Art Festival: Immersive Street Art & Graffiti Events

A few days ago, the international urban art festival See No Evil finished in Bristol! The project, which once a year brings together a selection of the world’s best street artists, again resulted in a huge outdoor gallery with lots of new, colorful painted murals based on and around Nelson Street… The See No Evil arts project represented hundreds of elements and styles of the street art world descending on one busy city centre. The building owners each give permission for the painting to take place including; a restaurant, youth centre, office blocks, student living accommodation, police station and a bridge/overpass. After the buildings have been painted and the final pieces finished, the event climaxes with a New York style Block Party that brings together all the aspects of the street art scene, welcoming the public to share their work. ...

Italian mural artist Pixel Pancho just came up with an fantastic Soviet-style piece in Kazan, Russia! This huge new mural is part of the Like It. Art festival in the capital and largest city of the Republic of Tatarstan. Announced as Europe’s largest street art and graffiti festival, Like It. Art took place between 17 to 22 July and was officially supported by the Mayor’s Office of Kazan. But although the line-up includes pretty big names like Etam Cru from Poland, Kislow from the Ukraine, Belin from Spain, Nychos from Austria, and of course Pixelpancho, I unfortunately haven’t heard much about this urban art festival before… ...

Attention all British folks - The UK’s most ambitious permanent street art project See No Evil will return from 13th to 19th August! Announced as Europe’s largest street art event back in 2011, See No Evil brought 72 international urban artists, including some of the finest names, to Bristol. During one week, artists like Aryz, El Mac, Mr. Jago and many more transformed wide areas of the city into a massive outdoor art gallery. This year, See No Evil is again going to become one of the major street art festivals in good old Europe, allowing you to see some of the world’s best street artists in Bristol, alongside huge projections and art installations… ...

Between September 13th and 16th, 2012 the Stroke Urban Art Fair 2012 will take place once again at the Postbahnhof in Berlin, bringing hundreds of artists and more or less urban art related galleries together in one big arena… Within the last two years, more than 60,000 visitors came to see artists and galleries from all over the world (Poland, Brazil, Austria, USA, Italy, France, Chile, Spain, Switzerland or the UK - just to name a few). Urban Art is now! In fact the huge variety of subcultural dynamics of the last 30 years in this melting pot is self-replicating. Terms such as “Low Brow”, “Street Art”, “Graffiti”, “Illustration”, “Graphic Design” or “Comic Art” are fused with classic notions of art as well as unconventional resources and are newly interpreted in a fresh, innovative context. ...

I already wrote a lot about the urban art festival Crimes of Minds, taking place in the beautiful city of Brest, France. Nonetheless, there is still a lot I haven’t featured yet. For that reason, I’ll hereby give you a more extensive overview about what happened during the last months Crimes of Minds… Crimes of Minds - The Festival Organised by well-known graffiti artist Liliwenn, Crimes of Minds started about a year ago with Best Ever and Ben Slow painting in the streets, went on with Morten Andersen, Fin DAC and Sly 2 and included the famous Da Mental Vaporz crew creating a fantastic mural! Since then a lot happened and Brest got more and more colorful. ...

It’s going to be hot in Amsterdam later this month, when several popular urban artists like Toast, Besok, Graphic Surgery, ECB, Morten Andersen and Bonzai catch up at the international urban art exhibition Urban Art EFX, presented by Urban Stylistics! *The exhibition themed “from urban to contemporary” showcases an eclectic variety of artwork. These range from paintings, sculptures, installations, photography to video art, created by key-players of the contemporary Urban Art movement. It highlights a snap-shot of their current artistic development as well as the story behind an up-and-coming artist generation, whose roots lay in the Graffiti and Street-art culture. ...

There’s strange things happening at the Flemish coast. This weekend, the open air art festival Beaufort04 started, transforming the Belgian coast into an enormous space for contemporary art in the public landscape. Various contemporary artist like Wim Delvoye, Ai Wei Wei and Anthony Gormley already produced their series of work during the first three editions, now it’s time for others to do the same… Isaac Cordal for example is creating a body of work called Waiting for Climate Change, consisting of several of his well-known sculptures and installations that will be exhibited on the beach of De Panne as well as in a local historic villa. In my eyes, having all these small figures in a publicly accessible area and discussing climate change at the beach is quite an interesting approach. It’s a perfect scenario for Isaac’s works! ...

Martin Hawkes and his video team filmed famous German urban art duo Herakut while painting a pretty nice mural in Stavanger on the west coast of Norway! The mural, which shows a girl and a couple of monkey in that popular mixture style of photo-realistic graffiti and damn rough painting, was part of the Nuart Festival and was built in 2011… Nuart is an annual international contemporary street and urban art festival established in 2001. From the first week of September an invited international team of street artists start to leave their mark on the city’s walls, both indoor and out, creating one of Europe’s most dynamic and constantly evolving public art events. (about Nuart) ...

UR{BNE} Films is an urban design and architecture film festival, coming up in Brisbane this May and in London this June! The main intention behind this very interesting project is to showcase films that inform and inspire about urban design, architecture, public spaces and collaborative design process, where communities and city design can be the subject, the background, the actor and lead role in the wide mixture of feature films, documentary and shorts… ...

I just fell from my chair. Toronto-born, Tokyo-based entrepreneur, occasional artist and almost architect Christian Forestell (here a short interview) is right away starting the world’s largest painting project entitled Bikini Lines to benefit children orphaned in the 2011 Fukushima disaster! Bikini Lines - The Cactus Dome Painting Bikini Lines is a proposed massive, mixed media project inspired by a lack of standardized nuclear disaster reporting, in particular the panic that set in over Tokyo following the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and subsequent meltdown. Based on crowd-funding, the project’s main focus is on painting the huge Cactus Dome on the Marshall Islands, an enormous, foot-and-a-half-thick, 107m wide dome consisting of 358 gigantic concrete panels built over a nuclear crater, seriously! ...