Art in the Round: Street Art at the Tate Modern

The Tate Modern’s “Street Art” is a unique exhibit unleashing the skills of a diverse group of street artists on an external wall of the museum, which is housed inside an old power station overlooking the river Thames. The exhibit will coincide with the Tate Modern’s “UBS Openings: The Long Weekend,” an annual, four-day festival of music, film and art now in its third year. Enhancing the interactive aspect of “The Long Weekend,” the artists are being asked to create new works of art on bare outdoor walls, leaving an impression of this genre, an “important aspect of current art practice,” on an equally important piece of architecture.

It’s the job of museums like the Tate Modern to grant a popular phenomenon like street art—a more neutral term than the loaded “graffiti”— recognition and legitimacy as a colorful stamp on the front of the Tate building. Apart from this exhibit, the genre has a global following on the streets and in galleries, and has a substantial fan base online. The Tokyo-based PingMag is devoted to the street art scene, and covers “first-generation” work in places like Iran, as well as the graffiti of Tokyo’s diverse neighborhoods.

London has another venue dedicated to street art (though it’s technically indoors): the London Underground. Multiple tube stations in London have been used to house original artwork by Turner Prize-winning artists, graphic artists and students with disabilities. For example, artist Chiho Aoshima covered the train platform walls of Gloucester Road station with cotton-candy cartoon mountains with faces. See pictures of the exhibit at the blog The Cool Hunter.

The Cool Hunter also reviewed an exhibit of street art in Miami, Florida, called “Primary Flight,” in December 2007. These eclectic designs, sponsored by the Spinello Gallery, creative agency Blackbooks, think tank Landsea Ventures and paintmaker Sabotaz, spotlight 25 graffiti artists from around the world. The works include arctic fantasylands, car pileups, a modern Virgin Mary, spaceships and sophisticated stencil portraits. View images from the exhibit at Cool Hunter, or visit the official site of Primary Flight.

The French graffiti artist Honet is surely one of the most prolific graffiti artists in the world, conquering the walls, floors and ceilings of some of the most obscure places in and out of France: bunkers, sewers, abandoned aquariums, subway tunnels and so on. He and his cohorts have documented their adventures meticulously, and slideshows of many of them are available on Honet’s site, where you’ll immediately be faced with a flashing list of all the places Honet has gone with spray paint. Some of his works are detailed and profound; others are tags (signatures) at various levels of elaboration.

Many graffiti practitioners, such as British artist Banksy, choose to remain anonymous, which can make it challenging to cover the graffiti movement in the U.S. and abroad. But at 2007’s Tribeca Film Festival, “Bomb It!,” which catalogues the conflicts and creativity of graffiti artists on the contemporary scene, came pretty close. The filmmakers interviewed dozens of graffiti artists (many of whom have bios on the official “Bomb It!” site), showcased their work, and wove a tale about a genre of art that has gained serious momentum in the past decade, at least partially with the help of the Web.