How graffiti gangs became mainstream ‘street artists’

Source Scroll In by Stefano Bloch
Graffiti has become so mainstream in recent years that auction houses, museums and entire art shows cater to street art connoisseurs and collectors around the world. Images in the news of young vandals responsible for marking walls have been replaced by sleek websites belonging to global phenoms such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey. In cities around the world, graffiti is now associated with “street artists” rather than violent street gangs. Today, many cities, from Pittsburgh to Pretoria, invite street artists to help brand neighborhoods that are being revitalized and gentrified as legitimately hip destinations for business owners, home buyers and influencers. Some up-and-coming neighborhoods in cities like Dakar, Senegal; Mexico City; Brisbane, Australia; and Seoul, South Korea offer street art tours and host graffiti festivals.
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Zasha Colah appointed curator of 13th edition Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

Source E-flux
Zasha Colah is a curator and writer. Her exhibitions and texts have been an exploration of artistic imagination under conditions of sustained oppression, often through the prisms of liveliness and restorative laughter. Her work considers a range of cultural practices as an unspoken infrastructure of acts and channels of counter-expression in disobedient terrains that confound militarization and earthly extraction. She is particularly interested in the point at which these practices may cross over to become collective. Colah was raised in Lusaka, Zambia, and Mumbai, India, where she lived and worked until 2014. She divided her time between Berlin, Germany, and Mumbai from 2014 to 2017, and for the last six years has been based in Turin, Italy.
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