Living Walls is an Endless Canvas sponsored exhibition and conference focused on street art and its role in engaging public space.

We are bringing in the works of an international selection of artists who typically make use of the streets to showcase their work. We have also sought artists that re-appropriate the public realm, attempting to take charge of their media space.

Artists will be asked, along with submitting artwork, to present some form of documentation of their other works as well as their process in order to illustrate via pictures, video, sketches, words, etc, the scale and context in which the artist typically works in public space.

Logistics:
First in order to understand why we need to raise funds let us provide you with more specific logistical information regarding our project.

The project will be divided into three components: a component devoted to public murals involving poster art, a lecture series which the Georgia Tech architecture department has agree to host for us, and a that of a gallery opening taking place at the Eyedrum. The poster art show will precede all other events the prior to August 13, 2010. On Friday August 13th, the event will consist of a lecture series held at Georgia Tech. On Saturday August 14th, the event will consist of an exhibition and Pecha Kucha-style presentations held at Eyedrum. The gallery exhibition will be on display in Eyedrum’s galleries from August 13 through the end of September and will commemorate the various public walls around the city blanketed by the wheat pastes.

Poster show:

Inspired and aligned with the open source and free culture movement, driving many poster art (wheat pasting) shows that have happened internationally: Benevento, Turin, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, etc. These other poster art shows have been pieced together by colleagues of the curators of the Living Walls conference. The intentions behind our show are aligned with the same set of values. This alignment has embedded us in a network of street artists who willingly support our efforts. Thus we know there is a critical mass of street artists engaged in poster art all over Europe and South America willing to answer an open call to submit to our show. Along with all this we have three artists contributing to our event who have agreed to act as our liaisons over seas in Berlin, Brazil and Australia. Our liaisons have agreed to collect submissions from around the world and ship posters from over seas to us. An open call for artists will soon be put out asking for poster submissions. These posters will be wheat pasted blanketing a few public walls around Atlanta which we have gained permission for. All these public works will be thoroughly documented for display within the gallery component.

Lecture series:

We are very thankful to the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech who have agreed to support this conference through hosting a lecture series and providing space for other activities. We intend to have a series of lectures the day before the gallery show in order to promote the gallery show itself as well as to engage and inform a different audience that would otherwise not attend the gallery show.

Gallery show:
Select artists, along with contributing to the poster show, will display their work within eyedrum. All artist are asked present some kind of documentation regarding their specific artistic process. This documentation itself will be on display within the gallery and is intended to illustrate all that is entailed in the act of making street art. Also on display will be the documentation of the prior week’s events, the wheat pasting of the submitted posters. On the opening day of the gallery show we will have a pecha kucha* like event, where selected artist and lecturers will present 20 slides. Each slide will be displayed for 20 seconds, yielding a total presentation of about 7 min in length. The pace of these presentations has a unique way engaging an audience with an entertaining, yet informative slew of ideas.

Project location: Atlanta, GA