Street Art: Legendary Artists and Their Visions

About the Author\nAlessandra Mattanza is an author, screenwriter and fine-art photographer who has lived in New York and Los Angeles for a number of years. She currently works as a foreign correspondent, contributor and editor for several publishers and magazines. Chris Versteeg lives and works in Rotterdam as a graphic designer and illustrator at Projekt C (www.projektc.nl). Chief-editor and publisher of SAM Magazine (www.streetandmore. com), she is a co-founder of the Lastplak collective (www.lastplak. com). After attending the Grafisch Lyceum and later the Willem de Kooning Academie, she decided to focus on graphic design, illustration and painting.\nIn the last few decades, art has moved from the museums and art galleries to the streets. Visionary artists, gifted with breath- taking expressiveness, have utilized featureless and abandoned spaces of everyday life and converted them into a new artistic palette for expressing their ideas. In this context, this new art breaks the mold and speaks directly to a now- global audience without intermediaries or filters. Social themes, political criticism, and poetry materialize on a bridge, on the facade of an old building or between the railings of a courtyard. Chris Versteeg provides a detailed historical introduction to street art and graffiti, from its origins to the main trends through which it is expressed: from graffiti to sticker art, from tagging to character, and including stencil art. Thanks to the interviews by Alessandra Mattanza, the reader is provided access to twenty of the most representative exponents of the latest street-art scene. These artists tell their story and introduce the readers to the rationale and the ideas from which they draw inspiration.