A fire hydrant, bright red with a Chinese flag imprinted upon it, glares down at Atlanta passersby, captioned with the words “Emergency Only”. It is a political message, to be sure. What it is not, however, is traditional art. This fire hydrant, painted by Spanish street artist Escif, dominates nearly an entire parking deck right in the heart of Underground Atlanta. It is one of many murals undertaken by the street arts conference, Living Walls, The City Speaks.
Living Walls, The City Speaks, a conference on street art and urbanism, was founded in 2009 by Monica Campana and Blacki Li Rudi Migliozzi, with the central aim to bring awareness to street art.
“It’s a very democratic thing,” said Alex Parrish, 21, Director of Communications and Assistant Project Coordinator at Living Walls. “It’s an invaluable resource, especially in Atlanta.”
According to Parrish, the conference’s mission is “to incite a public dialogue to inspire awareness of your surroundings.” Living Walls hopes that people will interact more with their surroundings instead of just consuming the advertisements that, especially in a city like Atlanta, use large amounts of city space.
“Places in Atlanta kind of get overlooked,” explained Parrish. Living Walls tries to attend to places that are not getting developmental improvements.
Living Walls works with street artists from all over the United States and from overseas to paint murals on city buildings. The building owners are not asked to pick a theme. “We just trust in the artistic merit,” says Parrish.
Artists use swing stages and lifts to scale large buildings, and work with aerosol, latex paint, and wheat paste, where they paste paper onto the wall.
They recently had a conference with an academic lecture series including Billy Mitchell of Truly Living Well, who lectured about urban gardening; Timothy Franzen of the American Friends Service Committee and Chris Appleton of WonderRoot, a local non-profit community arts organization, both of whom spoke about activism through public art.
International speakers who spoke in the lecture series include Sabra Ripley of The Beautiful City Tax Act in Toronto, which taxed all billboards in order to create art projects, and Tristan Manco, from Bristol, a publisher who promotes street artists.
Gaia, a street artist from Baltimore, Maryland, and Doodles, an artist from Oakland, California, also spoke in the lecture series and worked alongside Living Walls to paint murals in Atlanta over the summer.
Living Walls has also recently worked in conjunction with WonderRoot on a youth mural project conducted at seven different recreational centers with seven different artists who painted murals with children and young adults.
Living Walls conducted its first conference in August of 2010 and has only grown since. In 2010, over 25 participating artists painted 12 murals. This year, more than 40 artists painted over 25 murals throughout Atlanta and the surrounding areas of Decatur and East Point.
Street artist Sam 3’s mural is visible from Georgia State University campus, and may be the tallest mural on the East Coast, stretching up 16 stories on the side of a Comfort Suites Hotel near Underground Atlanta.
Future projects include a mural and several workshops with a street artist from Tel Aviv, Know Hope. Living Walls also has something in the works for April. They hope to focus their next summer conference on female street artists, according to Parrish, because street art today largely consists of male artists.
Living Walls gets its funding from fundraising – carnivals, yard sales, even “paint parties” – as well as from grants like the one they are receiving from the non-profit organization Possible Future. Sponsorship is not just monetary, says Parrish, as sponsors participate in their projects.
Parrish says that the organization is currently attempting to gain non-profit status.
“Street art is a movement,” says Parrish. “This is not just a few people. It’s the city of Atlanta.”
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