| Launching on Saturday, December 10, the Art Gallery of Calgary is featuring an exhibit by a collection of Canada's top graffiti artists, who will "write" in the gallery space.
The current trend of graffiti artists expanding their surfaces to canvas has been slowly building steam, with previous shows including KofieOne and Greg "Craola" Simkins in San Francisco, and Miss Van's unique brand of graffiti dolls now at the Jonathan Levine gallery in New York.
If you're looking to prepare yourself with some history, I recommend saster.net (an acronym for Streets Are Saying Things), an online museum for graffiti art since 2002. You'll have to register to view the galleries, but you'll be in good company. The site is a virtual community for artists, with almost 5,000 images of work that users debate, appreciate and recite history for. The comments range from the basic "dope" to detailed histories of artists as far back as the early ’70s and the evolution of their crews. New albums and topics are released monthly, but new photos are added constantly, in addition to event listings, archives and sketchbooks.
Given the transitional nature of graffiti art, it’s amazing to see a collection of work documented, discussed and preserved for generations who may never see the originals. |
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