Writing on the Wall: Street artists transform the urban landscape

The artist Gaia is part of a young generation using art to revitalize cities, engage residents, and connect to the past.

A physician-turned-street-artist takes an urban art form to a landscape where most of the walls are eons-old stone.

A New York City artist brings climate change home by mapping the coming floods and drawing them on the actual cityscape.

Photo: c/o MooseStreet artist Moose Benjamin Curtis was having some difficulty with the police. The officers had just arrested him for creating designs on a wall in South London. But it was complicated — as things often are when Moose is involved. You see, Moose doesn’t use spray paint or wallpaper paste — the usual tools of this trade. Instead, he wields scrub brushes, old socks, cleaning fluid, and, when he’s living large, a high-pressure hose. He creates images by cleaning shapes into filthy urban surfaces such as retaining walls, signs, and tunnels. People have called it “reverse graffiti,” “clean …

The walls of our cities are becoming canvases for creative expression in the hands of a new generation of artists. These kids are street-smart and engaged. (And, OK, they’re not all kids.) They work, on some levels, in the same spirit as Occupy Wall Street, reclaiming and transforming the urban landscape, and infusing their art with social and environmental consciousness. “Street art is showing that there can be these locations and public spaces that are temporarily taken over with artwork — spaces we would traditionally think of as non-art space,” says Martin Irvine, an associate professor at Georgetown University. Irvine has …

Photo: c/o Peter GibsonWhen Peter Gibson first set out with spray paint and stencils into the streets of Montreal, he had protest on his mind, not art. He had little sense that his small act of sabotage would usher him into the boundary-pushing realm of street art — or land him in the back of a police car, facing serious criminal charges. It was just after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and Gibson, a university-trained pianist who was 27 at the time, watched as the U.S. and its allies searched for an object on which to inflict their …

“Window,” a photograph by L.A. artist Susanna Battin, appeared on a San Bernardino County billboard in December.Photo: Susanna BattinIf you drove down I-15 in San Bernardino County, Calif., outside of Corona, last Friday, you may have noticed a giant, digital billboard exclaiming, “WE BUY USED GUNS.” But if you’d looked at the same sign from the opposite direction, rather than being socked in the mouth with a solicitation to sell your sidearm, you’d have seen a crystal clear window — a view right through the sign of the undulating ridge of the Santa Ana Mountain Range beyond. The image was …

Photo:Randal FordThe house was a nightmare. “It had been collecting dust and graffiti since Katrina and there was something very shabby and Brothers Grimm about it,” says Candy Chang, an artist and graphic designer who lives just a few blocks from the place in New Orleans. But where others saw blight, Chang saw an opportunity, and armed with a few buckets of paint, she transformed the derelict house from a symbol of the community’s decay into an emblem of its collective aspirations. With permission from the property owner and neighborhood groups, Chang turned the front wall of the house into …