One of my favorite memories of my first trip to BsAs in march revolved around graffiti. I am a big fan of the stuff to begin with and have taken pictures of it in every country I go to (though you will find it surprisingly lacking in places like London and Amsterdam).
In March, when I first came, I was walking in Palermo and saw a wonderful piece of graffiti art that had taken up a whole wall of a particular area. Upon returning back from a days worth of activity in Palermo, with the sun still high in the sky, I saw a man touching up the art, which you don’t usually see. Not only that, but the art was being admired by the store owners on the block. One peorson just stopped me on the street to tell how good he thought the work was.
Wall art seems to have a special place in the city. You see a lot of secondary schools where the students have put up art on their walls and there are just so many pieces of wall art around the city and the work is often pretty darn good, and very cleanly done.
on top of that there seems to be a large amount of graffiti done from cardboard cutouts (something i have seen in very few cities and can be surprisingly detailed:
I think the stuff is really good, though perhaps it does not have the same “artsy fartsy” flair of the stuff found in Barcelona. It seems more natural and organic from the city and has particular importance to a New Yorker has most graffiti in Manhattan proper has been basically scrubbed off over the last 10 years. As a consequence, I have been trying to take as many photos as possible (some which have found their way onto this site) and for a while I thought of a way to do all the art credit. As a consequence, I have decided to make a separate page (accessible on the right hand side of the blog) which I will update rather often with just graffiti and wall art. I hope you enjoy.
