@j_carlson taking the final shots for #walltowallsav | Thank you @converse & @juxtapozmag | #savannah #109mlk
The sprawling, outdoor paintings were made for Living Walls, an annual gathering of street artists from around the world who paint on walls and buildings. The project has been praised as brightening up a city struggling with one of the nation’s highest foreclosure rates.
But it has also prompted an outcry. Some residents have raised concerns that too much of Atlanta has become a canvas, and some find the works disturbing or offensive.
One mural depicting a nude woman was taken down in September after residents called it pornographic. On Tuesday, Georgia Department of Transportation workers painted over another mural — of an alligator-headed man with a serpentine tail — that neighbors said confused them and was possibly demonic.
“The best thing you could say about the alligator painting was that people didn’t understand it,” said Douglas Dean, a former state representative from the largely black neighborhood in southwest Atlanta. “It absolutely did not represent what people want to see on a busy street every day.”
The parking lot and two small brick buildings at the corner of Wooster and Grand are about to vanish. They have been, for some time, a beloved and well-used graffiti spot. In recent years, the lot’s walls have hosted a Banksy rat, a Fairey paste-up, and French street artist JR’s paste-up of a giant photo of a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. But it’s around the corner where the real fun happened.
Those walls belong to what’s known locally as the Candy Factory, a spot that the New York Times published a visual guide to in 2005*. It has changed many times since then—images constantly coming and going—but here comes the biggest change of all. The Candy Factory and the parking lot are wrapped in plywood and readied for condo-fication. The parking lot is being hammered and drilled.
(via Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York: Candy Factory)
* By me! Thus I am sorry to hear this news. I consider that wall a kind of landmark.
Look closely and you can find digital graffiti right under your nose: people have daubed videos, animations and comments over buildings and streets around the world. Soon there could be a new type of tag in our cities - cut-and-pasted people - thanks to a technique for editing augmented reality (AR) videos.
Using the AR apps available for smartphones or tablets, anybody can overlay digital text, video and graphics onto the physical world for others to see later. Most major cities are teeming with these digital annotations. You just need to identify a tagged location using your smartphone’s map, and watch through the camera using an AR app. Hey presto, a video or animation will then be overlaid on the scene.
(via Paste augmented-reality video graffiti on the streets - tech - 27 October 2012 - New Scientist)
After repeatedly commenting and complaining about the pockmarked streets of Yekaterinburg, local blog URA.RU turned to Voskhod to create a brilliant campaign: under the cover of night they would paint the faces of local politicians around the most unsightly potholes and potentially shame them into action. The response? It worked!
(via Embarrassing Pothole Caricatures of Politicians Spur Action to Fix the Streets in Russia | Colossal)
lately, the public face of Charleston has seen a splash of new colors. Thanks to the ChArt Outdoor Initiative in Avondale and Park Circle, the number of local public murals has tripled in the past year. And then there are the murals that have existed under the radar. The rising popularity of Charleston native Shepard Fairey had street art popping up all over town in the early ’90s, and while much of that is gone now, locals like Ishmael, Sheepman, and Patch Whisky have incorporated the street ethos into their own art and continue to produce public works.
(via Multimedia: Murals in Charleston | Features | Charleston City Paper)
![We love these living walls by artist Anna Garforth; her work is characterized by her continual use of new and varied materials to create typographic work (e.g. food, recycled paper, moss). Each piece should be seen as distinct and carrying its own message and purpose. What seems to tie all of Anna Garforth’s work together is her insistance on interactivity and public engagement. Her pieces are often displayed in community-facing workshops, but she also publishes, exhibits, and maintains a hefty list of clients.
(via Moss Graffiti Promotes Sustainability In Urban Spaces [Pics] @PSFK)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2j9fxOtvW1qzdiowo1_500.jpg)
We love these living walls by artist Anna Garforth; her work is characterized by her continual use of new and varied materials to create typographic work (e.g. food, recycled paper, moss). Each piece should be seen as distinct and carrying its own message and purpose. What seems to tie all of Anna Garforth’s work together is her insistance on interactivity and public engagement. Her pieces are often displayed in community-facing workshops, but she also publishes, exhibits, and maintains a hefty list of clients.
(via Moss Graffiti Promotes Sustainability In Urban Spaces [Pics] @PSFK)
A stoop-sitter on France Street saw it happen last week, and when it was over, a slinky blonde cabaret singer was left standing in the doorway of blighted house at the corner of North Rampart and France Streets, brass instruments jutting out around her, Carnival beads dripping over the threshold. “He just nailed it up there and got back in his truck and left,” the woman said.
(via Drive-by artist leaves decorative doorways where there was only blight | NOLA.com)
Brooklyn-based photographer Emily Schiffer came to Chicago last summer to explore food scarcity issues in the city. While shooting on the South Side, she met Orrin Williams, founder of the Center for Urban Transformation, and came up with an idea for another project that involves using “large-scale photographic installations and urban redevelopment as strategies for pre-visualizing a transformed landscape.”
With the help of Williams and other community leaders, Schiffer plans to locate unoccupied buildings and transform them into indoor growing spaces and grocery stores. Then, Schiffer will install large photographs on the front of blighted buildings.
Photographer To Transform South Side Blight With Public Art - Art - Curbed Chicago
Thx for the tip: Sarah C.!
