Global Graphica

New York street art: Image of 2009 sharpie tag drawing in “IC’s” Moleskin sketchbook. Happy New Year!


© Ivan Corsa Photo – Street Art Images

Happy Holidays, everybody! We’ve taken some time off from Global Graphica for the past few days while traveling, getting some vacay-time and visiting family for the holiday break. We’ll still be posting occasionally to the site over the holiday break and back in full swing after New Year’s. Happy New Year!

We’re adding some new street-art website links to our updated list, in the sidebar of the Global Graphica homepage. Here’s the linkage to some cool street art sites we like …

Street Art – Antville.org
http://streetart.antville.org/

Barcelona Street Art
http://www.barcelonastreetart.net/

Mexico Street Art
http://streetart.com.mx/

The Street Art Locator
http://www.streetartlocator.com/

Hey everybody — Apologies for the lack of posts these past few days. On Thursday, the WiFi in the place we were staying, in a remote seaside village in the south of France, went bust and, until now, we have been unable to get online and make updates to the site. But we’re back now with some fresh stuff.

Sorry, everybody, for the few and far-between posts the past couple of days. We’re been in transit past few days, from New York to Paris and then on the road to the French coast. But we managed to get some pix along the way and finally some WiFi access.

A lot of readers have asked why we don’t have an “About” section on the Global Graphica website. We often felt that the site’s content spoke for itself, as it were, but had planned to put a concise explanation of ourselves on the site eventually. So we’re adding an “About” blurb to the sidebar to the right. Here it is …

About Global Graphica

Global Graphica is a personally curated website devoted to photographically documenting the street art we see in daily walks in and around downtown New York City and in cities we travel to around the world. Images of other ephemeral art forms and visual culture are also posted to our site, as is information and commentary about exhibitions, events and media. Global Graphica was launched in 2004 as a spin-off web project of the pop-culture web magazine Air Massive. The site was set up to create a personal photo record of the ever-changing street art we encountered daily in our downtown New York City neighborhood and beyond. Global Graphica welcomes inquiries and submissions of images from readers and artists.

A convenient group-pool feed of Banksy photos on Flickr as been added to the site. Check it …

It’s a bit of a surprise that the Tate Modern, the globally esteemed London art museum, has recently opened an exhibition of street art. But with the international explosion of street art in recent years, the countless number of books on the subject recently published, broader mainstream appeal and adoption of the aesthetic by a growing cadre of designers and the media, it should not be a surprise at all.

The Tate is a massive sign of recognition of street art’s place in the wider culture.
The show has created space in its galleries (and fittingly on the exterior of the museum itself) for works by an international group of street artists. Two of our favorites, New York collective Faile and Brazilian brothers Os Gemeos, have work at the Tate exhibition, which runs until August 25.

We’re back bee-yatches!!! Global Graphica has returned from a six-month hiatus.
We took a break from the website to devote more time to our work producing several big online advertising campaigns for a major cell-phone service provider and consulting on a new Web video start-up. So new posts to Global Graphica were few and far between in the first half of 2008.
Now that we’ve got something approximating normal working hours again, we’re ready to get back to the business of adding fresh images daily and regularly updating Global Graphica, our personally curated collection of images documenting the ephemeral street art, graff and visual artifacts we stumble upon in wanderings around New York City and abroad. Good to be back.

The New York Times has a first-rate feature on graff in the German captial. There’s an article and a good companion video worth watching called “Graffiti in Berlin” Das ist sehr gut, ja?

Here’s the Wikipedia entry on “graffiti.” It’s worth reading to getting the full background on the subject, as well as an historical context. And for anyone who asks, “Graffiti” as Wikipedia defines it is …

Graffiti (singular: graffito; the plural is used as a mass noun) is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property. Graffiti is sometimes regarded as a form of art and other times regarded as unsightly damage or unwanted vandalism.

Our minimalist workspace as it is now in ’08 in downtown Manhattan, New York City, where all the magic still happens. Compare the images in this post and the previous post and it’s interesting to see what’s changed: artwork on the wall, newer smartphone, earbuds instead of headphones, different books and magazines, coffee cup has a proper saucer, etc.


© Ivan Corsa Photo – Street Art Photos

Our minimalist workspace as it was circa summer 2006 in downtown Manhattan, New York City, where all the magic happens.


© Ivan Corsa Photo – Street Art Photos

We get a lot of kicks visiting Signs Defiled (www.signsdefiled.com), a website posting tons of images of ads ad signage defaced, often in funny ways. Check it.

We’re back from our Thanksgiving break., relaxed, rested and ready to bring on more street art images. Above: Giant balloon of Pokemon character Pikachu flying above the streets of midtown Manhattan in the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

The Global Graphica massive is back in the hizzy. We took some time out to celebrate the American Thanksgiving holiday and to max and relax in New York City with friends from Tokyo. Now that we’re rested … onward with the graphica!

Regular visitors to Global Graphica may have recently noticed that we’ve been listing a new digital camera in our notes. For years, we’ve been relying on Nikon Coolpix series cameras. We’ve taken tens of thousands of photos with them. But last month, the camera had finally burned out after so much use.

The Nikon cameras have been excellent over the years. So much so that we never doubted that we just buy another Nikon. But as we started hunting for our digital cam, we couldn’t help but notice the new Canon PowerShot SD 630 digital camera. The model is an advanced iteration of the SD 600 series. What struck us most about the device were three things: its very large view screen, the vastly superb graphical menu interface, and the sleek form-functionality factor.

Compared to what we saw of the latest Nikon models, we were in no doubt of making the switch back to Canon (our first serious pre-digital-era camera was a massive Canon SLR, which we used for many years until it finally conked out). The SD 630 is an excellent and beautiful little camera. So far, we’ve been very happy with it.