Richard Hambleton (1954 2017) was a Canadian artist known for his pioneering street art. He was a surviving member of a group that emerged from the New York City art scene during the booming art market of the 1980s, which also included his close friends Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. As a conceptual artist, Hambleton s early work instal-lations titled Image Mass Murder from 1976 1979 were secretly placed onto streets in over 15 cities, depicting chalk-body outlines and blood-splattered crime scenes of what appeared to be victims. This theme of a prevailing violence, fear, and morbid curiosity elicited surprise and anxiety from its unsuspecting viewers. In the early 1980s, Hambleton created his most iconic Shadow Man works artfully splattered ominous shadowy figures on unexpected street corners, walls, and alleys that startled viewers into a visceral awareness that the city was still a dangerous place. This book features over 200 images including his early Shadow Man canvas paintings, as well as photographs of his in situ street work, a selection of his Marlboro rodeo horse silhouettes, and his Beautiful Paintings series of landscapes and seascapes, alongside other works on paper; behind-the-scenes studio shots; personal, unseen photographs of the artist; and inspirational imagery. Hambleton was renowned for influencing artists such as Banksy, Blek le Rat, and Shepard Fairey. This arresting, one-of-a-kind book will appeal to those interested in visual arts, street art, graffiti, and art history.

This volume takes on the challenge of representing a sound installation by the Swiss artist Daniele Buetti, commissioned by the Schirn Museum in Frankfurt, which transfers color theory, meditation, and hypnosis into an artistic context. It's All in the Mind is built around a twenty-five-minute audio performance that takes the audience through the techniques of hypnosis. In the work, Buetti uses techniques that rely on "color purification," conjuring up different colors and their varying psychological effects. Interviews with specialists in hypnosis and in Buetti's work complement the illustrations and help explain and interpret the work.

In The City as Subject, Carolyn S. Loeb examines distinctive bodies of public art in Berlin: legal and illegal murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, post-reunification public sculptures, and images and sites from the street art scene. Her careful analyses show how these developed new architectural and spatial vocabularies that drew on the city’s infrastructure and daily urban experience. These works challenged mainstream urban development practices and engaged with citizen activism and with a wider civic discourse about what a city can be. Loeb extends this urban focus to her examination of the extensive outdoor installation of the Berlin Wall Memorial and its mandate to represent the history of the city’s division. She studies its surrounding neighborhoods to show that, while the Memorial adopts many of the urban-oriented vocabularies established by the earlier works of public art she examines, it truncates the story of urban division, which stretches beyond the Wall’s existence. Loeb suggests that, by embracing more multi-vocal perspectives, the Memorial could encourage the kind of participatory and heterogeneous construction of the city championed by the earlier works of public art.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, young people in New York City radically altered the tradition of writing their initials on neighborhood walls. Influenced by the widespread use of famous names on billboards, in neon, in magazines, newspapers, and typographies from advertising and comics, city youth created a new form of expression built around elaborately designed names and initials displayed on public walls, vehicles, and subways. Critics called it "graffiti," but to the practitioners it was "writing."

"Taking the Train" traces the history of "writing" in New York City against the backdrop of the struggle that developed between the city and the writers. Austin tracks the ways in which "writing" -- a small, seemingly insignificant act of youthful rebellion -- assumed crisis-level importance inside the bureaucracy and the public relations of New York City mayoral administrations and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for almost two decades. "Taking the Train" reveals why a global city short on funds made "wiping out graffiti" an expensive priority while other needs went unfunded. Although the city eventually took back the trains, Austin eloquently shows how and why the culture of "writing" survived to become an international art movement and a vital part of hip-hop culture.