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In a small, largely abandoned village along the coast in Belgium, the walls are covered in graffiti. What began as an effort by the few remaining locals…
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When it comes to our cities, we all have an edifice complex.I first encountered this term, edifice complex, in a book of the same name by architectural…
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In the late 1940s, a Midwestern salesman named Edward Seymour was looking for a better way to demonstrate his line of aluminum radiator paint to…
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Gangs have been writing graffiti since at least the early 20th century, and the reasons have remained remarkably stable: identifying turf boundaries, roll…
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Graffiti is always a political act, whether overtly or accidentally. The very nature of vandalism requires some kind of confrontation between a disruptive…
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In order of increasing intensity: Graffiti can be tags, throwies, burners or pieces.Tags are those quick stylized signatures, a note left behind or a…
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What do skateboarders, graffiti artists and French post-structuralists have in common?Let’s start with the skateboarder. The sport that essentially began…
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Chaz Bojorquez has been called the O.G. Godfather of Cholo graffiti. He started writing graffiti in Los Angeles in the early 1960s-- his first letters…
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Since the early 1990s, the hyper-anonymous street artist Banksy has been upending our collective notion of art, vandalism and politics with both formal…
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If you ask someone what they think about graffiti, the possible responses are fairly easy to predict. They’ll either like graffiti, or they won’t, or…
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If you’re planning a trip to Istanbul in the near future, or even if you aren’t, there’s a new app for iPhones that hopes to deliver a different sort of…
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It’s really difficult to pin down what you might call a manifesto of graffiti writers. Graffiti is always a political act, insofar as it questions and…