World Atlas Of Street Art And Graffiti

Product Description

Since its genesis on the east coast of America in the late 1960s, street art has travelled to nearly every corner of the globe, shifting and morphing into highly complex and ornate new styles.

Displaying their work within what is effectively the world’s largest, most open gallery urban artists unveil their beliefs and imaginations to a public unable to avoid them, challenging conventional ideas about the place of art in everyday life.

From Steve Powers (ESPO) in New York to Kid Zoom in Australia, taking in Banksy’s London, Paris as seen by Honet and OX, and Os Gêmeos in Brazil, The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti is the first truly geographical history of the form. Featuring specially commissioned works and interventions from major graffiti and street art practitioners, it offers readers an insider’s view of the urban landscapes as they are experienced by the artists themselves and traces the many and myriad ways in which this vibrant artistic and social phenomenon has developed.

At its best, urban art is not simply an aesthetic based on slogans, political posturing, or personal promotion: it is an art form deeply committed to spontaneous creativity and the diversity of the city. This beautifully illustrated book, created with the help of many of the artists it features, dispels the idea of such art as a thoughtless defacement of pristine surfaces, and instead celebrates it as a contemporary and highly creative inscription upon the skin of the built environment.