Minor)
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Here’s a clever use of shadowing by photographer Joe Baran. All that’s necessary is the right spot at the right time and a little bit of graffiti.
This project has something for everyone: those who enjoy gadgets, bicycles, graffiti, overthinking, steampunk, art, and/or rainbows! Creator Akay calls it a “complicated technical solution to aide in simple acts of vandalism.” Read more about it at Underwire. Link -via Laughing Squid
Australian graffiti artist BUFFdiss works in masking tape. He’s especially fond of making giants in public places so that people look like dolls in comparison. In the links, you can find an interview with him. BUFFdiss says that using masking tape permits him greater leeway with authorities who would object to the use of more permanent media.
Link via Make | Video | Photo: Mick Bradley
Graffiti artist Rainbow Warrior in Albuquerque finds drab buildings and "improves" them by spilling paint to pour "illegal rainbows"
off their tops.
City officials are angry and threaten to go after the "knuckleheads" behind the scheme, but Ingrid Fetell of Aesthetics of Joy asks whether the rainbows – while illegal – can still be joyful:
I find this tension – between the forbidden act of graffiti, technically vandalism, and the delight people are discovering as a consequence – acutely compelling. Is an illegal rainbow still joyful? Here’s a letter writer commenting on the rainbow warrior situation:
So, somebody lays down a rainbow on the thing, a piece of art (and yes, it is art, even if it is “free,” and maybe especially so) that pokes fun at the mess, that makes me grin and say, “That’s a little better!” As a life-long citizen of Albuquerque, as someone
who has had his very personal property damaged by genuinely malicious individuals: this isn’t the same thing. Is it graffiti? Yeah. Is it the same as somebody tagging a vulgar word on the car my parents gave me when I went to college? No. The intention of the rainbows is perhaps mischievous, but it is definitely not malicious. The intention, and the execution, is a wink, a laugh, a little unexpected burst. Worth a slap on the wrist and a good talking to, nothing more.
Two guys with a conflict turn into street art and behave like video game characters. This really neat animation was produced by CorridorDigital. -via Laughing Squid
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A large rock stands out in the middle of a plain in Mongolia. The Taikhar chuluu is covered with inscriptions dating back as far as Turkic rule in Mongolia. Those inscriptions were followed by more in the Mongol language, then Tibetan, and even more modern graffiti.
Of course, the rock itself did not come here by itself, the legend says. Long time ago there lived a hero here called Bökebilig (“Strong and wise”). Suddenly a large snake started to come out from under the earth. Bökebilig did not like this, and he pushed back the snake from where it came, and then he closed the mouth of its cave with this rock which has been standing here ever since. Not far from the rock there is a small mountain called Altan sandali (“Golden throne”), of which tradition says that Bökebilig took a rest on it, while washing his hands in the nearby Tamir river.
Street artist Banksy visited New Orleans in 2008, decorating various buildings with his distinctive paintings. He encountered an enemy who became known as the Gray Ghost.
Fred Radtke made it his mission to erase every bit of graffiti in the city long before Banksy’s arrival, sweeping down the street with his paint roller in hand. The anti-street-art crusader passed quietly through each neighborhood, obliterating all traces of spray paint with his own signature splotches of gray – hence his nickname. Some locals celebrated his dedication to keeping New Orleans clean, while others decried his assault against free expression.
The Gray Ghost upset some property owners because an original Banksy work increases the value of a building considerably. Banksy responded by incorporating the Gray Ghost in some of his works. The battle with the Gray Ghost eventually came to an end in court, but today only one original Banksy image remains in New Orleans. Link -via Rue the Day
If you can’t beat ‘em, let ‘em be world record-breaking art: Brazil unveiled the world’s largest graffiti at 37,000 square feet (3,500 m2). Oddee has the exclusive photos: Link
Shannon immortalized his proposal to Jessica for eternity. Or at least until the wall is repainted. -via Buzzfeed
Graffiti can be useful! Someone has been painting compasses on the sidewalks of New York City at subway exits. If you’ve ever ridden a subway beneath a city, you know how helpful this can be when you re-emerge and have to get your bearings on the street level. The question is: why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? Actually, they have.
Using sidewalk compasses is an idea that has been tried before by both official and unofficial sources. In 2006, a blogger snapped a photo of a compass on the sidewalk at the 8th Street L station; someone else caught one on Bleecker. The City of New York’s Department of Transportation got in on the act in 2007, installing compass decals in the ground at selected stations around midtown, in a pilot program that doesn’t seem to have been continued.
Maybe this time, the idea will stick around. Link -via The Daily What
(Image credit: Paolo Mastrangelo/NYC The Blog)
This clever bit of graffiti was spotted in Ottawa, Ontario. It’s patterned after Charlie Brown’s iconic shirt and inverts Charlie’s expression “Good grief” with the inscription “Grief ain’t Good.”
UPDATE: In the comments, Nick gives detailed information about this site. Thanks, Nick!
Victorious armies have employed graffiti to celebrate their conquests for millennia. A photoessay at Poemas del río Wang utilizes images from the archives of LIFE magazine and other sources to document the extensive graffiti that characterized Berlin after the defeat of Hitler.
The inscriptions remained intact for fifty years in the closed and isolated Reichstag. It was only in the 90s that they were discovered by Karin Felix, a collaborator of the restorations. She prepared a first, complete catalog of the inscriptions and she has made inquiries about the persons and the stories behind the names.
During the restoration of the Reichstag, some of the graffiti was conserved as an item of historical interest.
Link.
It looks like an old, rusty fence, right? Just take a step to the left and look at it again.
It’s a human face! This graffiti is located on a fence in Berlin and was created by Mental Gassi, a German art collective that places large human faces in public places.
via Nerdesque | Mental Gassi Blog
German artist Aram Bartholl often juxtaposes online life with real life, as seen in his giant Google Maps indicators and actualization of World of Warcraft avatars. One of his recent projects is to place CAPTCHAs — the images of letters and numbers used to prevent computers from creating accounts with online services — in public spaces. Bertholl places them next to graffiti tags because graffiti, like CAPTCHAs, are codes that can only be read by certain people. The project is called “Are You Human?”
via Make | Artist’s Website
An incident in Detroit raises several questions about street art. Renowned British graffiti artist Banksy visited a crumbling factory in the city and painted a wall.
Discovered last weekend, the stenciled work shows a forlorn boy holding a can of red paint next to the words “I remember when all this was trees.” But by Tuesday, artists from the 555 Nonprofit Gallery and Studios, a feisty grassroots group, had excavated the 7-by-8-foot, 1,500-pound cinder block wall with a masonry saw and forklift and moved the piece to their grounds near the foot of the Ambassador Bridge in southwest Detroit.
The move — a guerilla act on top of Banksy’s initial guerilla act — has sparked an intense debate about the nature of graffiti art, including complicated questions of meaning, legality, value and ownership. Some say the work should be protected and preserved at all costs. Others say that no one had a right to move it — and that the power and meaning of graffiti art is so intrinsic to its location that to relocate it is to kill it.
The gallery defends its action by pointing out that the artwork would have been destroyed soon along with the building. Others respond that Banksy may have intended for that to happen. And then there’s the fact that the context gave the painting it meaning in the first place. One could say that while Banksy broke laws against trespassing and vandalism, the gallery is guilty of theft. The property owner hasn’t said anything about it yet. No one yet knows who, if anyone, stands to profit from the incident. Link -via Metafilter
(Image source: Banksy)
Here’s a fun way to create something unique by mixing traditional needle craft with modern urban street art.
Each pack contains all you need to cross stitch your way to a beautifully finished piece of urban tapestry, of which any great home would be proud to share its walls with.
This impressive work of graffiti by flickr user DROP HPC-ANC brings all of your LEGO nightmares to life. I found this at Albotas, which usually presents a high-quality geeky work of graffiti daily.
via Albotas
Graffiti artist Tony Quan suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and is unable to move any part of his body other than his eyes. But thanks to an open source computer project called EyeWriter, he can still draw. The technology tracks the movements of his eyes, allows him to select different shapes and colors, and then projects his images onto the sides of buildings. The above video is a selection from a documentary about the project.
Remember Muto, the "animated" or time-lapse graffiti by Blu that took the InterWeb by storm? Well, here’s the sequel: a collaboration by Blu and David Ellis called COMBO (with music by Roberto Lange)
It was produced by Studio Cromie and released at the Fame Festival 2009
Tenerife, the largest of Spain’s beautiful Canary Islands is home to an enormous amount of unique street art. See a small selection of the awesome graffiti at Direct Villas Tenerife.
(image credit: Flickr user herr_S)
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
This great needlepoint work was created by Tennessee artist, Jacquelyn Royal. If you like her work, there’s more on the site, but I don’t think any of them look nearly as real as this one.
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