Category: the faith of graffiti

Summer solstice

I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell I am doing (at least with my sticker project).  Since 2004, I’ve been to Berlin six times and made dozens of trips to NYC, plus individual trips to San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Munich, and Madrid (mostly work-related except for NYC).  Students, alumni, and friends have picked up stickers in Amsterdam, Rome, and several cities in eastern Europe.  A couple of thousand stickers by now.  A growing database.  An exhibition in 2006.  A blog with musings and lots of links.  Two conference papers.  A few sticker contacts.  A…

Wooster Collective in Berlin

Too bad my SLU study group and I will miss the Wooster Collective meet-up in Berlin and a chance to meet Marc and Sara Schiller, the NYC-based couple who has done so much to advance street art around the world.  Plus the students would have loved going to the hip Club der Visionaere; they talked about it all the time. No complaints, though.  Our recent trip was fantastic in all respects!!

Alternative Berlin

At Spencer Homick’s suggestion, my SLU students — Kat Dwyer, Bridget Montesanti, and Charlie Reetz — and I signed up for a walking tour yesterday with a group called Alternative Berlin to see and learn about street art.  It was a great way to begin our two week journey — better than I expected, to be honest.  Our guide Mark was extremely well informed, not only of the “scene” itself, but also about the ways in which artists engage the community with their work.  He discussed street art as much more than mere decoration and/or defacement of the public environment. …

the faith of graffiti

A few years ago, I stumbled across the faith of graffiti in a used book store.  Published in 1973, it includes documentary photographs by Mervyn Kurlansky and Jon Naar, with an essay by Norman Mailer.  As A-1, Aesthetic Investigator, Mailer describes meeting up with CAY 161 and other young street artists in an apt. in Washington Heights.  They talk about “the curiosity of past passions to write the name, as if, like the Twist, it was over.”  That is, by the time Mailer wrote the story in the early ’70s, legal penalties against graffiti artists in NYC were getting serious…