Love it or loath it, Street Art is now everywhere and the genre is not only making the transition from the street to the gallery,it is also crossing over onto the walls of the museum. It has infiltrated advertising, graphic design, fashion, music and the Visual Arts as quickly as it has appeared on our back alley walls. The movement is truly international both the UK, USA, Europe and the Far East. Collectors are fighting over Banksy stencils, and when sold, some are fetching nearly 6 figure sums. Walls have been dismantled brick by brick and shipped overseas and world records have been set, for many of the artists involved. Street Art in all forms is an important part to our contemporary visual culture. The work is shown not only in the major capitals but the smaller provincial cities and towns have also embraced the medium. Last year Banksy’s first museum show was mounted not in London or LA’s MOCA but in his hometown of Bristol.
Now Nottingham is mounting a major new exhibition of works on paper from the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. The show is drawn from this internationally renowned collection of prints highlighting established and emerging street artists, both British and international, including Banksy, D*Face, Eine, Miss Tic, Shepard Fairey and Swoon.The show is curated in response to the touring exhibition organised by the V&A, and mounted at Nottingham Castle. It aims to showcase this new burgeoning arts scene within the city,and present local talent and studio groups (Switch, Amy Blackwell, GING and Smallkid) alongside big names to reinforce Nottingham’s successes (Burgerman, Dilk). The show will give new platforms and opportunities for this underrepresented art form (Salon de Refusés) and forge new international partnerships through a series of both on and off site events. Throughout the summer each participant in this mini-festival will promote a positive message in their work, often working with local councils and community groups and international corporations. The exhibition is hoping to dispel common negative associations with the genre.The inclusion in the V&A Street Art exhibition will highlight the influence on contemporary visual culture.
Nottingham Castle has invited internationally renowned ‘doodler’ Jon Burgerman to create a unique and experimental installation in the South Hall stairwell. Formerly Nottingham based, and a self proclaimed “multidisciplinarian, vegetarian, and pop artist”, Burgerman carefully constructs his own world in which “the narrative of being an artist is being played out across a wide variety of media for the enjoyment, enlightenment and delight of those that choose to tune in”.Now based in Brooklyn, New York City, Burgerman has created a series of drawings and projections in response to the broad themes of Street Art; Contemporary Prints from the V&A, which will push his practice in a stimulating new way, forming a semi-permanent, temporal presentation of his trademark character creations.The Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery is housed in a magnificent 17th century ducal mansion built on the site of the original Medieval Castle, with spectacular views across the city. The Castle has a turbulent past, linked to kings and conquerors and still has a maze of original caves hidden beneath its imposing walls. After all what better place for Street to Infiltrate than the hometown of Robin Hood, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor!
The exhibition gets underway on 2 July and runs through 25 September