Elevating street art — and using tech to bring its vibrant magic inside

Graffiti, spray art, urban art — whatever you call it, the dizzying colors, mind-bending designs and in-your-face polemics of the street art of the past 40 years is getting a full-fledged retrospective through June 3 at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore.  

Pulling together pieces from iconic “taggers,” including pioneers such as New York’s subway-graffiti legend Crash; globally recognized artists such as Shepard Fairey, famous for his colorful Obama portrait; and new talents, including Portugal’s Vhils, the museum’s “Art from the Streets” exhibit traces the evolution of this defiant means of expression from its rebellious roots — originally seen as vandalism — to its acceptance as a contemporary art form.

“Art genres that are ephemeral and anti-institutional can sometimes be overlooked by museums because they’re so difficult to present within the environment of a gallery,” says Honor Harger, executive director of ArtScience Museum. “We wanted to document this important global art movement in a serious and considered way while conveying its energy and spirit.”

Capturing the ephemeral

A series of galleries featuring large-scale murals, installations, videos and sketches takes visitors through the various techniques that street artists have employed, as well as the technology they’ve embraced along the way. To showcase pieces that by their very nature are fleeting, HP — one of the exhibit’s sponsors — printed nine massive, wall-size murals of street art from around the world using the HP Latex 1500 Printer. 

That helped the museum display important pieces that often have already disappeared and exist now only in photos, while HP got to showcase the innovation it’s doing around graphics and its commitment to artists. “A lot of this art is so beautiful, but it doesn’t exist anymore,” says Puneet Chadha, director of marketing for the graphics solutions business, APAC at HP. “We wanted to help the museum show how the art actually was, to help recreate it. ”

On one end of the style spectrum are the bold signatures of the 1970s that kicked off graffiti art’s arrival — the spray-painted tags that came to define urban life. On the other are the massive digital photos of faces, eyes and hands that the artist JR, with his “Inside Out” project, used to transform and reinterpret communities in 130 countries.

“While spray-painting is the technique most of us associate with the genre,” says Harger, “visitors are often surprised that street art allows artists to be as creative as they want in their choice of medium.” In addition to spray paint and digital photos, artists have used mosaics, brushed paint, stencils, emulsion, pasted paper, printed mylar and even wall carving to tell their stories.

New work, with Singapore as the canvas

The museum commissioned some of today’s leading street artists to create 10 new works, some painted on the museum walls and some in public spaces around Singapore, to remind visitors that street art is about place and flux. These works showcase artists around the globe, including Spain’s Felipe Pantone, Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho and Singapore’s Speak Cryptic.

Harger says visitors are often surprised by how diverse street art can be. And seeing this work in a museum setting gives art fans a different view of a genre they may feel they already know well.

Case in point: French artist YZ, one of the most important women in the field, created an impressive large scale black and white portrait of a woman in tribal clothes on one of the museum’s walls. Called “Empress Ngatini,” the piece incorporates recycled materials — including bike tires — to explore how people can reuse what they have created, Harger says.

Printed souvenirs that support art education

To create versions that visitors can take home, HP partnered with Eko, who painted a rich work onsite that portrays the chaos of today’s society. Using HP digital printers, Eko’s creation has been printed on a variety of materials, including textiles, vinyl and canvas, using environmentally friendly inks, so visitors can take away unique souvenirs, including handbags, diaries and wallpaper. Proceeds will go to Art Outreach Singapore to fund art education.

“We wanted to go ahead and create something amazing beyond the prints we had made for the museum,” says Chadha. “One can move out of the exhibition, inspired by one of the paintings purchase a piece of art in the form of a tote bag or a t-shirt.”

For HP, working with ArtScience Museum’s curators and artists is another way the company is bringing the latest innovations in technology to artists to propel their creative inspiration and output. 

Watch a video of the works that ArtScience Museum commissioned for “Art from the Streets.”