Tumblingerstraße

Croatian Naive Art

Naïve art is a classification of art that is often characterized by a childlike simplicity in its subject matter and technique. While many naïve artists appear, from their works, to have little or no formal art training, this is often not true.

A LOVE LETTER FOR YOU - West Philadelphia Murals

Graffiti Chile: Grin

Grin, a Chilean artist who has been active for more than a decade. Grin combines his passion for graffiti with another urban discipline: architecture. He practices both in enormous murals that play with depth and texture, and sometimes they merge with the structure of the building itself:

Photos by: KELP (www.kelp.cl)

Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera was a Mexican painter and muralist born in Guanajuato City, Guanajuato. Studied painting in Mexico before going to Europe in 1907.While in Europe he took up cubism and had exhibitions in Paris and Madrid in 1913; he then had a show in New York City in 1916. In 1921 he returned to Mexico, where he undertook government-sponsored murals that reflected his communist politics in historical contexts.

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His personal life was as dramatic as his artwork. In 1929, he married Kahlo who was roughly 20 years younger. The two had a passionate, but stormy relationship, divorcing once in 1939 only to remarry later. She died in 1954. He then married Emma Hurtado, his art dealer. Rivera died of heart failure on November 24, 1957, in Mexico City, Mexico. Rivera's talent for historical murals and his tributes to earthy folk traditions made him one of the most influential artists in the Americas and one of Mexico's most beloved painters.

Market in Tenochtitilan

Pan American Unity

Pan American Unity

Totanac Civilization

The World

Detroit Inudstry Mural North

Detroit Inudstry Mural South

Los Angeles

Courtesy of the Shipslinky photo blog.

Sights from the Philly El

Below is a list of the completed Murals, their titles, and the direction which they are best viewed while traveling on the Market-Frankford Elevated line.

Havana Bombings - a documentary short

Graffiti artists and members of their communities discuss graffiti culture in Havana, which takes very different forms in Cuba than it does in the United States.

Urban Art Helps Detroit Cope With Hard Times

In a city laid low by hard times, surprising sights are popping up on the streets of Detroit.

Top Five Comic Book Cities

http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/the-critics/top-10-comic-book-cities/5204772.article

Interesting note on Gotham City:

So there you are…..anyway, usually it serves as a backdrop but in the ‘Destroyer’ story arc in DC’s Legends of the Dark Knight monthly comic, the architecture of Gotham City was a central character. Destroyer focused on a crazed architectural historian obsessed with reviving the work of Gotham town planner Cyrus Pinkey. Before Batman intervenes, most of Gotham’s contemporary glass and concrete skyscrapers which had obscured Pinky’s gothic extravagances, are destroyed by the ‘Mad Bomber’.

However, this story was actually a rather brazen piece of opportunistic ‘masterplanning’ by Batman’s editors who wanted the Gotham in the comic books to resemble the one in depicted in Tim Burton’s film – in order to attract new readers. In Destroyer, Pinky’s towers are a dead ringer for Anton Furst’s designs for the film (see Furst’s sketches in the slideshow above).

The Artwork of Dan Witz

Dan Witz, 1957 born in Chicago, IL, received his BFA from Cooper Union in New York. In the late 70's he moved to New York’s East Village. The artwork of Dan Witz evinces a rigorous conceptual framework. This framework not only opens up a dialogue with graffiti and street art which dominate the urban environment, but also allows for the retention of clear and open lines with the canon of art history.

From the no-wave and DIY movements of New York’s Lower East Side of the 70’s, through the Reaganomics of the 80’s to the flourishing of graffiti art in the new millennium. Whether stickers or paste-up silk-screened posters, conceptual pranks and interventions, or beautiful tromp l’oeil paintings, the medium is inspired as much by the nature and subject of his art as by the mutating urban conditions in which the piece is executed.

Spending Time With New York Street Advertising Takeover

New York City is covered with illegal billboards and advertisements. One random day, civilians decided to take back the public space by covering over 120 illegal billboards with original works of art.

Don Draper would not be pleased.

Famous Bus Stops

Baltimore Graffiti Artists

JR's Street Art of Rio's Favelas

French photographer and street artist JR has produced another awe inspiring public art project in Rio. Known for his massive scale black and white portraits, JR recently covered a hill side shanty town with his trademark imagery. The photos make the houses almost seem alive with the intricate emotional details of his subject’s faces popping out.

So may people ignore the favelas and the favelas have eyes and are looking back at the rest of the city compelling everyone to look back...and hopefully pay attention.

Br(az)illiant: Restructuring Shanty Towns For the Future

This post was swiped from Dornob.com, which is a popular design and fashion website.

Yes, these are real … and yet entirely unreal at the same time. After traveling extensively through the shanty towns of Sao Paolo and Río de Janeiro, Brazil, artist Dionisio Gonzalez has constructed a series of photographic collages that blend imagination and architecture, a kind of hyper-real Alice-in-Wonderland representation of the hodge-podge urban reality around him.

His work is not just artistic or theoretical commentary – it is a semi-concrete vision for the possible restructuring of shanty towns. He has imagined and proposed a reuse of the spontaneous constructive elements of the existing structures in mass settlements to create controlled hybrid-but-functional communities of the future.

The artist’s critique and proposal are based on his observation of the slash-and-burn tactics of the Brazilian government which, when it intervenes, simply swoops in and sweeps areas before rebuilding utterly – at the expense of the shared structural history of an area that might not be ideal but is what many people call home.

González tests out various configurations, scales and stylistic combinations in his compelling series of collages – in part an aesthetic exercise but also an attempt to take the real materials he has photographed and find new ways to recombine them for new purposes. His work has won him international recognition and awards.