Urban Art - Works from the Reinking Collection

Urban art at its most effective offers the liberatory tools for declaring oneself a part of one's environment, and for countering the strictures and regimentation of public space with murals and stenciled graffiti. By means of sometimes subtle, often humorous, occasionally confrontational or even deliberately offensive interventions in the urban landscape, artists have challenged our habitual ways of seeing and plunged us into a dynamic civic dialogue of actions, objects, sculptures and texts. At the center of this publication are works from the Reinking Collection, which contains representative works by the most influential artists of the street art movement, such as Brad Downey, Banksy, Mark Jenkins and Zevs. The book examines some of the possible reasons for the recent growth in popularity of urban art and discusses the ambiguous effect that the transfer of these works into a museum environment has had on both the art itself and its reception.