7 Essential Books on Street Art

What Japan’s manhole covers have to do with Brazil’s favelas and the timeless tradition of Arabic calligraphy.

Street art is a frequent fascination around here. Today, we turn to seven stunning, intelligent books that examine street art from a variety of angles, from the artistic to the sociocultural to the political and beyond, to glean holistic understanding of the ubiquitous, important but often misunderstood medium for public dialogue and civic self-expression.

TRESPASS

WoosterCollective is among the most authoritative blogs on street art. Last fall, its founders, Marc and Sara Schiller, poured years’ worth of expertise and insight into Trespass: A History Of Uncommissioned Urban Art — a gorgeous and thoughtful anthology that covers everything from Guatemalan guerrilla gardeners to icons like Banksy and Barry McGee that’s as much an exhaustive compendium of compelling artwork as it is a modern manifesto for activism, democracy and freedom of speech. And since the lavish 320-page volume comes from Taschen, easily the most visually ambitious publisher today, it’s an absolute treat for the eye.

What makes Trespass different from other street art books is that it’s not a street art book. It’s a book that certainly includes street art and graffiti but goes beyond that to also address performance, protest, sculpture, and the whole goal of the book was to really look at the context of street art in a much larger historical perspective.” ~ Marc Schiller

Originally reviewed, with video, here.

STREET SKETCHBOOK

One of street art’s most characteristic features is that it’s so fundamentally public and in-your-face. But what goes into the private creative process of a street artist? That’s exactly what Tristan Manco examines in Street Sketchbook: Journeys, the follow-up to his 2007 Street Sketchbook: Inside the Journals of International Street and Graffiti Artists — a rare peek inside the sketchbooks of 26 of the world’s hottest new artists, and one of our 5 voyeuristic peeks inside the notebooks of cross-disciplinary creators.

Originally reviewed, with more images, here.

ARABIC GRAFFITI

It’s no secret that the the majority of street art coverage in the media, from blogs to books to films, has a severe geographic bias, with a tendency to focus on Western lettering and imagery. Arabic Graffiti is a breath of fresh Eastern air in the global dialogue on street art. The ambitious anthology by Berlin street culture tastemaker Don Karl and Lebanese typographer Pascal Zoghbi explores the use of Arabic script in urban context, curating graffiti artists and typographers from the Middle East and around the world who incorporate Arabic calligraphy styles in their artwork — a beautiful intersection of tradition and contemporary creativity.

Part cultural anthropology, part study in creative ingenuity, Arabic Graffiti is also a timely and needed cross-cultural bridge of visual communication in the context of today’s global political climate. (For more on the subject, see the fantastic Cultural Connectives.)

Originally reviewed, with more images, here.

STREET WORLD

What makes street art so fascinating is that it isn’t an isolated discipline — rather, it’s the confluence of a myriad cultural phenomena, offers commentary on countless social issues, and borrows inspiration from a multitude of other creative domains. In Street World: Urban Art and Culture from Five Continents (which you might recall from this old piece on Beautiful Losers, the excellent documentary about contemporary street art culture), Roger Gastman, Caleb Neelon and Anthony Smyrski examine street art culture from a holistic standpoint, as it relates to other forms of urban expression — skateboarding, bike messengering, DJing, fashion, gang politics, music, design, photography — and explore how the advent of the Internet has fostered a new global street culture in less than a generation. From New York’s back-alleys to Brazil’s mega-cities to South Africa’s townships, the hefty tome is divided into more than 50 topics, each illustrated with dozens of photographs.

STREET KNOWLEDGE

Today, street art is so ubiquitous it’s easy to forget it’s a fairly nascent form of urban dialogue. But where did it begin and how did it make its way around the world? That’s exactly what King Adz explores in Street Knowledge — a fascinating encyclopedia and insider’s guide to street art culture around the world, tracing the evolution of the movement from its groundbreaking days in 1980’s New York to the bleeding-edge work of modern-day Middle Eastern artists. From old-school graffiti legends to modern street art icons, including film-makers, designers, DJ’s, writers and poets, the book reveals the deep and lateral propagation of street art across just about every aspect of contemporary culture.

From interviews with some of world’s most influential street art talent, including Banksy, Quik, Shepard Fairey and the Obey crew, Martha Cooper, David LaChapelle and Tony Kaye, to profiles of up-and-comers from across the globe, Street Knowledge also places the featured street art in the context of the cities where it appears, doubling as an underground guide to the hottest art, culture, music, fashion, dining and film spots in some of the world’s most exciting cities.

Originally reviewed last year.

URBAN IRAN

In 2008, our friends at Mark Batty released the excellent Urban Iran — a gripping, visually stunning anthology by photographers Karan Rashid and Sina Araghi exploring the rich spectrum of street art across Iran’s cities and countryside.

Alongside the lavish visual spreads are illuminating essays that examine the artwork in a sociopolitical context, bridging this faceted visual landscape with the cultural undercurrents that power it.

What makes the project particularly intriguing is that it came mere months before the 2009 Iranian uprisings, but the content and context of the street art themes featured in the book — censorship, rebellion, political disillusionment, a yearning for justice and democracy — presage what was to come.

Originally reviewed, with more images, here.

DRAINSPOTTING

Street art is considered a subculture in and of itself, but the fact remains that it’s divisible into a great diversity of subgenres itself. Among the most fascinating is Japan’s unusual style of manhole cover graffiti, cataloged in Drainspotting — a stunning photographic anthology of the remarkable street art gems found across nearly 95% of the country’s 1780 municipalities. With their bold colors and dramatic motifs, from doves to dragons, the book’s 100 photographs capture the best and most visually compelling of Japan’s 6000 distinct manhole cover designs, part of a 20-year beautification program, orchestrated by what’s essentially Japan’s version of the WPA, aiming to make manholes reflect the uniqueness of each city — its mythology, its aesthetic sensibility, its legacy and essence.

The cherry on top? There’s also a Drainspotting iPad app, a beautiful homage to the classic Japanese intersection of art and technology. The app uses geolocation, inviting users to drainspot Japan, scavenger-hunt-style, and discover more examples of this unique visual subculture that didn’t make the book.

Originally featured here last spring.

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The Homosexuals: A CBS “Documentary” from 1967

A vintage signpost for how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go.

In 1967, CBS aired an episode of the network’s CBS Reports series exploring homosexuality, a topic so taboo and controversial at the time that it took three years in the making, several revisions and a change of two producers to finally air the program. Titled The Homosexuals, the hour-long broadcast was anchored by Mike Wallace, whom you may recall from his provocative conversation with Ayn Rand on morality and love as a business deal, and was the first American network documentary to ever explore the topic of homosexuality on national television. It featured interviews with a number of gay men from San Francisco, Philadelphia, Charlotte and New York, legal experts, cultural critics, priests and psychiatrists, as well as footage of young men interacting in a gay bar and a teenager being arrested during a police sting operation, complete with psychoanalysis that pegged it all on the inevitable domineering mother.

Particularly poignant is this short interview with a young man identified as “Warren Adkins,” who is in fact the prominent gay rights activist Jack Jichols, founder of the Mattachine Society:

The innermost aspects of a person’s personality is his sexual orientation, and I can’t imagine myself giving this up, and I don’t think most other people who are sure of their sexuality, whether they’re homosexuals or heterosexuals, can imagine giving that up either.”

When asked about the “cause” of his homosexuality and whether he dwells on it, Nichols responds with a kind of quiet bravery certainly far ahead of its time and in many ways still more evolved than the opinions of many on the subject even today:

I have thought about it, but it really doesn’t concern me very much. I never would imagine if I had blond hair that I would worry about what genes and what chromosomes caused my blond hair, or if I had brown eyes… My homosexuality to me is very much in the same category. I feel no more guilt about my homosexuality or about my sexual orientation than a person with blond hair or with dark skin or with light skin would feel about what they had.”

As part of the research for the broadcast, CBS conducted a survey that found 90% of Americans saw homosexuality as an illness and the vast majority favored legal punishment even for homosexual acts done in private between two consenting adults. But what’s most fascinating is that the segment portrays gay men — and, mind you, completely neglects gay women as part of the homosexual community — as inherently promiscuous, incapable of sustaining long-term monogamous relationships. And yet, even as we cringe at the general trauma and civil rights failures around the issue in 1967, here we are nearly half a century later, still debating gay marriage and questioning the rights of those men and women who do want to legally enact these loving long-term monogamous relationships. One has to wonder whether a documentary on today’s gay rights opponents would sound just as foreign and antiquated half a century from now.

But, hey, one thing we’ve made unabashed progress on is gay rights sign design.

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Ai Weiwei: Without Fear or Favour, a BBC Documentary

Exploring the role of art as an agent of change, or what 100 million porcelain seeds have to do with Twitter.

Creative visionary, political activist and post-modern Renaissance man Ai Weiwei is China’s most widely known and politically vocal contemporary artist. His now-legendary Sunflower Seeds installation for the Tate Modern in October 2010, which took 2.5 years and 1,600 Chinese artisans to produce 100 million hand-crafted sunflower seeds from the finest Chinese porcelain, offered powerful commentary on consumerism, Chinese industry, human rights and collective labor. In February 2011, a 220-pound pile of the seeds sold for $559,394 at Sotheby’s in London. On 3 April, 2011, Ai Weiwei was detained under harsh conditions for over two months without any official charges being filed, on allegations of “economic crimes.”

On June 22 2011, following a large and sustained outcry by international human rights organizations and prolific Western media coverage, the Chinese government released Ai Weiwei on bail, under a number of conditions. But the controversy surrounding his work and the provocative political questions raised by his arrest remain an important part of the global dialogue on art, activism and freedom of speech.

He uses the publicity he gets in a very knowing way, and he uses exhibitions and projects, like the Bird’s Nest stadium, as a platform to be visible and to be able to turn them against themselves. And that’s extremely interesting, and a very sophisticated way of being an artist.”

This fascinating hour-long documentary titled Ai Weiwei: Without Fear or Favour, released by BBC One’s Imagine program earlier this year and recorded shortly prior to Ai Weiwei’s arrest, helps contextualize his work, its cultural significance and its implicit political tensions. Ironically, the film — which deals with issues of openness, censorship and accessibility — is not viewable outside the U.K. thanks to BBC’s restrictive digital media policies, but it’s available on YouTube in its entirety, at least for the time being, thanks to what seems to be Ai Weiwei’s own Chinese YouTube account. Enjoy.

Ai Weiwei is, to my mind, the most significant Chinese artist we are aware of in the West. He’s articulate, he’s passionate, he goes to the edge, he’s unafraid of criticizing the politics and the situation in his own country, nor indeed is he afraid of criticizing Western capitalism.”

For more on Ai Weiwei, his work and convictions, look no further than the excellent Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009, culled from the salvaged archive of the artist’s blog, which was taken down by the Chinese authorities in 2009. Courageous, honest and effusively eloquent, Ai Weiwei’s writing offers a rare lens on the mental and physical state of present-day China, the role of contemporary art in politics, and the role of the artist as an agent of change.

via +Mel Exon

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7 Celebrations of Nelson Mandela

What Apartheid has to do with Victorian poetry and using peace as a weapon of mass reconstruction.

FIRST RECORDED INTERVIEW

In 1961, Nelson Mandela became leader of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and coordinated sabotage campaigns against military and government targets. On May 21st that year, mere months before being arrested for sabotage and other charges and sentenced to life in prison, a 42-year-old Mandela gave his first-ever interview to ITN reporter Brian Widlake as part of a longer ITN Roving Report program about Apartheid. At that point, the police are already hunting for Mandela, but Widlake pulls some strings and arranges to meet him in his hideout. When the reporter asks Mandela what Africans want, he promptly responds:

The Africans require, want the franchise, the basis of One Man One Vote — they want political independence.”

Towards the end of the interview, Mandela tries to reconcile the difficult dynamic between peace and violence, suggesting that the full force with which the police had gone after him might have triggered this shift from nonviolent to violent protest means — violence, it seems, does only breed violence.

THE RELEASE (1990)

On 2 February 1990, President F. W. de Klerk reversed the ban anti-apartheid organisations, announcing that Mandela would shortly be released from prison. Nine days later, after 26 years in prison, Mandela reentered the free world and gave a seminal speech to the nation. The event was broadcast live all over the world, and this recording from the BBC archive is the only surviving footage of the momentous moment. Here, a deeply overwhelmed Mandela shares his first impressions of the new South Africa he had just brushed up against and revisits the complex relationship between peaceful means and armed struggle.

I have committed myself to the promotion of peace in the country. But I have done so as part and parcel of the decisions and campaign that have been taken by the ANC . . . The armed struggle is a defensive act against apartheid . . . There is not a single political organization in this country, inside and outside of Parliament, which can ever compare to ANC in its total commitment to peace.” ~ Nelson Mandela

INAUGURAL ADDRESS

On April 27, 1994, South Africa held its first multi-racial elections in which full enfranchisement was granted. The ANC won with a 62% majority, and Mandela, as leader of the organization, was inaugurated as the country’s first black President on 10 May, 1994. His inauguration address was as much a vision for South Africa’s future was it was a declaration of humanity and justice for a new global era.

Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity’s belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all. All this we owe both to ourselves and to the peoples of the world who are so well represented here today.” ~ Nelson Mandela

CONVERSATIONS WITH MYSELF

Released last fall, Conversations with Myself is a timecapsule of (an) extraordinary character if the world ever saw one — a remarkable anthology of materials that capture Mandela’s essence with equal parts humility and heroism. The Guardian‘s Peter Godwin eloquently called it not “so much a book as a literary album,” with its varied snippets of Mandela’s life — letters, calendars, prison diaries, vignettes of personal life, and transcripts from over 50 hours of audio recordings by TIME magazine editor Richard Stengel, who ghost-wrote Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. With a foreword by Barack Obama and an introduction by Verne Harris, head of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, the book is an absolute treasure about an absolute treasure, reminding us, as Godwin puts it, that we often see history through retrospectacles that lead us to think what happened was somehow inevitable, whereas in fact it, not unlike human character, is a series of conscious and not always easy choices.

The cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings.”

NEED TO KNOW: NELSON MANDELA

For the biographically inclined, this short documentary from The Biography Channel manages to cover the essential Mandela, from his birth in the small African village of Mvezo in the Thembu tribe to his early interest in political activism to his imprisonment, release and eventual rise to presidency, in just under 7 minutes.

WISDOM

Andrew Zuckerman’s fantastic Wisdom project is a longtime favorite. Driven by the insight that the greatest heritage of a generation is the wisdom gained from life’s experience, Zuckerman went wisdom-hunting among 50 of our time’s greatest thinkers and doers — writers, artists, philosophers, politicians, designers, activists, musicians, religious and business leaders — all over 65 years of age. The resulting brilliant book-and-film, Wisdom: The Greatest Gift One Generation Can Give to Another, features remarkable interviews with and portraits of icons like Nelson Mandela, Jane Goodall and Desmond Tutu, among a treasure trove of others. (Zuckerman subsequently divided the great tome into four smaller, more digestible sub-volumes, each with its own thematic DVD: Wisdom: Life, Wisdom: Love, Wisdom: Peace, and Wisdom: Ideas.)

Nelson Mandela

Image copyright Andrew Zuckerman | www.wisdombook.org

It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another. Peace is the greatest weapon for development that any people can have.” ~ Nelson Mandela

More on the project here.

INVICTUS

Say what you will of Hollywood, but they certainly know how to send chills down your spine. In 2009, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, starring Matt Daemon and Morgan Freeman as Mandela, swept the awards circuit to great acclaim. Titled after the short Victorian poem of the same name, published by William Ernest Henley in 1875, the film captures Mandela’s journey and character through the events in South Africa before and during the 1995 Rugby World Cup, hosted there immediately following the dismantling of apartheid.

In the closing scene, Matt Daemon’s character visits Mandela’s prison cell as Morgan Freeman’s voiceover reads Henley’s poem, which Mandela has professed to have inspired him in prison. The vignette is nothing short of an emotional tour de force — try, if you can, to stop the goosebumps from enveloping your whole body.

(In true Hollywood fashion, the studios seem to have disabled embedding on all clips of the Freeman-narrated poem floating around on YouTube.)

Invictus is based on John Carlin’s excellent book, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation.

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