New Chicago Street Art: ROA's Animal Murals

Photo: Tom Harris 

Photo: Tom Harris

This week my studio flew street artist ROA into Chicago to paint anything he wanted on our blank 22' high west wall. We had been having a problem with bad taggers and gang members tagging up our wall.  We appreciate a fine piece of street art as much as the next guy but between the poorly sprayed on names of taggers and the city battling them with coat after coat of brown paint... it was time for action.  ROA painted two rams on our wall and stopped by a little out of the way spot in Logan Square to make a beautiful mural incorporating some of the architecture of the street.

Make your way to the intersection of N. Morgan Street and W. Kinzie Street here in Chicago's West Loop to see these two giant rams by ROA.

The wall of our studio.  Photo: Tom Harris

Photo: Tom Harris

Pawn Works coordinated ROA's visit to the city with our studio here in Chicago.

Photo: Brock Brake

It seems like I have been writing a lot about graffiti as of late. This is taking it to a completely different level. From the minds at Blu


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Why can't we be friends?

This is a collective of artist i came upon a long time ago and am just getting around to writing about. the Graffiti Research Lab is a group that promotes that very special type of art that is so often considered evil, especially to those of us that in the business of building their canvases. I personally have extremely mixed feelings about the graffiti subject as i find a good deal of it very beautiful. In any case this group has developed a new form of graffiti that may have some staggering implications for the built environment. Take a look at the videos, first a news story from Nuovo.ch and then some examples including a time when they where invited to MoMA. The last video shows how to make this technology at home!











other fun things to build! more on some of this later...
http://www.makezine.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/makemagazine

Thank about the facades possible that are simply light, or wanting to remodel and just ending up sketching on a building REAL TIME!