This theoretically and empirically grounded book uses case studies of political graffiti in the post-socialist Balkans and Central Europe to explore the use of graffiti as a subversive political media. Despite the increasing global digitisation, graffiti remains widespread and popular, providing with a few words or images a vivid visual indication of cultural conditions, social dynamics and power structures in a society, and provoking a variety of reactions. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, as well as detailed interdisciplinary analyses of "patriotic," extreme-right, soccer-fan, nostalgic, and chauvinist graffiti and street art, it looks at why and by whom graffiti is used as political media and to/against whom it is directed. The book theorises discussions of political graffiti and street art to show different methodological approaches from four perspectives: context, author, the work itself, and audience. It will be of interest to the growing body of literature focussing on (sub)cultural studies in the contemporary Balkans, transitology, visual cultural studies, art theory, anthropology, sociology, and studies of radical politics.

Bringing together a stunning array of antiwar, anti-Bush, and anti-Blair graffiti from the United States, Canada, Europe, Middle East, Japan, and Australia, this gritty, controversial collection captures many unique images which have survived only a few hours between execution and clean-up. Including a chronology of opposition to the war organized by continent, and commentaries by the graffiti artists themselves, this work constitutes an essential record of political opposition since 9/11. Every major city is featured, including London, New York City, Paris, Tokyo, Milan, Baghdad, Tehran, Berlin, Munich, Marseilles, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sydney, Melbourne, and more.

Shepard Fairey is arguably the most influential street artist in the world. His art captures the spirit of our times, while he asks viewers to "question everything". Fairey's work has challenged artistic conventions, visual formulas, and traditional social boundaries with much fanfare and criticism. OBEY Shepard Fairey, Inc is a critical and authorized examination of the artist's life and work.

What is street art? Who is the street artist? Why is street art a crime? Since the late 1990s, a distinctive cultural practice has emerged in many cities: street art, involving the placement of uncommissioned artworks in public places. Sometimes regarded as a variant of graffiti, sometimes called a new art movement, its practitioners engage in illicit activities while at the same time the resulting artworks can command high prices at auction and have become collectable aesthetic commodities. Such paradoxical responses show that street art challenges conventional understandings of culture, law, crime and art. Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination engages with those paradoxes in order to understand how street art reveals new modes of citizenship in the contemporary city. It examines the histories of street art and the motivations of street artists, and the experiences both of making street art and looking at street art in public space. It considers the ways in which street art has become an integral part of the identity of cities such as London, New York, Berlin, and Melbourne, at the same time as street art has become increasingly criminalised. It investigates the implications of street art for conceptions of property and authority, and suggests that street art and the urban imagination can point us towards a different kind of city: the public city. Street Art, Public City will be of interest to readers concerned with art, culture, law, cities and urban space, and also to readers in the fields of legal studies, cultural criminology, urban geography, cultural studies and art more generally.

A wave of protest is in the air and on the walls! A new generation of politicized artists, designers and communicators the world over are using stencil art as an accessible yet powerful means of giving voice to their ideas. The Stencil Graffiti Handbook sees Tristan Manco back on the streets. Through an incomparable network of street-art contacts, gained through over two decades of immersion in the scene, Manco has scoured the globe to find the most interesting street artists working today - those operating outside of the mainstream market of 'Urban Art' and beneath the radar of everyone but the true cognoscenti. Exploring the medium's applications within grassroots activism as well as the contemporary craft scene, Manco brings this thriving artform to light. Showing both process and results, The Stencil Graffiti Handbook dives into street art's essential elements - place, space, technique and subject - before taking to the streets to see how, where and why stencil graffiti is king. Also featuring studio visits with artists and practical, step-by-step guidance via artist-led projects, with specially commissioned instructional illustrations by the renowned Colombian collective Instituto Bogotano de Corte, The Stencil Graffiti Handbook is an unmissable education and inspiration for anyone with an open mind and a rebellious spirit.

The third coloring book in Dokument Press's popular Graffiti Coloring Book series is packed with the world's most prominent graffiti styles.More than 60 pictures and writers from the whole world fill the pages.Color in fresh, wild and playful letters and fantasy-filled characters.A game of color and form for grown-ups and children alike, and a chance to learn form some of the world's best graffiti writers.

Six case studies, conducted in New York City, Trenton, and Jersey City, explore how graffiti murals are created and what role they play in cities where buffing illegal graffiti is a lucrative business. The author interviewed people affected on a daily basis by the murals at sites around the metropolitan area, including property owners who have welcomed the muralists in hopes that the artwork would serve as a deterrent to vandalism-and provide a more aesthetically pleasing alternative to buffing. This analysis, informed by cultural Marxism and supported by street photography, suggests a radical departure from traditional New York City policy: instead of spending money exclusively on the elimination of illegal graffiti, resources should also be devoted to the creation of graffiti murals. In the end, graffiti removal teams and mural promoters are pursuing the same goal: making the city a more visually appealing place.

An icon of 1980s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) first made his name under the graffiti tag "SAMO," before establishing his studio practice and catapulting to fast fame at the age of 20. Although his career lasted barely a decade, he remains a cult figure of artistic social commentary, and a trailblazer in the mediation of graffiti and gallery art. Basquiat's work drew upon diverse sources and media to create an original and urgent artistic vocabulary, biting with critique against structures of power and racism. His practice merged abstraction and figuration, poetry and painting, while his influences spanned Greek, Roman, and African art, French poetry, jazz,and the work of artistic contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly. The results are vivid, visceral mixtures of words, African emblems, cartoonish figures, daubs of bold color, and beyond. This book presents Basquiat's short but prolific career, his unique style, and his profound engagement with ever-relevant issues of integration and segregation, poverty and wealth. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

WATERSTONES BEST BOOKS OF 2022 - SPORT 'This book is a work of art about football's works of art... Loved it.' - Kevin Day, broadcaster 'A beautiful showcase of such a distinctive part of the game's culture... impossible not to get lost in the book' - Miguel Delaney, The Independent 'Gorgeous to behold... Unmissable' - Danny Kelly, TalkSPORT radio presenter 'I absolutely love this book' - Jules Breach, football presenter On high-rise buildings, street corners and stadium walls in countries around the world, eye-catching murals pay tribute to footballing greats. From Messi and Ronaldo to Rapinoe and Cruyff, these striking displays are remarkable testaments to the awe and affection fans feel for these football legends and cult heroes. Join renowned football writer and broadcaster Andy Brassell as he explores this fascinating phenomenon. Offering a fresh, highly visual perspective on the global game, Football Murals is the first book to celebrate these towering works of art. Beckenbauer and Cruyff, Rooney and Ronaldinho, Totti and Salah, Zlatan and Zidane - being honoured with a mural cements a player's place in a club's heritage and links them to the heart of the community. This richly illustrated book showcases the most impressive examples, explores their inspirational qualities and examines what they say about these icons and their sport. Written and curated by respected football writer Andy Brassell, this ground-breaking book features more than 100 murals from around the world, capturing the scale, grandeur and wit of this powerful and popular art form. Through a series of short essays and extended captions, Andy shares the players' stories, discusses the cultural politics and explains just why these men and women have been immortalised in mural form. Covering such diverse topics as Home Town Glory, Football Fame and The Cult of the Coach, Football Murals addresses the issues important to fans worldwide. It spans Marcus Rashford's inspirational mural in a Manchester suburb, the George Best tribute on the East Belfast estate where he was born, the 15-foot depiction of Megan Rapinoe in St Paul, Minnesota, and the Naples 'shrine' to Diego Maradona.

In the past three or four years, Detroit has become a spraycation spot for graffiti artists. Formerly known as the automotive capital of the world, the media now refers to the Motor City as a bankrupt ruin a shadow of its former self. Thanks to the city's street artists, however, Detroit is experiencing an artistic renaissance. The author has recorded the work produced by these graffiti writers and documented the evolution of Detroit street art culture in more than a dozen neighborhoods in and around this resilient Midwest city between 2008 and 2013. This photographic dossier is the first book to exclusively feature graffiti from Detroit, where one in every five structures is vacant, abandoned, or dilapidated. As industry disappears, the number of vacant walls increases, drawing the attention of the most talented graffiti artists and writers on the planet."

A guide to the art, artists, and culture of graffiti from the 1970s to today, as told by the taggers themselves This major co-publication with the Museum of Graffiti chronicles the worldwide graffiti movement from its birth in the 1970s, through the street and train painting of the 1980s, to its emergence as an artistic genre admired in museums and sold at auction. With hundreds of never-before-seen photographs of graffiti art from the 1970s to today, many of which have been provided exclusively for this volume by the artists themselves, the book gives an insider's view through multiple interviews with celebrated graffiti artists, including Roger Smith of Sane Smith, Hotboy Hert, DESA, Shirt King Phade, RIME, MadC, Saber, AURA, and others. Told through essays, hundreds of images, and interviews with the artists - both the underground outlaws and the writers who went mainstream - The Wide World of Graffiti will become the standard-bearer of the art form's history and life today, a unique contribution from the first and only museum dedicated to graffiti as an art form.

Graffiti and street art images are ubiquitous, and they enjoy a very special place in collective imaginary due to their ambiguous nature. Sometimes enigmatic in meaning, often stylistically crude and aesthetically aggressive, yet always visually arresting, they fill our field of vision with texts and images that no one can escape. As they take place on surfaces and travel through various channels, they provide viewers an entry point to the subtext of the cities we live in, while questioning how we read, write and represent them. This book is structured around these three distinct, albeit by definition interwoven, key frames. The contributors of this volume critically investigate underexplored urban contexts in which graffiti and street art appear, shed light on previously unexamined aspects of these practices, and introduce innovative methodologies regarding the treatment of these images. Throughout, the focus is on the relationship of graffiti and street art with urban space, and the various manifestations of these idiosyncratic meetings. In this book, the emphasis is shifted from what the physical texts say to what these practices and their produced images do in different contexts. All chapters are original and come from experts in various fields, such as Architecture, Urban Studies, Sociology, Criminology, Anthropology and Visual Cultures, as well as scholars that transcend traditional disciplinary frameworks. This exciting new collection is essential reading for advanced undergraduates as well as postgraduates and academics interested in the subject matter. It is also accessible to a non-academic audience, such as art practitioners and policymakers alike, or anyone keen on deepening their knowledge on how graffiti and street art affect the ways urban environments are experienced, understood and envisioned.

For most people the mention of graffiti conjures up notions of subversion, defacement, and underground culture. Yet, the term was coined by classical archaeologists excavating Pompeii in the 19th century and has been embraced by modern street culture: graffiti have been left on natural sites and public monuments for tens of thousands of years. They mark a position in time, a relation to space, and a territorial claim. They are also material displays of individual identity and social interaction. As an effective, socially accepted medium of self-definition, ancient graffiti may be compared to the modern use of social networks. This book shows that graffiti, a very ancient practice long hidden behind modern disapproval and street culture, have been integral to literacy and self-expression throughout history. Graffiti bear witness to social events and religious practices that are difficult to track in normative and official discourses. This book addresses graffiti practices, in cultures ranging from ancient China and Egypt through early modern Europe to modern Turkey, in illustrated short essays by specialists. It proposes a holistic approach to graffiti as a cultural practice that plays a key role in crucial aspects of human experience and how they can be understood.

This collection of original articles brings together for the first time the research on graffiti from a wide range of geographical and chronological contexts and shows how they are interpreted in various fields. Examples range as widely as medieval European cliff carvings to tags on New York subway cars to messages left in library bathrooms. In total, the authors legitimize the study of graffiti as a multidisciplinary pursuit that can produce useful knowledge of individuals, cultures, and nations. The chapters-represent 20 authors from six countries; -offer perspectives of disciplines as diverse as archaeology, history, art history, museum studies, and sociology;-elicit common themes of authority and its subversion, the identity work of subcultures and countercultures, and presentation of privilege and status.

A fascinating look at Keith Haring's New York City subway artwork from the 1980s Celebrated artist Keith Haring (1958-1990) has been embraced by popular culture for his signature bold graphic line drawings of figures and forms. Like other graffiti artists in the 1980s, Haring found an empty canvas in the advertising panels scattered throughout New York City's subway system, where he communicated his socially conscious, often humorous messages on platforms and train cars. Over a five-year period, in an epic conquest of civic space, Haring produced a massive body of subway artwork that remains daunting in its scale and its impact on the public consciousness. Dedicated to the individuals who might encounter them and to the moments of their creation, Haring's drawings now exist solely in the form of documentary photographs and legend. Because they were not meant to be permanent-only briefly inhabiting blacked-out advertising boards before being covered up by ads or torn down by authorities or admirers-what little remains of this project is uniquely fugitive. Keith Haring: 31 Subway Drawings reproduces archival materials relating to this magnificent project alongside essays by leading Haring experts. Distributed for No More Rulers

New York graffiti writers who cut their teeth painting trains in the '70s and '80s transfer Old Skool street art to a more permanent, collectible medium in this book, using transit maps, instead of subway cars, as canvases. GHOST, T-KID, QUIK, REVOLT, BLADE, SHAME125, COPE2, SKEME, and others decorated ordinary 23" x 32" MTA maps with their personal tags and graphics-echoing the heyday of New York train graffiti. Sixteen sections, one for each writer, feature a total of more than 100 maps, as well as brief statements about the painters' artistic evolution and style. Like a dynamic "piece book," or sketchbook, this collection is an exclusive sampling of the painters' signature strokes and tags in portable form. In fact, many of the artists featured here have used subway-map art as a springboard from the fleeting genre of train-tagging to the sturdier platform of the international art gallery circuit.

Artistry with spray paint goes much deeper than what some would write off as vandalism. Modern spray paint artists use the medium in a myriad of inventive ways, see them in The Art of Spray Paint. With roots in graffiti and utilitarian projects, spray paint has come to the forefront of the art world, seen both on the streets and in museums across the globe. The Art of Spray Paint investigates the diverse artists who are thriving with the medium, from the evolution of graffiti by John "CRASH" Matos, to the photo-realistic stencils of Logan Hicks, or the precise lines and can control of Tristan Eaton. Zimmer provides a window into the world of 20 leading artists working with spray paint in diverse ways including graffiti, urban art, stencil, portraiture, crisp graphic work and mixed media. You'll also discover DIY projects and tricks of the trade, as well as a focus on the artist's role in society, the rise of mural festivals and its effects, and each artists' background and attraction to spray paint as a medium. Contributors include: CRASH, PichiAvo, BR163, Logan Hicks, Joe Iurato, Nick Walker, Caroline Caldwell, Casey Gray, Tristan Eaton, Matt Eaton, Hueman, Elle, Tatiana Suarez, Conor Harrington, Remi Rough, Will Hutnick, Rubin415, Rebecca Paul, Zac Braun, Ian Kuali'i, Ele Pack, and Dana Oldfather

The Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art integrates and reviews current scholarship in the field of graffiti and street art. Thirty-seven original contributions are organized around four sections: History, Types, and Writers/Artists of Graffiti and Street Art; Theoretical Explanations of Graffiti and Street Art/Causes of Graffiti and Street Art; Regional/Municipal Variations/Differences of Graffiti and Street Art; and, Effects of Graffiti and Street Art. Chapters are written by experts from different countries throughout the world and their expertise spans the fields of American Studies, Art Theory, Criminology, Criminal justice, Ethnography, Photography, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, and Visual Communication. The Handbook will be of interest to researchers, instructors, advanced students, libraries, and art gallery and museum curators. This book is also accessible to practitioners and policy makers in the fields of criminal justice, law enforcement, art history, museum studies, tourism studies, and urban studies as well as members of the news media. The Handbook includes 70 images, a glossary, a chronology, and the electronic edition will be widely hyperlinked.

This is a nostalgic, visual account of the best time and place to be a graffiti writer. In the 1980s, brothers Kenny, a.k.a. KEY, and Paul, a.k.a. CAVS, immersed themselves in the graffiti scene in the Boogie Down Bronx, dutifully photographing hundreds of pieces on now-discontinued MTA subway cars and capturing their proud comrades before, during, and after the act. Bombing White Elephants with their pilot markers and documenting them with their cameras, which they always carried, they were on the ride of their livesuntil 1989, when the last painted train was removed from service. Tags by names like QUIK, IZTHEWIZ, and many others appear here in color exposures, and dozens of artists share stories and drop knowledge with no filter. A foreword by graffiti historian Henry Chalfant, coproducer of Style Warsthe seminal documentary on New York graffiti and hip-hop culturekicks things off.