New layer: 19th Street

I actually added this layer a couple of weeks ago, but wasn’t able to post the update because the server hacking incident knocked out our ability to edit the blog until just now. Shown here are three new pieces by Apex, Neon, and Jase, plus some amazing characters by Chor Boogie from San Diego.

Timelapse Geology

Sorry for the lack of updates recently: our server got hacked over the holidays, and it’s taken us a while to get all the pieces back together again.

Here’s one very cool thing that came to my attention recently: it’s a map of the alluvial valley of the Mississippi River, showing how the course of the river has changed over hundreds (thousands?) of years.

Each color represents a different moment in the river’s long history, and the images are layered up so you can see it all at a glance. What a great idea! I wish I could say I came up with it first, but these maps were drawn up by Harold N. Fisk in 1944. If you’d like to see the whole thing in more detail, there’s a high-resolution version (4 MB, 1000×5871 pixels!) on Flickr.

5 Pointz

I spent Thanksgiving weekend in New York, where I had the immense pleasure of visiting the famous 5 Pointz. It’s a whole block of industrial buildings located right next to the elevated 7 line in Long Island City, Queens. (If you take the train out there from Manhattan, just look out the windows on the left side. You can’t miss it. Or click here for directions.)

A bit about the history of this spot: starting in the early 1990’s, this building was known as the Phun Phactory, and curated by a man named Pat DiLillo. A dispute with the landlord ended that project, and without anyone to cultivate the art on the walls, the building got bombed with tags and the overall quality went way down. In 2002, local writer Meres approached the landlord with the new project, and 5 Pointz, the Institute of Higher Burnin’, was born. People paint there now only with Meres’ permission, and hundreds of writers have contributed their pieces to bring the building up to a whole new level.

I spent a few hours wandering around the place and documented it as well as I could. I took a few hundred photos, which was not nearly enough, but you can see some of them here. I encountered two groups of people shooting video projects, and at least five different writers midway through painting pieces as I strolled through the space. I also got to see Meres himself in action, teaching technique to some young aspiring writers, coordinating the new work going up, and even taking the time to demonstrate the basics of style for the tourists. The man’s dedication and patience were impressive.

5 Pointz’ future looks bright: to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the project, Meres says he plans to cover the rest of the building top to bottom next spring. Meanwhile, of course, I hope to do a timelapse treatment of those walls once I’ve gathered enough photos. (As always, if you have photos you’d like to contribute, please do!)

Someone please remove this man’s thumbs before he hurts somebody.

photo by Jeff Scheid, AP

Apparently the mayor of Las Vegas has forgotten about that whole “cruel and inhuman punishment” thing in, what’s it called? Oh yeah: the U.S. Constitution. Or maybe he’s just hoping to get promoted into the neocons’ White House. I hear they’re big fans of torture there.

Read the article here: Mayor: Sever Thumbs of Graffiti Artists

Update: Wooster Collective wants your thumbs!

Update 2: According to Visual Resistance, this Goodman guy has connections to organized crime.

(Thanks to Ben Fischler for the original link.)

the graffiti of disaster

Interesting article on the Reuters feed about graffiti in the wake of the hurricanes in New Orleans: New Orleans dotted with the graffiti of disaster.

A can of spray paint was a crucial tool for New Orleans rescue teams marking buildings in the search for survivors after Hurricane Katrina. Seven weeks later, the homespun graffiti is spelling out another kind of message.

“FEMA, where y’at?” reads the writing on a toppled column in the median of a deserted street in St. Bernard Parish, where residents remain bitter about the slow federal response to the flooding and winds that flattened homes and flipped cars.

(via Visual Resistance.)

new location: ghost

Keeping up with the fast pace of the San Francisco scene is not easy! Today’s new spot, aka ghost/house, is what you might call a “dirty” wall. This is not your typical permission wall or hall of fame for the bright and shiny, it’s just the gritty reality of graf in the raw. In the past year, it’s been a tagging scratchpad, a practice wall for toys, a windowbox for wild fennel plants, and a picture frame for full-color pieces. I’ve added 11 layers so far, featuring work by Orfn, Zeros, Aydo, Seko, Twick, Aim, Aren, and Unity, among many others. No doubt there will be more to come…

new layers: cove

Just added five new layers to the “cove” wall, featuring new pieces by Zel, Drsk, Skew, Buter, Riel, Cake87, Jime, and many more. Most of these pieces are already gone in the real world, of course, but their ghosts are preserved here for your enjoyment.

Quality of Life: review coming soon…

Just a quick note to say that I saw Quality of Life tonight, and found it very very good. It’s a terrific story, told with grace and style and a lot of heart. I’ll give it a proper review when I have time, but for now I’ll just say this: this is not just a movie for graffiti heads. Anyone with a soul will enjoy it. Go see it while you can!

It’s playing through Sunday at the United Artists Galaxy 4 Theatre (at Van Ness and Sutter) in San Francisco.

barnstormers spread the know

Spread the Know is the latest project by the amazing timelapse painting collective The Barnstormers. This one’s for the good cause of promoting HIV testing and AIDS awareness. They took over a whole city block and part of a subway station, with splashes of color and layers upon layers of styles, and captured the whole process on film with slick motion-control camera moves. There’s no way I could not love this, since it brings together three of my favorite things: street art, timelapse photography and activism. But on top of that, they do it with tremendous amounts of style. Also see their Motion Paintings page for examples of their earlier work, like We Love Music and Scrounge.

Be the printer. It’s all in the wrist.

Vincent Leclerc’s FatJab is the latest in a series of painting machines (like Applied Autonomy’s GraffitiWriter and StreetWriter, and Joshua Kinberg’s Bikes Against Bush.) What they all have in common is a linear array of nozzles that sweep out messages, dot-matrix style, across a surface. But what’s different about FatJab is that it’s not something you drive– it’s something you wield, mounted on a set of brass knuckles, like a cyborganic paint-ninja. How hot is that?

Unfortunately the site has only a handful of pictures, and no examples of anything painted with it yet, but I’m hoping that will change very soon, once they find some people with enough skill to test the thing.

(via Protein Feed, via Kevan. Thanks Kev!)