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Summary
Summary
A comprehensive gallery of the best street art from around the world.
For years, graffiti art sat on the fence separating vandalism and public art. Today it's matured into street art -- a form of public art marking cities around the world.
Global Street Art is a splendid collection of some of the best around the world, investigating the media the artists work with, the "canvases" they work on, the themes that arise through their work, and the "galleries" in which they choose to set their work.
The types of street art and the methods used vary widely, so the book organizes the photographs into categories in these chapters:
Introduction: A brief history of graffiti and street art Global Breakdown: USA, Europe/UK, South America, and Rest of the World Techniques: Graf/Letters, Freehand Spraycan, Stencil, Stickers and Posters, Atypical Techniques, Durable Techniques, and Ephemeral Techniques, and more Spaces: Plants, Integration, Shadow and Photo, Spaces and Faces Movements: Alluding to 3D, Anamorphism, Photorealism, Text Work, Calligraphy, Geometry, and more Surfaces: Vehicles, Roads, Passenger Trains, Freight, and more Themes: Animals, Hip-hop Characters, Robots, and more Ad-busting/Activism International Street Art Festivals and Projects.Street artists are startlingly talented -- they create witty, provocative and sentimental art. Global Street Art presents their painted world.
Author Notes
Lee Bofkin is the co-founder and CEO of Global Street Art, a unique artist-led street art channel that holds the largest online street art photo archive. He holds a PhD in evolutionary mathematics from Cambridge.
Reviews (1)
Booklist Review
The amount of graffiti produced each weekend globally could easily fill all existing commercial art galleries. UK-based author and photographer Bofkin traveled the world to record the exuberance and abundance of the contemporary graffiti-art scene. With rich photo documentation from the urban spaces of Australia, Brazil, Italy, Japan, Spain, and South Africa, among many others, Bofkin captures the breadth of artistic diversity and incredible skill at play in this international art form. Short essays throughout offer localized histories of graffiti practice and consider major contemporary trends in techniques and theme, including the use of ephemeral materials, font experimentation, and the adoption of irregular spaces as canvas. There is particular focus on mural projects, reflecting the rise of a legal street-art culture and the urban graffiti festivals that foster opportunities for the production of large-scale work. Bofkin's celebratory photographs and text reveal global graffiti as a developed, even established, art form and make the case for the beauty of painted cities around the world.--Bosch, Lindsay Copyright 2014 Booklist
Excerpts
Excerpts
Foreword The beauty of street art is that it teaches you to look at spaces not for what they are but for what they could be. Every day thousands of artists around the world make their art in spaces designed for altogether different purposes: an abandoned factory in the outskirts of Lisbon becomes a hidden gallery visited by only a handful of people each week; a New York fence, designed to exclude the public, becomes an ideal support for lengths of yarn, strung into elegant letters; the outside of a passenger train in Rome turns into a rolling canvas for those who are daring enough to paint it. In the past 50 years, society has moved from regarding graffiti as a public nuisance and a menace to embracing elements of the scene, with street art and graffiti festivals celebrated around the globe, and some municipalities waking up to the possibility that these new types of muralism can beautify their cities. In this book I look at how street art can be seen all over the world; the historical reasons behind street art developing as a distinct form -- separate to gallery-based art -- and how this should affect our perception of street art; the current trends in its production; and the curation of public space and the impact this is having. It's no exaggeration to say that cities which support street artists, or react less punitively against their actions, will have better opportunities for developing city identities, and engaging local communities and tourists alike. Street art and graffiti have intermingled with and influenced each other, and will continue to do so in the future. Artists who are now recognized as street art pioneers often have backgrounds as graffiti writers or were influenced by graffiti, if only through a desire to do something different. The breaking of rules and cultural constraints was what originally led to the growth of graffiti; today, it is the breaking of artistic constraints that prevents creative stagnation. Narrow definitions of street art and graffiti do not constrain the artists' work and neither do they constrain the position of this book. In the following pages there are examples of both street art and graffiti; some of the best art is produced when different ideas combine and street art and graffiti are both powerful forces for changing the appearance of our cities. Some of the artists featured in this book think of themselves as street artists, graffiti artists or graffiti writers; others choose to be 'artists' without further qualification. There is no single terminology to cover all perspectives. What I will say is simply that all the artists featured in this book produce great work that is often outside: outside of the studio, outside of the commercial gallery system, and sometimes outside of the law. There are so many artists active today that I would estimate that the amount of street art and graffiti produced around the world each weekend could fill all commercial galleries at least once over, and then again the following weekend. This book was written and compiled to honour the thousands of artists who paint our cities around the world. It is not a complete guide to the most fashionable street artists or the most commercially successful; it is, however, a selection of stunning contemporary street art from across the globe, showing the breadth of artistic diversity through relevant work. Curating this book has been an exhausting pleasure. I started the process by selecting one thousand favourite photographs from Global Street Art's own 70,000-photo archive spanning 25 countries (I took most of those pictures). I then added some of the best photographs shared on our blog and tried to contact every artist whose work was featured in the photos. I trawled through Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, website contact forms, paint shops, blogs and friends, working in seven or eight different languages and using translation programs to track the artists down and make sure they were happy to be featured. The results are visible in the following pages and I am tremendously grateful to the more than 300 artists who agreed to have their work represented in the book. When I travelled around the world taking photos for this book I made friends with many artists and didn't get killed: two things that make me very happy. This book is quite academic because I'm a geek and I really believe in painted cities. To add some levity there are stories about wild dogs, train tunnels and massive freaking guns. Excerpted from Global Street Art: The Graffiti Artists and Trends Taking over the World by Lee Bofkin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.