Second Coat

The Victoria and Albert Museum is not the first place anyone would expect to find a fly-poster crew at work. But in the middle of February 2017, a team from Shangri-La, the after-dark corner of Glastonbury Festival, arrived with buckets, brushes and paste and added a layer of their own to the museum’s display about the festival.

Scott Albrecht’s New Translations has had plenty of attention online since it opened at Subliminal Projects on 19 November 2016, and it is easy to see why. Part of it is the address: Subliminal is the Echo Park gallery run by Shepard Fairey, and a show there is noticed. The larger part is that the work is very good indeed.

If you watched children’s television in the late 1980s you have seen Wayne White’s work, even if the name means nothing. He was one of the designers and puppeteers behind Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the gloriously strange Saturday morning show whose talking furniture and cardboard-bright sets won him three of his four Emmy awards for art direction.

Advertising panels across Britain have been opened this Black Friday weekend and refilled with posters that pass for Nike, Gucci, Apple and Pretty Little Thing until a second look. Waste World comes from Bill Posters, a founder of Brandalism, and asks where the rich world’s rubbish and recycling go once the shopping stops. His project page for the campaign shows every poster.

In April 2017 the people behind Very Nearly Almost, the UK street-art quarterly, announced that the magazine was finishing. It had run for ten years, since 2006, and reached 35 issues, and the decision to stop was theirs, made while the magazine was still doing well. There was no slow fade. The ending was planned as a proper send-off, with an exhibition and a book to follow.

Modern graffiti is usually dated to Philadelphia in the late 1960s, when teenagers such as Cornbread began writing their names across the city, with New York following within a couple of years. That puts its fiftieth anniversary in 2017, and the first exhibition of the year at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, just outside Philadelphia, takes the date as its starting point.

Chicago’s Vertical Gallery turns four this spring and marks it with Ratical, the first solo show Blek le Rat has had in the city. The Paris stencil pioneer, rats and all, brings canvases, work on wood, a bronze and fresh screenprints, among them a Chicago take on his walking man in a signed run of 60. It is open from 1 to 29 April.

Mr Jago has been around the British scene long enough to count as a veteran, and long enough to be tired of the category he usually gets filed under. Now based in Bristol, he is regularly called a street artist, though the work has long since outgrown the back streets and belongs more naturally on gallery walls.

The gable ends painted in central Łódź since 2011 belong to their buildings, so the people who follow those painters collect paper instead: a signed screenprint from a numbered edition that may sell out within minutes of the release. In Poland, spreading its price over instalments arranged through Hoprata buys an earlier date and nothing else, worth paying for only when the edition will not wait.

Anyone who has walked Melbourne’s laneways with an eye on the walls since the early 2000s has seen Mic Porter’s work, and in the city’s graffiti, urban and contemporary art circles his name comes up quickly. In 2017, after three years living in Auckland, he was back and working hard. He talked to the UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost about the work from a newly rented workspace north of the city centre.

Cam Scale grew up in Sydney, where the pieces along the railway lines through the suburbs were the first art that really got hold of him. He drew as a small boy, and his parents tried art classes, but the interest only took off at high school. He and a close friend spent their spare time causing trouble, mostly by blowing things up, until they found graffiti.

For ten years Andrew J. Steel painted as half of BMD, the New Zealand street art duo from Taranaki whose members kept their names to themselves. In October 2015 the pair announced they were going separate ways, and revealed who they were: Steel and Damin Radford-Scott. Three months into his solo career, Steel answered a set of questions from the UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost about who he is and what he intends to do next, and his answers were as direct as his painting.

Philadelphians call it TMoms. People go there to eat, to drink and to meet each other, yet calling Tattooed Mom a bar and restaurant misses most of the point. It is closer to what the writer Hakim Bey called a temporary autonomous zone, a pocket of freedom, except that this one has been open on South Street since 1997 and shows no sign of going anywhere.

Graphic Surgery have been refining their particular kind of minimalism for years. Out in the world it takes the form of bold, sparse marks in derelict buildings; in the gallery, of carefully made pieces with a precision that has won them steady attention from collectors and other artists.

Few writers have a reputation as secure as Saber’s. The Los Angeles painter, a member of the MSK and AWR crews, built his name on wildstyle so dense and so large that it seemed to belong to architecture more than to lettering, and his vast piece on the bank of the Los Angeles River in the late 1990s is still spoken of as one of the biggest graffiti productions ever painted.