new layers: harveys

harveys/north layer 8, November 10, 2007. Piece by Vulcan.

Just added two new layers to the wall at Harvey’s, featuring new work by Vulcan, both as a work in progress, and as a finished piece. This is one of the things I like about graffiti, murals and street art: their public placement often means you get to see them as they’re being created. Enjoy!

new city: Olympia, Washington!

Shown here: olympia/capitol layer 29, August 11, 2007. Photos by Jason Taellious. Stencil artist unknown.

I’m happy to announce a brand new addition to the site: the Capitol Theater Free Wall in Olympia, Washington. This wall’s evolution is radically different from the walls I usually shoot in San Francisco. The most notable difference is the rate of change: because it is truly a free wall, there’s something new to be found almost every day. Just as remarkable is the tireless effort of photographer Jason Taellious, who has been visiting this spot every day for several months to document it.

What’s up at the moment is just 29 of nearly a hundred layers I’m in the process of cobbling together from the photos of Jason and other local photographers. But this should be enough to give a good idea of the wall’s unique character. There’s quite a lot of graffiti in the New York tradition, done at various levels of skill. There are some pretty sophisticated stencils, and the occasional wheatpaste poster. High on the wall there are roller tags, and even one made with a modified fire extinguisher. And then there are random messages scrawled, it seems, by passersby who aren’t part of any street art subculture at all. All in all, it’s quite a unique mix. And how it churns. Nothing, not even a masterpiece, seems to last more than a few days, which does prompt the occasional complaint.

If you’re looking for more information about the Capitol Theater Free Wall, the wall has its own Flickr group. Also worth seeing is this chronological slideshow.

new layers: cavern/westB

Shown here: cavern/westB layer 39, October 14, 2007. Pieces by PHAZE, SAGER, AWOL, AVOID, PIERS, BREAK and KEEP.

Added five new layers to cavern/westB, bringing that wall up to date at 39 layers, and the entire site up to a total of 389 layers. This is still only a thin slice of all the photos we’ve gathered for the project. I’m in the process of building montages for several new locations in other cities. Stay tuned for lots of new stuff!

Wilkommen, Bemvindo, Welkom…

In addition to the popular blogs in English, lately I’ve been seeing a lot of links in to this site from foreign-language sites. It’s great to see how people from different cultures respond to the project. Here’s a quick roundup of recent international trackbacks:

Dutch: fontanel.nl thenielsch.web-log.nl flabber.nl

French: uqam.ca canalblog.com 2m3.net gayattitude.com pigtailbou liminarie.fr ecrans.fr fandart disobedience.be fluctuat.net insiturb1 uqam.ca netocean.free.fr

German: bluesbrothers sauglattismus blackbook.de kraftfuttermischwerk.de

Italian: lnx.zigolo.net visionet-art ilcannocchiale.it pimpmytrain.com

Japanese: parks12 designwork-s.com coliss.com bangchoo

Latvian: xlt.lv

Romanian: teoblog.com

Portuguese: agenciaging.com.br followwe e-ventos-tecnologicos perdidonaweb

Russian: visualstyle.ru

Spanish: webonauta inicios.es cuartoderecha revistasebo psicoexcesos.com bullmanu.com

Swedish: iman.se

I’ll keep this updated as new links come up.

Graffiti Archaeology got Dugg…

…and the Digg Effect slammed our server so hard, I couldn’t even log in to edit this blog. Whoops! Sorry folks! One of these days, we’ll get one of those shiny new cold-fusion-powered servers with infinite free bandwidth.

Style as Superpower

There’s always been a strange connection between the graf world and the world of superheroes. Maybe it’s the secret identities, or the way things tend to happen at night. Jonathan Lethem brought out a piece of it in his novel The Fortress of Solitude, which is really worth reading. Now there’s a group of animators approaching the same idea from another angle: a hiphop/anime hero who can absorb energy from graffiti walls, and use the style to fight his enemies. Check out the teaser video: Blokhedz. Arrow fight! Gotta love it.

(via Cartoon Brew)

Rediscovered by the online press

Wow! Graffiti Archaeology has been making the rounds of some very cool blogs and online magazines lately. A couple of weeks ago, we were featured on Infosthetics, a wonderful site dedicated to information design. (I’ve been a fan of their site for years!) And then this week, we got hit by the trifecta of Drawn!, Laughing Squid, and Juxtapoz. I particularly like that last one, because they really get what we’re all about, and they ask their readers to participate in the project by submitting their own photos (which they can easily do over at our Flickr group.)

Welcome, everybody! Hope the site’s not too slow from all the traffic!

new layers: cavern

Shown here: cavern/westB layer 34, August 26, 2007. Pieces by SILENCER, NOVAK, DRSK, WARF, SESTOR, BEATS, and STEEL.

Added ten new layers to various walls at the Cavern, bringing a few parts of it all the way up to date. Check out westB, north, and outside for the latest stuff. This spot has had some interesting action in the past year: it became a bit of a battleground for a few months, with lots of people dissing each other. That phase came to an abrupt end when the walls got buffed in April. Now, after a few months of tentative tags, it has started attracting full-on pieces of the highest quality. Will the trend continue? Only time will tell…

New layers: 22nd/west

22nd:west layer 13. Pieces by DRAMA, STEEL and JAPAN; throwie by ESMA.

Despite the untimely destruction of the Tire Beach free wall, or perhaps because of it, other spots in SF have continued to get a lot of aerosol love. This latest update completes the death-rebirth cycle on one of the very first walls we’ve covered here, with four new layers progressing from tags and throwies up to some outstanding burners. Enjoy.

Help plan the future of Tire Beach!

The big paintout last weekend, and the security theater that followed, have shown that the City of San Francisco wants very much to be taken seriously in their effort to eradicate graffiti art from Warm Water Cove.

They claim to be doing this with community support.

I don’t believe that’s true.

They haven’t heard from the true community of Tire Beach: the writers, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, DJs, dancers, fringe artists, and fans who have collectively spent more time in that park than anyone else. These are the people whose watchful eyes made it a relatively safe place to be, despite unpleasant conditions and utter neglect from the city. And these are the people who, against all odds, turned this smelly armpit of a park into a place of thriving grass-roots culture. You, dear reader, may be one of these people. And the city hasn’t heard from you.

The good news is, the plan for the future of Warm Water Cove is not yet set in stone. The planners are asking for input from the community (remember, that’s you!) before they make a final proposal. Even better, we have a deadline: if we don’t speak our minds by September 25th, we’ll miss our chance.

Of course, we don’t want to just whine at them. It’s better if we can talk amongst ourselves first, and come up with some kind of coherent plan to bring back the art. Dav Yaginuma has created a discussion group so we can do that. If you have any opinion at all, please join the group. Got a great idea? Share it. Think it’s impossible? Tell us why! Even if you don’t have much to add, join anyway! Numbers can carry a lot of weight.

I’m not taking charge of this effort, or promising to see it through to any specific goal. Heck, I might wake up tomorrow and decide it was all a waste of time. But I feel that at the very least, those who care about the art need to be heard. If that’s you, go ahead and join the group, and let’s make some stuff happen!