Definitely worth a visit for any graffiti fans. Matt Coneybeare writes that The 191st Street Station in Washington Heights is home to one of the most colorful, graffiti and street-art filled tunnels in New York City. Used as a passageway to get from Broadway and 190th to the station, the tunnel extends over 1000 feet under the hills of Washington Heights. Take a walk through the tunnel in this immersive video from local YouTuber ActionKid, though we disagree with his labeling of the tunnel as creepy.
A walkthrough of the 191st Street Station in Washington Heights, Manhattan on the (1) Train. It features a very creepy subway passageway, dirty tracks and platforms, and an elevator. It is also the deepest subway station in the system.
Can we create beautifully designed manhole covers? It's already bring done as described in a fascinating article by Allan Richarzof AtlasObscura
In Japan’s glittering cities, all hustle and light, they can be easy to miss. With all that sensory assault, who thinks to look down and take notice of something as mundane as a manhole cover? But these are no ordinary bits of civic infrastructure. In Japan, many manhole covers are works of urban art—elaborate, curious, distinctive, even colorful. They have become a tourist destination unto themselves, and attract a legion of dedicated manhole enthusiasts who travel the country to visit some of the thousands of unique designs.
Japan’s decorated manhole covers—broadly encompassing storm drain, domestic water supply, electrical and other utility access covers—initially took shape as a public relations campaign for sewers. Beginning in the 1950s, the cast plates featured simple geometric patterns, such as the “Tokyo” and “Nagoya” designs. Japanese civil servant Yasutake Kameda conceived of the intricate, artistic versions in 1985, to help warm a skeptical rural population to the idea of the costly but necessary modernization of the country’s sewer system. From these humble, practical beginnings, manhole covers have become a cultural phenomenon.
That’s 80 pounds of Hello Kitty in Tama City. BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images
Typically, “local manholes” or “design manholes” feature elements special to a particular location: a town emblem, landmark, event, or official bird or flower. For instance, Takasaki, 60 miles northwest of Tokyo in mountainous Gunma Prefecture, has manhole covers that commemorate the city’s popular summer fireworks festival. Local mascots (known as yurukyara, such as Fukaya City’s adorable rabbit-deer Fukkachan) and cartoon characters also appear. In Tokyo’s Tama ward, home of the Sanrio Puroland amusement park, one can find covers featuring the ever-popular Hello Kitty. Local sports franchises are also represented near the teams’ home arenas and stadiums—such as the well-known colorful depiction of the logo of the Hiroshima Carp baseball team.
While there is some logic to the placement of the covers, particularly those graced with color—usually near a landmark, theme park, or stadium—others appear to have been placed without rhyme or reason. Indeed, it is not unusual to walk down an otherwise unremarkable side street and spot a special one underfoot.
The ornate manhole covers are initially carved from aluminum, which is used to make sand molds for casting. The majority of the designs are selected by local municipalities, in conjunction with manufacturers. In most cases, the design is just imprinted in the cover, but in some cases the covers get another touch—colored resins flooded into voids like enamel on jewelry.
Today an estimated 95 percent of Japan’s 1,718 municipalities, across all 47 prefectures, now host their own unique covers. In Osaka, approximately 10 percent of the city’s 180,000 manhole covers feature ornate designs, of which roughly 1,900 get the color treatment. Typically, a designed manhole cover, which weighs more than 80 pounds, excluding the frame, costs approximately $585—a five percent premium over the cost of a plain cover. The color, however, is applied carefully by hand, and nearly doubles the price of a manhole to more than $900.
Such is the popularity of these little urban treasures that they have a devout, organized following. There is the industry-led Japan Ground Manhole Association, and the fan-based Japanese Society of Manhole Covers, whose website features thousands of photographs submitted by users across Japan, who have snapped everything from large sewer covers to tiny local utility access panels.
There are some 12,000 different manhole cover designs in Japan, including this one in Kawaguchi. BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images
“Manholers,” as they’re known, may travel to distant areas of the country just to photograph covers or collect pencil rubbings known as takuhon. Trading cards featuring manhole designs are also popular collectors’ items, and can command steep prices in online auctions.
One prominent fan is Kei Takebuchi, a popular Tokyo-based singer-songwriter. Takebuchi traces her fascination with them to the covers of Nagoya, which feature a charming cartoon water strider insect, while she was on tour in 2015. Since then, she has regularly tweeted photos of manhole covers to her nearly 200,000 followers on social media. “Every manhole cover design has [a meaning] … it tells me that we can create art with almost anything,” she says, in an interview for this story.
Like many places, Japan is full of people with unusual hobbies or obsessions, but love for the country’s manhole covers has gone mainstream: a “manhole festival” was held near a major train station in Tokyo last month, featuring trading cards, baked goods, and replica covers from around the country. Retailer Tokyu Hands ran an extended campaign at its central Shinjuku location, with a range of manhole cover–related goods for sale.
Singer Kei Takebuchi spent hours in Kawagoe City to capture this photograph of a manhole cover depicting a historic bell tower. Kei Takebuchi
The affinity for manhole covers also seems to tap in to Japan’s fondness for hobbies that involve lots of domestic travel. Stamp rallies—featuring rubber stamps at train stations and other landmarks—encourage hobbyists to travel to overlooked or lesser-visited locales to add one more stamp to their collections. “Rail-fans” similarly scour the country to document or experience a rare train carriage, an unusual station melody, or other rail-related minutia.
It is the same for manholers, with the occasionally far-flung or seemingly random placement of coveted covers—and directions of varying accuracy—adding to the sense of a scavenger hunt. Indeed, Takebuchi recounts once spending three hours on a bitterly cold day in Kawagoe City in Saitama Prefecture to snap a photo of a particular manhole cover, beautifully designed with an images of Toki no Kane, a historic bell tower. Similar stories are common currency in manholing circles.
Easy to overlook, but curious and rewarding, Japan’s unique manhole covers are a charming reminder that the mundane can be exciting, and that you should never forget to look down.
As reported in Hyperallergic: After buying it at auction, the American street artist says he will paint the Banksy mural white as a protest against the buying and selling of street art.
American street artist Ron English has announced his plans to stage a modern take on Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning Drawing“ by expunging a famous Banksy mural from existence. English says the controversial decision represents a protest against the art market’s continued monetization of street art.
“We’re tired of people stealing our stuff off the streets and reselling it so I’m just going to buy everything I can get my hands on and whitewash it,” English told the United Kingdom’s Press Association, adding, “I’m going to paint over it and just include it in one of the walls in my house.”
Like Banksy, English is known for the strong political messages of his street art, which explores brand imagery and advertising. The artist has been arrested multiple times, preferring to use public spaces and billboards as his canvas.
The artist’s announcement comes roughly a month after Banksy attempted to destroy one of his own paintings, detonating a hidden shredding mechanism on “Girl with a Balloon” (2006) immediately after it sold for $1.3 million at a Sotheby’s auction.
English’s target is Banksy’s “Slave Labour (Bunting Boy)” (2012), which he recently acquired for $730,000 at Juliens Auctions in Los Angeles. The work depicts a young child crouched over a sewing machine as he produces Union Jack bunting. It was a protest against the controversial use of sweatshops to manufacture memorabilia for the Diamond Jubilee and London Olympics in 2012. And while “Slave Labour” was first painted on the outside wall of a bargain shop in north London, it was mysteriously removed months later before resurfacing at an auction in Miami in February 2013. It was subsequently removed from auction after considerable appeals by residents of its hometown London suburb, Wood Green. Regardless, the mural was eventually sold at auction in the UK, fetching a price of $1.2 million at Bankrobber London.
“The painting was created as a piece of social commentary. It was transformed into a commodity without regards to the original message,” English told Hyperallergic. “I knew that if I bought the painting it would shine new light on the art and the image hopefully putting the issue of child labor back into the public dialog. If I whitewash it, the piece becomes the new ‘Erased de Kooning’ by Rauschenberg. And it gains hype and status as a commodity in the art world, which would allow me to resell it at a profit and use the profits for children’s charities, furthering the original intent.”
Throughout his career, Banksy has tried to dissuade people from capitalizing on his art. In 2008, after revealing that a large body of work attributed to him was in fact fake, he pleaded with his fans: “Graffiti art has a hard enough life as it is — with council workers wanting to remove it and kids wanting to draw mustaches on it, before you add hedgefund managers wanting to chop it out and hang it over the fireplace.”
According to the Press Association, English mentioned that his purchase and eventual destruction of the mural was “for my good pal Banksy.” However, the artist does plan to eventually sell the piece for a million dollars. “I’m crazy but I’m not stupid,” he added in a comment to the publication.
The artist’s decision to cash-in on “damaged” art is well-informed. The buyer of Banksy’s self-destructed painting ultimately decided to keep it as her “own piece of art history.” After all, some critics estimate that the destroyed artwork is now worth double its original estimate.
Atlas Obscura has found a great example of mosaics in Mexico City.
Originally opened in 1956, the library building is most evidently the work of artist Juan O’Gorman. Though the building’s architecture is blocky, windowless, and monolithic, the artist created colorful designs that cover the entire surface of all four sides. The designs were inspired by a quartet of historical epochs, with the north wall representing the pre-Hispanic period; the south wall, the colonial period; the east wall, the modern era; and the west wall, the university’s history.
The colorful decorations turn what could have been an imposing institutional block into a vibrant attraction that’s both a piece of history and a piece of art. And again, thanks to a little block jutting up from the roof like a handle, combined with the circular depictions of the Ptolemaic and Copernican visions of the universe, it really looks like a massive boombox built by an ancient civilization.
And the decorations get even more incredible up close, as they aren’t simply painted onto the walls, but composed of designs illustrated with a variety of types of local stone, each chosen for its natural color. Amazingly, all of the reds, greens, blues, yellows, and other colors are created with naturally colored stones from across Mexico. O’Gorman chose this method because as opposed to paint and other mediums, the stones wouldn’t fade.
The UNAM Central Library is an incredible building that manages to encapsulate the country’s rich history with a kind of symbolic visual poetry, writ large. It almost has to be seen to be believed. But seriously, you guys see how it looks like a boombox, right?
Last week, a mural Keith Haring painted in Amsterdam in 1986 was re-exposed to the public after being covered up by insulation panels for 29 years.
Haring traveled to Amsterdam in 1986 for a solo show at the Stedelijk Museum. In addition to creating a large-scale and riotously colorful canvas inside the museum (which it recently restored and reinstalled), he asked if he could make a public work. The museum offered the exterior wall of its art storage facility, and Haring set to work, completing the 40-foot-tall mural in a single, chilly day in March 1986.
Keith Haring working on his Amsterdam mural in 1986 (photo by Patricia Steur, courtesy the Stedelijk Museum)
The mural, rendered in white paint that pops against the red brick wall, depicts an enormous fish-dog hybrid figure with a more characteristic Haring figure riding on its back. The mural is signed “XXX KH86” in its lower-right-hand corner. Three years later, the Stedelijk moved out of the city-owned building, which became a cold storage facility, and aluminum insulation siding was added to its exterior, completely concealing Haring’s mural.
Following the restoration of the Stedelijk’s large canvas and a campaign by the Dutch street artist Aileen “Mick La Rock” Middel, the museum, the Keith Haring Foundation, and street art dealer Olivier Varossieau organized the removal of the panels. The virtually unscathed mural was uncovered on June 18.
Keith Haring’s recently uncovered Amsterdam mural (photo by Hanna Hachula, courtesy the Stedelijk Museum)
“The mural was under cladding for [29] years and it was a very large undertaking requiring a great deal of lobbying and red tape from many people to get the cladding to come off so that the very beginning phase of understanding what conservation work might be best appropriate considering its current conditions could get started,” a spokesperson for the Haring Foundation told Hyperallergic. “No timeline currently exists for its conservation and the development of the ‘Market Quarter’ will take many many more years to be completed.”
According to the New York Times, the team of Will Shank and Antonio Rava — who previously restored large-scale Haring murals in Paris and Pisa — will work on restoring the Amsterdam mural.
Keith Haring working on his Amsterdam mural in 1986 (photo by Patricia Steur, courtesy the Stedelijk Museum)De Hallen AmsterdamKeith Haring’s recently uncovered Amsterdam mural (photo by Hanna Hachula, courtesy the Stedelijk Museum)
This week in art news: a federal judge upheld his prior ruling in favor of the 5Pointz artists.
Judge Frederic Block rejected a post-trial motion by property developer Jerry Wolkoff to dismiss his prior court ruling compensating the artists of 5Pointz for the whitewashing of their artwork in October 2014. In his ruling last February, the federal judge ordered that the artists be paid $6.75 million in damages.
Congratulations #5Pointz artists and #meresone !!!!!
Some folks want to build walls – street artists long to paint them.And this weekend, June 9th and 10th, they’re going to do just that, as some of the world’s most brilliant street artists team up to paint one epic public mural in downtown Los Angeles.
Hand-picked by the maestro of words known as @wrdsmth – whose typewriter-styled words of wisdom have dotted many an urban surface all over the world – the roster of artists includes the likes of searing abstract expressionist @imalexinc, “Courage Has No Gender” founder @MegZany, and PADHiA, whose stark portraits under her @unfukyourselfmoniker probe the unexplored terrain of the human psyche. San Francisco-based street artist @Fnnch, whose “Honeybear” art can be found all over his city, has also been recruited, as well as the kinetic aerosol scribbler known as Jazz Guetta.
With their creativity combined, this amazing assemblage of muralists are set to transform a 20-foot high, 168-foot wide wall in L.A.’s Arts District into the city’s newest art installation.
We can’t WAIT to see what they come up with – and we want you to see it too, which is why we’re covering both days of this monumental event on our Facebook feed.
We’re doing this because, for one, it’s going to be incredibly cool! And, we believe in the power of street art to impact communities ALL OVER THE WORLD in profound ways.
Art, when untethered from the confines of a gallery or a private collection, has the ability to add spontaneity to our lives. When encountered on the streets near where we work or live, it shakes us from the humdrum routine of daily existence, its impact magnified by the element of surprise.
Building walls is an act of division – of keeping people out. Painting walls unites us.
People from all walks of life will gather this weekend to see what these street artists are up to. They will watch them at work and we hope they will be stirred. Perhaps they will be moved to create their own works of art!
And when the artists are finished painting, their massive mural will live on and continue to inspire people.
A funny thing can happen when you paint a wall – it can turn into something else. It’s as though its inherent function as an object of separation disappears under layers of pigment and color. Instead of keeping people apart, it brings them together – creatives and fans alike.
We hope you will join us, too, for this #StreetCreative event in L.A.’s Arts District. The artists get going at 9:00 AM on Saturday morning, June 9. Catch updates on the CreativeFutureFacebook page!
“You will come to an evil end if you rob this grave” and “My beloved was here” ranked among the most popular messages for graffiti writers in ancient Jewish communities.
Starting some 3,000 years ago, Jews scratched walls at homes and public spaces with prayers, warnings, blessings on deceased relatives, and store advertisements. They even used graffiti to mark rows of theater seats that were reserved for Jewish groups. In the margins of the texts, they sketched outlines of ships, people, menorahs, and synagogue columns.
Carving the letters and images “required time, diligence, steadfastness, and a degree of pain tolerance,” Karen B. Stern, an assistant professor at Brooklyn College, observes in her new book, Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity. As the graffiti artists hammered away at doorways, pillars or cliffs, she writes, “powders and fragments would cover one’s face and fill one’s lungs with dust; hardened dirt, rock, and plaster could push back and split fingernails; and carving implements, including metal nails, blades, and stones, surely drew blood when the lighting faded or surfaces grew unwieldy.”
A seat inscription for the place of the elder Jews from the Bouleterion/Odeon of Aphrodisias, Turkey. CC/King’s College London
She has documented graffiti written by Jews, dating back as early as the 8th century B.C., at archaeological sites from modern-day Croatia to the Persian Gulf. Clusters survive at the Dura-Europos synagogue in eastern Syria, El‐Kanaïs in Egypt along the Nile near Aswan, the Beit Shearim necropolis in northern Israel and the Aphrodisias ruins in western Turkey. They come in a babel of languages, including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Lihyanite, and Nabataean. Some people who carved the walls were clearly uneducated, while others used neat handwriting that indicates elite upbringings. Interspersed are markings from non-Jewish neighbors: pagan sayings, Byzantine crosses, and praise for Allah.
A skeleton hovering over a grave in Catacomb 1, Beit Shearim, Israel. Ezra Gabbay
Dr. Stern notes that for countries that have been torn apart by religious strife, and places where hardly any Jews live anymore, the graffiti now serves as evidence of past centuries of peaceable coexistence. Privileged and ordinary people of many faiths all had the same habit of emblazoning their names, interests and accomplishments on the walls. Decoding the inscriptions, Dr. Stern says, sheds light on those who left few other traces on the sands of time: “It’s about paying attention to voices that have otherwise been drowned out.”
Jo Atherton’s tapestries can’t be ignored. They’re filled with texture, movement, and color. When placed on the blank walls of galleries, they’re like fishing lures for the eye: visitors will spot them from across the room and hone on in.
“Often, people are drawn to them,” says Atherton. “They don’t quite know what they’re looking at … It’s only when they get up close that they have that shock moment of, ‘Oh my God, it’s rubbish!’”
This is not a judgement. Atherton, a freelance artist based in Bedfordshire, England, literally makes art from garbage. Some of it is old garbage—pieces of pottery and glass from ancient Rome, lent gravitas by the passage of time. Some of it is slightly more recent, like the nests of rope, fishing net, and colorful plastic doo-dads that make up those sneaky tapestries, which she calls “Flotsam Weaving.” She finds all of her materials herself, in the depths of the Thames and along the low-tide lines on Cornwall’s beaches.
Atherton prefers to beachcomb in Cornwall, on the U.K.’s southwest coast. “A lot of material washes up in the winter because of the Gulf Stream,” she says, and she and other seekers pick up stuff from all corners of the Atlantic: the West Indies; the Eastern seaboard; Nova Scotia. Atherton describes the tideline as “a story,” and scavenging along it as “an act of reading.”
A detail from a flotsam weaving, featuring a bubble wand and a rooster-shaped bike reflector that once came free in boxes of Kellogg’s Cereal. Courtesy Jo Atherton
Often, she must imagine the characters that populate the resulting tales: What kid played with this plastic soldier? Who disobeyed their parents and released this now-popped balloon? But sometimes, the real ones make themselves known—as when she found a fisherman’s tag that had floated to Cornwall after detaching from a lobster buoy in Maine. “I thought, ‘I’ll type his name into Facebook and see if I can find him,’” she says. “And sure enough, I could.” Later, they talked on the phone, and realized they share a birth year, 1979.
Experiences like this inspired her Flotsam Weaving series, which she says is about “the threads of stories … [and] the similarity between text and textile.” More recently, she has been exploring other media, including printing and cyanotype. For these works, she arranges tiny bits of plastic in repeating, often circular patterns. Silhouetted and abstracted by ink or photochemicals, they look like plankton viewed through a microscope. “Prehistoric plankton settled onto the ocean floor and slowly turned into oil,” she says. “That’s now what we’re making our plastic from … the prints are a way of getting people thinking about these deep-time connections.”
A friend just sent me some great photos of street art in Hawaii. This is part of an annual street art festival Pow Wow.
POW! – It’s the impact that art has on a person.
WOW! – It’s reaction that art has on a viewer.
Together they form POW WOW, which is a Native American term that describes a gathering that celebrates culture, music and art.
Centered around a week-long event in Hawaii, POW! WOW! has grown into a global network of artists and organizes gallery shows, lecture series, schools for art and music, mural projects, a large creative space named Lana Lane Studios, concerts, and live art installations across the globe. The central event takes place during Valentine’s Day week in February in the Kaka’ako district of Honolulu, and brings over a hundred international and local artist together to create murals and other forms of art. The festival is expanding to cities and countries such as Taiwan, Long Beach, Israel, Singapore, Jamaica, Washington D.C., Guam, New Zealand, Germany and more.
Who would have thought that such a mainstream tourist destination would have such wonderful murals and a full-on street art festival?
In Japan’s glittering cities, all 
I like his style!
. As the graffiti artists hammered away at doorways, pillars or cliffs, she writes, “powders and fragments would cover one’s face and fill one’s lungs with dust; hardened dirt, rock, and plaster could push back and split fingernails; and carving implements, including metal nails, blades, and stones, surely drew blood when the lighting faded or surfaces grew unwieldy.”
