Mural Project Library Resources: Books

Organized geographically by country and city, more than 100 of today’s most important street artists (including Espo in New York, Shepard Fairey in Los Angeles, Os Gêmeos in Brazil, and Anthony Lister in Australia) are profiled alongside key examples of their work. The evolution of street art and graffiti within each region is also chronicled, providing essential historical context.

Graffiti Women: Street Art from Five Continents is the first and only comprehensive survey of the work of women graffiti and street artists. A follow-up to author Nicholas Ganz's enormously successful Graffiti World, this book features the work of over 125 of the most prominent women artists from around the world. With more than 1,000 full-color illustrations and an authoritative text, this book places women at the vanguard of this exciting and ever-evolving art form.

Street art and graffiti are a familiar sight in cities around the world. Neighbourhoods painted with murals are popular with tourists and tagged walls become backdrops for fashion shoots and music videos. Banksy is a global celebrity whose work sells for astonishing prices. Millions of photographs of street art are saved on smartphones, uploaded to social media and displayed on t-shirts and other merchandise. But are street art and graffiti the same thing, or do they have different histories, meanings and practitioners? Who makes street art? Who buys it? Can it be exhibited in a gallery or must it be located on the street? Why have museums started collecting street art? Is there a commercial market for street art? And will it even exist in the future? This strikingly illustrated book explores every aspect of street art, from making and photographing it to stealing and selling it.

This first installment in a four-part series is a celebratory tour of some of the most vibrant, impressive, contemporary mural art in the world. Fifty artists from six continents share nearly 400 examples of their best work and a little bit about their own lives and journeys as muralists. The criteria for inclusion in the book was simple: the artists had to be full-time muralists who push the boundaries of the art form and engage with the medium as a vital social concept.

Walled City makes plain why large-scale outdoor paintings have become so widely admired and accepted. The level of talent, skill and execution has elevated the oversized mural in our collective consciousness. Featuring the best work of more than 40 artists from every corner of the planet, Walled City clearly shows that large scale murals have established themselves as a new pillar of urbanism. The installation processes are often as interesting as the paintings themselves. These intrepid artists deftly utilize paintbrushes, spray cans, stencils and wheat paste to install their work, often risking life and limb. Outdoor paintings and murals arent a new phenomenon, but their scale importance to contemporary visual culture is clearly on the rise.

Cultural historian Amanda Hallay explores the ways in which graffiti works to forever compel and simultaneously repel us as a society. When did graffiti turn into graffiti art, and why do we now pay thousands of dollars for a Banksy print when just twenty years ago, seminal graffiti artists from the Bronx were thrown into jail for having the same idea?

In recent years street art has grown bolder, more ornate, more sophisticated and—in many cases—more acceptable. Yet unsanctioned public art remains the problem child of cultural expression, the last outlaw of visual disciplines. It has also become a global phenomenon of the 21st century.

Renowned graffiti artist KET looks at 38 of the most influential urban artists from around the world. With photographs, biographies, and commentary by KET, this is the perfect companion for modern art fans who would like to learn more about their favourite street artists and discover new ones.

Victor Arnautoff, an artist, was born in 1896 in the Russian empire. After serving as a cavalry officer in WWI and then in the White Siberian army during the Russian Civil War, he became part of the Russian diaspora, working for a Chinese warlord, studying art in San Francisco, and working with Diego Rivera in Mexico. This text examines his life and work.

The art of muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros emerged after the violence of the Mexican Revolution. Beginning in the 1920s, promoters sought to bring the work of these artists to the U.S. public, who had acquired a newfound taste for Mexican culture. Muralism without Walls examines the introduction of Mexican muralism to the United States and seeks to account for the specific strategies and networks by which the muralists both engaged and resisted the broader fascination with “south of the border” culture.

Chicanismo, the idea of what it means to be Chicano, was born in the 1970s, when grassroots activists, academics, and artists joined forces in the civil rights movimiento that spread new ideas about Mexican American history and identity. The community murals those artists painted in the barrios of East Los Angeles were a powerful part of that cultural vitality, and these artworks have been an important feature of LA culture ever since. This book offers detailed analyses of individual East LA murals, sets them in social context, and explains how they were produced. The authors, leading experts on mural art, use a distinctive methodology, analyzing the art from aesthetic, political, and cultural perspectives to show how murals and graffiti reflected and influenced the Chicano civil rights movement.

What good can a splash of color do in a community of gray? As Mira and her neighbors discover, more than you might ever imagine! Based on the true story of the Urban Art Trail in San Diego, California, Maybe Something Beautiful reveals how art can inspire transformation—and how even the smallest artists can accomplish something big. Pick up a paintbrush and join the celebration!

A rich source of inspiration for anyone interested in do-it-yourself culture. Graffiti Cookbook is a guide to the materials and techniques used within today's most creative and progressive art movement.

Suitable for college use, this title opens with an exploration of graffiti's background and history, from Pompeii to the Hip Hop revolution to the present day, as well as how to stay on the right side of the law. It explains the practical techniques of using a spray can, and the step-by-step methods and skills required to create artistic graffiti.

During the 1930s San Francisco's most ambitious public murals were painted by artists on the left. In this study, Anthony Lee shows how these painters, led by Diego Rivera, sought to transform murals into a vehicle for their rejection of the economic and political status quo and their support of labor and radical ideologies, including Communism. In addressing these subjects, the mural painters developed a new imagery, based on the activities of the city's laboring population - its efforts to organize, its protests, its strikes. Painting on the Left relates the development of wall painting to the city's international expositions of 1915 and 1939, the new museums and art schools, corporate patrons and government administrators, and the concerns of immigrants and ethnic groups. It examines how murals became, and the extent to which they remained, "public," and it looks at how mural painters struggled against developments in art and politics that threatened their practice: the growing acceptance of modernist easel painting, the vagaries of New Deal patronage, and a wartime nationalism hostile to radical politics.