Unsanctioned: The Art on New York Streets

Description

For the last ten years city librarian Luna Park has been cataloging the art to be found on NYC streets. She quickly learned that for those that pay attention, the street can provide as much of an arts education as a museum. Ever since the City banished graffiti from the subway trains, it's streets have developed into a vast playground for a complex culture, made up of distinct communities, each with their own hierarchies, values and sets of rules. This book is the culmination of a decade of obsessively keeping up with NYC graffiti and street art, a time period which saw a seismic shift in the public perception and acceptance of the artform. The public space within which artists operate is fluid and new boundaries are being pushed every day. The streets are teeming with a vast spectrum of (un)sanctioned art, running the gamut from quick, illegal handstyles to full-blown production murals.

Katherine "Luna Park" Lorimer is a Brooklyn-based graffiti and street art photographer and curator. As co-founder and regular contributor to The Street Spot blog, she is passionate about documenting urban artforms and supportive of all creative endeavors to redefine public space. She has presented her observations on street art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library and guest lectured for the 'History & Emergence of Street Art & Graffiti' course at Long Island University. Her photography has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.