Street Art for the Recession

Perhaps it is the same air of renewed commitment and creativity among artists that I blogged about last week that we have to thank for a whole new batch of fascinating and uniquely recession-era street art cropping up in New York.


Back in April, Brian Lehrer interviewed the founders of Wooster Collective, a group of street artists based in Manhattan, about street art given the listener reports of some fresh graffiti and stencils showing up all over the city New York with a distinct economic theme.

The WNYC website linked to a couple of great examples of these pieces, below:

1) a sarcastic bubble-letter sticker encouraging you to "enjoy subprime lending;"
2) a stencil of former treasury secretary Henry Paulsen, fed. chairman Ben Bernanke, and former SEC chairman Christopher Cox, below the caption "Axis of Evil."
3) spraypaint by the Holland Tunnel asking, "where's my f*cking bailout?

Marc and Sarah Schiller, the Wooster Collective founders, describe street art as a "mirror to society," and say that it allows the city itself to act as a canvas for any artist with something to say. But, what is most exciting to me about this is really true for anyone with something to say. For this medium more than most, it seems anyone with "something to say" (and with the guts to risk getting caught) can be an artist.
Street art is a subversive medium, but one with mass access and a huge audience. The combination gives it great potential to communicate ideas which aren't expressed in the mainstream media, and need to squeeze themselves into the spotlight through other means instead.

In addition to standard spray paint graffiti and stencils, the Schillers mentioned a few more elaborate street art "installations" that can be found around New York.
I found one such installation artist with some great pieces online at WebUrbanist. Brad Downey dresses himself as a city maintenance or construction worker so as to be essentially invisible as he goes about setting up his funky installations, like these (right.)

Phone booth installations are popular, according to the Schillings, because so many of the phone booths in New York are unused, defunct, and forgotten.

Artists replace the backlit ads with their own work, adding something interesting to the landscape while aggressively rejecting the world of advertising our consumer culture, as well as commenting on a wasted urban infrastructure.

So perk up your peripheral vision next time you're on the streets, and see what art you find.