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Culture July 3, 2018
When you wanna see art, but you have no Monet.
Have you ever walked down a street and seen a painting on a wall and just stopped to stare? What you saw was probably street art, which is a tradition that goes way farther than the famous artist Banksy.
They liven up a city street, but like most art, there’s more to it than just pretty images and a surprise factor. Street art brings communities together and pushes art forward to a new audience.
Historically, art was a luxury. Only the rich had access to it. In today’s digital age, art is now more accessible than ever.
With growing accessibility and diversity, the definition of art is expanding. Street art, digital media art and interactive art are making their way to social media channels, which help underrepresented artists gain ground. The appeal of street art is similar since it comes from its accessibility and availability.
Street art is not only accessible to the masses, coloring concrete jungle backgrounds for anyone to see and admire, it’s readily-available to make. Artists can put up their art freely in some areas or be commissioned to work on walls. Street art has an unofficial, spontaneous quality, so it often gets mixed up in terms like “graffiti” and “vandalism.”
Often street art utilizes pop culture or contemporary symbols in their art, which helps open conversations on sometimes dense topics. Artists like Banksy have created art that generates conversations beyond aesthetics and into the sociopolitical discourse. By utilizing public spaces to express messages, street art redefines how we view art.
Street art has a large audience thanks to its public and visible nature. Every single person who walks by sees it, representing a contrast to museums where people either have to pay or get past security. That means the public can become a part of the art if that was the artist’s intent. A person can become a participant in the artwork through photos such as the one above.
It’s no surprise that the street art movement affects communities since they are the places that host the art. In some cases, street art brought communities together, even those with violent pasts or in conflict.
Royyal Dog is one artist that merges communities with his work. He paints black women wearing traditional Korean dresses called hanboks on various walls throughout the world. Many of his works have been on display in Los Angeles, where the riots of the early 1990s are still a recent and painful memory for the Korean-American and African-American communities. In combining both cultures on the walls of Los Angeles, Royyal Dog’s street art illustrates hope, reconciliation and community.
In a TED Talk on “How painting can transform communities,” Dutch artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, who exhibit under the name Haas&Hahn, talk about their work with favelas.
A favela is a slum in Brazil’s urban areas, often consisting of unfinished houses and bare brick walls. Favelas are known for their crime, poverty, gangs and drug problems. For a decade, Haas&Hahn worked on favela community projects, bringing color onto dull, urban walls and in the community with young locals who learn how to paint in the process. The result? Newly painted, bright and colorful homes that create a stunning view.
What Haas&Hahn noticed after working on these projects was that after they finished, locals continued painting projects, bringing the favela’s community together.
Over time, Haas&Hahn’s projects have become more simple because they want to include more people. They realized that the time they “spent in the neighborhood was maybe actually even more important than the painting itself.” Using street art, Haas&Hahn let communities express creativity and transform.
Street artist Vhils creates street art composed of the wall he works on. Instead of just using walls as a canvas, Vhils chisels and carves off the surface to create art.
Street art has expanded immensely in the past decade. As artists become more creative in utilizing public space, 3D street art has emerged. In the example below, artist David Zinn creates 3-D pole art in Schaumburg, Illinois.
The famous street artist Banksy opened a park of 3-D street art installations in his project Dismaland: a Bemusement Park. The park is a satiric work to juxtapose Disneyland’s amusement park.
In the past five years, pop-up museums and art installations like the Museum of Ice Cream and Happy Place are becoming an increasingly mainstream avenue of art-viewing, saturating social media accounts with colorful pictures. Though these art installations mimic the model of street art by inviting observers to collaborate and participate, they come with a heavy price tag. With tickets ranging from $30 and over, these pop-up exhibits are not public-friendly and are often sold-out for months or entail long queues.
No thanks, I’ll just take a walk downtown. Street art may be old school, but new art is constantly being created, sometimes on a blank wall canvas and sometimes over older art. So what are you waiting for? It’s time to hit the streets.
If you don’t know where to find street art near you, check out the app PublicArt.