street art

[asakiyume]

It's hard to know where to begin with experiences of Bogotá, so I'm going to just launch right in with street art. It was everywhere. We passed this mural every day:



Any surface could have something beautiful painted on it:



There was ordinary tagging, too, of course, plus quickly scrawled political messages, like this one, on the headquarters of the newspaper El Tiempo (Without democratization of the media there is no peace!):



We were eager to go on the Bogotá graffiti tour, which is held twice daily.


Our day, it was led by Jeff, who, despite that American-sounding name, is a Colombian anthropologist with a deep love of graffiti. He knows so much about the artists, their history, and the history of Colombia--which is relevant for a lot of the art.

Jeff


The artist who goes by the name of DjLu often does stencils of the faces of real people, with the message "juega siempre" somewhere in the art. He's also famous for doing insects whose wings are guns, representing the fact that violence spreads like an insect-borne disease, and for pineapple hand grenades.



A gunfly


Jeff made an effort to highlight the work of female street artists, like Lili Cuca, who painted this mural:



(You can watch her work in this two-minute YouTube video)

Vertigo Graffiti did four images of the left-wing politician Gaitán, whose assassination in 1948 set off devastating riots.



One artist uses the name Guache, which means "warrior" in the language of the Muisca people who were the original inhabitants of the Bogotá area. Here's art by Guache:



With graffiti and street art, there's always something new. In the time we were there, this bird went up:



This isn't half of what I photographed, but at least it gives a good taste. At least one mural has a special story attached to it, so it'll get its own entry.

Comments

[sonia]

Wow! Thanks for sharing those. Glad to hear the trip was so wonderful.

[asakiyume]

My pleasure! Yes, it was a blessedly lovely trip.

[sovay]

We were eager to go on the Bogotá graffiti tour, which is held twice daily.

I love that there is a graffiti tour. It clearly rewards the walking.

[asakiyume]

It certainly does. It gave us huge quantities of basic information that we were able to use as scaffolding on which to hang other information. And because the graffiti landscape changes week by week, the tour is always new.

[sovay]

And because the graffiti landscape changes week by week, the tour is always new.

That's especially wonderful.

[ivy]

Yes, I too was delighted by that! The bird at the end is my favorite of the pieces you've shown, and it's awesome that you had a knowledgeable anthropologist as your tour guide!

[asakiyume]

About that bird, Jeff said you could identify the artist by the way he did eyes: always a black dot with a curved line going through it.

[queenoftheskies]

Those are beautiful.

[asakiyume]

They really are. I realize I've shown a lot of birds (because I love birds, and birds are a frequent subject of street art), but ... here are some cats!

[sovay]

but ... here are some cats!

Nice cats!

[asakiyume]

If you click through, you can embiggen the image, and you can see there's the neko bus from My Neighbor Totoro,the maneki-neko, a very degenerate Garfield, etc.

[gale_storm]

Gosh, thank you for sharing these. If this was just a small part of what you did there, I'll bet you did a lot and have lots of photos to share.

[asakiyume]

We were there for ten days. We didn't go very far afield--almost entirely places we could walk to--but we were in the historic section of Bogotá called La Candelaria, which is the oldest part of the city, and we couldn't turn around without bumping up against a museum, ancient church, or scenic street, so we did end up with *lots* of photos.

[aamcnamara]

Oh, lovely! Thank you for sharing!

[asakiyume]

My pleasure!

[amaebi]

Tres cool!

[asakiyume]

Oui! (The hotel where we stayed, a former colonial-style house with fifteen rooms for guests, attracted a lot of Europeans, including several from France.)

[osprey_archer]

Oh, beautiful! I love all the birds; the one in Lili Cuca's painting looks almost like it comes out of an Audubon book - or a Chinese painting - or I'm not sure where, really, but it's drawn with a grace and attention to detail that isn't always expected in graffiti.

And the gunwing insects are haunting.

[asakiyume]

I agree! Here are more birds, hummingbirds, by a different artist:

[boxofdelights]

I love that bird! The works you photographed from the graffiti tour are interesting, but that bird is pure delight.

[asakiyume]

So glad you like it!

[khiemtran]

Wow, thanks for sharing!

[asakiyume]

My pleasure!

[selidor]

Oh, these are great.
If you ever come over to Belfast, I highly recommend the street art tour here. Ours changes a little more slowly, but it's also quite rich (some photos I took). They invite street artists from around the world to add more at a festival every year. Note there is a distinction the artists themselves make between their street art and between NI's tradition of murals, which are...different.

[asakiyume]

Oh wow, yeah, your collection of street art photos are great and very similar in feel to what we saw. And the murals--well, yeah. Art's political too, and--everything that goes along with that.