Street Artists make Place Identity

Street artists like Haas and Hahn or JR are volunteering with or without crowd-funding or being commissioned by NGOs to help make place.   Sometimes place making by paint occurs overtime such as the Wynwood Arts District murals in Miami or older historic murals in smaller towns across America in the 1980-90s such as Lake Placid, Florida.  But this visioning by a single artist or artist team seems a newer idea.  Respect to street artists and crowdfunding makes these artist initiatives viable.  Here are a few.

Prolific Bay Area bomber ABOVE recently completed a marathon session in London at the Chrisp Street Market in Poplar over the weekend. Using over 100 cans of spray paint while making his mark on 46 shutters in a span of 48 hours, ABOVE surely came close to some sort of record while covering over 19 shop fronts with his iconic arrow motif.

Electric Blue Gallery liaised with the local proprietors and shop owners and agreed that the shutters could be painted by Ben Eine all along this largely ‘unpainted’ area sandwiched between Liverpool St station and Petticoat Lane on Middlesex Street, 2010

pigment workroom is a multidisciplinary studio based in bari, southern italy who is working as a laboratory for participatory urban interventions that unite resident with artist. within the town of san pio (formerly known as enziteto), a team of five italian artists — tellas, alberonero, geometric bang, alfano and ciredz — have enlivened the public spaces and domestic sites within an otherwise impoverished social housing neighborhood.

built during the 1950s as an isolated city, removed from the renowned waterfront vistas visited by tourists from around the globe, enziteto — as the residents still refer to it — makes up 3,000 inhabitants and is unfortunately notorious for its high rate of organized crime. by bringing their initiative, ‘enziteto real estate’, to this withdrawn spot, the artists’ aim to challenge the cliche that social housing units and their environmental context are of no cultural interest, stressing how the aesthetics of place can impact cultural and social conditions.