Roma Subway Art Ediz Illustrata

Traces the history of New York graffiti, shows a variety of painted subway cars, and desribes the graffiti writers and how they work.

Franco Albini’s works of architecture and design, produced between 1930 and 1977, have enjoyed a recent revival but to date have received only sporadic scholarly attention from historians and critics of the Modern Movement. A chorus of Italian voices has sung his praises, none more eloquently than his protégé, Renzo Piano. Kay Bea Jones’ illuminating study of selected works by Studio Albini will reintroduce his contributions to one of the most productive periods in Italian design. Albini emerged from the ideology of Rationalism to produce some of Italy’s most coherent and poetic examples of modern design. He collaborated for over 25 years with Franca Helg and at a time when professional male-female partnerships were virtually unknown. His museums and installation motifs changed the way Italians displayed historic artifacts. He composed novel suspension structures for dwellings, shops, galleries and his signature INA pavilions where levity and gravity became symbolic devices for connoting his subjects. Albini clarified the vital role of tradition in modern architecture as he experimented with domestic space. His cohort defied CIAM ideologies to re-socialize postwar housing and speculate on ways of reviving Italian cities. He explored new fabrication technologies, from the scale of furniture to wide-span steel structures, yet he never abandoned the rigors of craft and detail in favor of mass-production. Suspending Modernity follows the evolution of Albini’s most important buildings and projects, even as they reveal his apprehensive attitudes about the modern condition. Jones argues here that Albini’s masterful use of materials and architectural expression mark an epic paradigm shift in the modern period.

What is street art? Who is the street artist? Why is street art a crime? Since the late 1990s, a distinctive cultural practice has emerged in many cities: street art, involving the placement of uncommissioned artworks in public places. Sometimes regarded as a variant of graffiti, sometimes called a new art movement, its practitioners engage in illicit activities while at the same time the resulting artworks can command high prices at auction and have become collectable aesthetic commodities. Such paradoxical responses show that street art challenges conventional understandings of culture, law, crime and art. Street Art, Public City: Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination engages with those paradoxes in order to understand how street art reveals new modes of citizenship in the contemporary city. It examines the histories of street art and the motivations of street artists, and the experiences both of making street art and looking at street art in public space. It considers the ways in which street art has become an integral part of the identity of cities such as London, New York, Berlin, and Melbourne, at the same time as street art has become increasingly criminalised. It investigates the implications of street art for conceptions of property and authority, and suggests that street art and the urban imagination can point us towards a different kind of city: the public city. Street Art, Public City will be of interest to readers concerned with art, culture, law, cities and urban space, and also to readers in the fields of legal studies, cultural criminology, urban geography, cultural studies and art more generally.

In recent years, street art has become embedded in popular culture and received growing attention from the art market and art institutions. Work by street artists has entered galleries, auction houses and museums, and some artists have been given the opportunity to create large-scale sanctioned public art projects. Simultaneously, widespread photographic documentation of street artworks and the circulation of images online have provided artists with a potentially global audience. Based on studies of everyday interaction among artists, gallerists, collectors, bloggers and street art enthusiasts, The Street Art World investigates the often contradictory attitudes within the street art community towards art history and the institutions of art. The book also deliberates on street art's connection to the art market and public art. It considers street art's potential to affect the viewer's perception of public space, and the possible challenges the increasing digital mediation of street art may pose to bringing this potential to fruition. Peter Bengtsen is an art historian and sociologist.

A refreshingly jargon-free survey of what many consider the art movement of the twenty-first century. Whether adored or abhorred, graffiti and street art provoke passionate debate. This is the first comprehensive popular survey of the art movement around the world. Organized thematically, it explores the origins of the movement and its evolution, the relationship between street art and the urban environment, its interactions with (or rejection of) the market and the world of commercial galleries, and the culture of street art online. The book features a wide range of artists working in different media and styles across multiple countries. It explains the terms and language of street art—from tags and throwies to culture jamming and subvertising—as well as its multiple influences and sub-genres.