Category: Street Art

Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Always welcome more candles on your cake

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This woman’s anxious expression on a wall in Oaxaca is a bit frightening to have surfaced close to my birthday. I’ve decided to consider her as successfully defiant.

Some years are harder than others. The image below of the late Vicente Fernandez did not weather well this past year.

But walls in Oaxaca are everchanging canvases for artists, new discoveries encountered with every walk. As prints peel and fade, other layers soon are plastered over them – palimpsests of life.

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Postcard from Marseille, France: Vigilante ‘Street Doctor’ flacks cracks

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Above: Mosaic sidewalk patch by Ememem in Marseille

I’m just a sidewalk poet…. My work is the story of the city, where cobblestones have been displaced.”

Street artist Ememem, interviewed by Arnesia Young for My Modern Met

This mosaic underfoot in Marseille caught my attention, with no expectation of future encounters. Then we started bumping into similar tileworks in Lyon, where they transform annoying potholes, sidewalk trip-zones and missing chunks from buildings clipped by careless drivers into works of art.

As it turns out, the artist, who refers to himself as Ememem, is a native of Lyon. Ememem terms his work “flacking.” Flaque means puddle in French, but, instead of puddling, his hole-plugging repairs assume the role of a puddle-displacement public service.

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Postcard from Bilbao, Spain: Heart of Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz

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Above: Detail of mosaic portion of “Eskuz Esku” in Basque, or “Hand to Hand.” Lead artist John Pitman Weber and assistant Alicia Vallejo Sanz, a 2010 project of Itinerario Muralistico of Vitoria-Gasteiz.

While Bilbao with the Guggenheim and San Sebastian’s Running of the Bulls have made those cities well known in the United States, Vitoria-Gasteiz is the actual seat of government of Basque Country. With a population of about 250,000, the Basque capital lies only 40 miles outside Bilbao. The hyphenation reflects the duality of Spain’s sometimes dueling cultures: Vitoria is Spanish while Gasteiz is the Basque half of its name.

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