Calgary Graffiti Project Bombs
A graffiti mural was set to liven up Shaw Millenium Park, and mentor young artists over the next few months. Instead it’s become a giant PR nightmare for the City of Calgary, who supplied that paint (but not the proper supervision and guidelines) that was subsequently used to vandalize most of the park. Downtown Alderman John Mar (pictured) is calling for blood after touring the site yesterday. It will be interesting to see how this plays out and if the project will ever go on as intended, or if the budget will be eaten up with what’s sure to be a hefty clean up bill.
Twitter user @RyanPopowich probably sums it up best:
City gives skate-punks spray paint. Skate-punks spray paint the shit out of skatepark with F-Bombs. Wow, did not see that one coming
You have to feel for Dave Brunning (a great local graffiti artist), who helped to coordinate this project with the purest intentions, but sadly it looks like this is only going to end up pushing back street art as a legitimate artform in Calgary. It’s always been an uphill battle cleaning up graffiti’s public image: now it’s clear all it takes is a few bad apples, and some really bad planning by the City for things to go completely south.
Full story at Calgary Sun and to see street art done right visit Wooster Collective.
One Response to “Calgary Graffiti Project Bombs”
Jason Dorn - August 27, 2009
Ugg so frustrating to see something like this go belly up. I’ve seen designated graffiti areas in other cities (sydney, melbourne) that end up looking fantastic and adding to the environment. They even appear to be unsupervised areas where the artist are just expected to be respectful of the public space and other’s work.
It’s unfortunate that an art form with so much potential also has the tendency to attract meat heads who have no indention of “creating” anything. They just want to scribble garbage all over the world without having anything to really say.
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