Graffiti Love Letter: An Ode to the City

The world’s most beautiful urban commute, or what fifty buildings have to do with a creative homecoming.

Here’s a factoid: Back in the day, Brain Pickings took its first steps in West Philadelphia — a beautiful and sadly underappreciated city with a vibrant creative culture. Among Philly’s gems is its rich street art scene, from the iconic mosaic murals to its mysterious Toynbee tiles. Last year, we raved about another pinnacle of Philly’s street art genius — A Love Letter for You, the work of street artist Steve Powers, a.k.a. ESPO. It’s a beautiful ongoing graffiti love letter stretching across 50 building facades over 20 blocks along the Market-Frankfurt subway line in West Philly.

Powers first started painting on these rooftops as a teenager in 1984. Exactly 25 years later, he returned to Philadelphia to write a love letter across them, meant for one but relevant and inspiring to all. With its candid poeticism and superb typographic design, the letter reads as much like an intimate confession as it does like an ode to the city.

Listening to Powers speak about the project makes its mission come to life even more powerfully, as a piece of postmodern poetry that both feeds off of and replenishes the city’s urban romanticism.

It’s meant to be a reflection of the community. It’s meant to be a reflection of one person’s love for another person in the community, but at the same time it’s meant to live beyond these distinctions and just be something for everyone, no matter where they’re at. You don’t need to know where Farson Street is, or where Conestoga Street is in relation to Market Street. What you need to know is love exists here, love exists in yourself. The city is a giving, nurturing place if you let it give to you and nurture you.

The eponymous book about the project comes out on April 30, but it’s available for pre-order today.

Powers appears in the street art documentary Beautiful Losers, which we featured last year, and is speaking at the PSFK Conference in New York this Friday. We’ll be there — will you?

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The Corners Project

Bankers, b-boys, and why diversity and solidarity are not NYC’s strangest bedfellows.

New York City. Was there ever a more diverse, colorful and eclectic hub of humanity? Fascinated by the incredible hearth of culture that is NYC, strategic planner and hobbyist photographer Friko Starc set out to document it at its rawest, most candid form. For three years, he took portraits of strangers and passers-by at five Manhattan corners in what became The Corners Project, an inspired cross-section of New York’s living matter.

The five corners where the candid, spontaneous portraits were taken — Clinton & Rivington, Chrystie & Grand, Wall & Broad, Lex & 116th, 19th & 8th — stretch all across the island, from Chinatown to Wall Street, Lower East Side to Chelsea to Spanish Harlem.

From hipsters to homeboys, executives to entertainers, the project spans the entire social spectrum, with all its vibrant richness and charming quirk. Often presented in pairs, the portraits bespeak a unique blend of diversity and solidarity, the unmistakable we’re-in-this-together-ness of New York.

Last September, All Day Buffet awarded The Corners Project as one of the 100 best New-York-centric creative initiatives. And we tend to agree.

The project is part Ari Versluis’ fascinating Exactitudes, part Jason Polan’s wonderful illustrated Every Person in New York, with its own gritter, more unfiltered take on the ambitious goal of cataloging NYC’s incredible diversity and energy.

Explore The Corners Project and find it on Facebook, then go stake out a street corner of your own and marvel at the living runway of urbanity.

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Dan Witz’s Dark Doings

What hookers and tigers have to do with reclaiming your awareness.

Brooklyn-based artist Dan Witz has been one of the defining forces in contemporary street art.

It was Dan Witz who, back in 2003, first showed us how powerful street art could be. Each summer Dan’s projects take street art to new levels by adding elements of “surprise and delight” into the city landscape. For us, Dan Witz is the consummate street artist. He’s provocative. He’s dedicated. And most of all — he has absolutely wicked skills.” ~ Marc and Sara Schiller, Wooster Collective

Witz spent this past summer working on his latest project, Dark Doings, which opens as a solo exhibition tonight at the Carmichael Gallery of Contemporary Art in LA.

Inspired by a recent visit to the Red Light District of Amsterdam, Dark Doings explores the tragic obliviousness we’ve developed to our surroundings through subtle, haunting images of human and animal faces trapped behind dirty glass windows.

I’m trying to exploit our collective tendency towards sleepwalking by inserting outrageous things right out there in plain view that are also practically invisible. My goal is to make obvious in your face art that ninety-nine percent of the people who walk by won’t notice. Eventually when they stumble upon one or find out about it I’m hoping they’ll start wondering what else they’ve been missing.”

The project embodies the true purpose and power of street art — to challenge, to compel, to jolt us out of our self-constructed comfort zones and stagnant defaults. Dark Doings is a remarkable reminder of, to quote the theme from TEDGlobal, the substance of things not seen.

See more of the installations from the series, and remember to look a little closer — in the street, and in life at large.

Editor’s Note: On a related note, I’ve explored the importance of mystery in street art in my first article for the wonderful GOOD Magazine, investigating the greatest guerrilla art mystery never solved.

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