V&A touring exhibition on Street Art

Street Art

Street Art is a diverse, constantly evolving art form, one that moves across the derelict buildings, bus shelters and hoardings of cities across the world. Graffiti galleries on the internet take the street art scene from local to global, in your face but transient. The genre is as difficult to pin down as is to define - shifting rules apply. Street art has its roots in history, echoing cave paintings and stencilled slogans and images in political campaigning. The work collected by the V&A is figurative, rather than based on writing.
Urban art delivers social commentary while illustrating the subconscious of the 21st century city. Traditional genres are newly interpreted: portraiture, surrealism, pop art. Random references and symbols run through the street art story: Warhol's kids stencil film stars, arte povera students recycle free stickers, political propagandists take on the self-promoting signature taggers. Narratives emerge, visual worlds are created. Politics are less discussed, more shouted. A psychedelic sense of visual humour bounces through. Everything is a fair subject: spiky comments on the state of the world exist alongside images of forgotten celebrities of yesteryear. There is no common aesthetic, more an attitude: irreverence, democracy and freedom.
The V&A collected these works in an effort to capture an ephemeral contemporary aesthetic and a form of printmaking that have influenced mainstream graphics. Most notably recent advertising has been using the language of street stencils, plundering underground visuals in an effort to appeal to the young consumer.
There exists an energetic production of websites and magazines that archive this work, created by a network of peers. The one defining feature of the genre is its accessibility. It is unexpectedly available for view on the boarded up windows on your high street, or shared on the internet for all to see. Although street art is a genre defined by its outsider status, some galleries are now exhibiting it, bringing it in from the outside.
The V&A has traditionally collected new forms of printmaking, as well as ephemera and various forms of graphic art. Artists seen here use varying methods of image-making, ranging from simple stencilling to digitally printing multiple stickers, all of which can be grouped together under the heading 'printmaking'.

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These works, alongside examples of other forms of printmaking, ephemera and graphic art, can be seen at various galleries around the country in 2011 & 2012.
The Herbert, Coventry, 9 October 2010 - 16 January 2011 
The Civic, Barnsley, 28 January - 23 March 2011  
Black Rat Press Gallery, London, 14 - 29 April 2011  
Nottingham Castle and Museum, 2 July -  25 September 2011   
Chatham Historic Dockyard, Kent, 8 October - 27 November 2011 
Ulster Museum, Belfast, 9 December 2011 - 4 March 2012  
Bradford One Gallery, 17 March - 10 June 2012  
Tullie House, Carlisle, 22 September - 9 December 2012

Sam