Bombin' Magazine meets Artworld Digest

This are some images from an article Susan Katz wrote about Seed, Green and Graffiti, somehow they met and worked on this writing presented at a magazine called Bombin' from a project that started with David Cohen's Artworldigest magazine and the seed project.

Basil Seeds that you can purchase now at Whole foods.





Biodegradable Graffiti?

Graffiti and tag culture have always been about the reclamation of privatized space; once misunderstood to be merely the vandalism of property and a problem many urban areas hoped to eradicate—today graff is flourishing. With more and more young cats like NeckFace following in the footsteps of acclaimed street artists of yore, such as Basquiat and Keith Haring, street art has in fact left the street and is now on display in art galleries around the world. Although the public’s perception of graffiti has been elevated from a favorite pastime for hoodlums to a kosher form of artistic expression, this shift in attitude has also seemingly been why graffiti has lost a lot of its edge. No longer just about surreptitiously leaving your permanent mark, or expressing a political agenda, today’s graffiti is often commissioned for the concrete jungle— trendy, watered down, and lacking the rawness of its predecessors. The capitalization of this once revolutionary style and its subsequent acceptance and integration into the mainstream, has made way for even fresher ways of taking back the streets.
The ever-growing green phenomenon- has taken hold of our culture with no signs of slowing down. No longer only a concern to treehuggers everywhere, the mission for increasing environmental awareness has given birth to a art/activist movement known as guerilla gardening. Considered to be one of the first such groups, Canadian Public Space Committee’s website explains “without permit or license, we plant seeds and seedlings in all those neglected corners of public space”. By using nature as their medium, green guerillas are re-imagining local vacant plots and what TreeHugger.com calls “driving sustainability mainstream”. The movement, which continues to gain momentum and is now practiced worldwide, has led to the inspiration for art projects such as Art World Digest’s The Seed Project which encouraged art activism through planting creatively. The project brought together “artists and activists [who] planted wheatgrass seeds creating individual art projects from what was grown”.
One of the most innovative submissions to the project was artist Gabriela Alva’s literal take on guerilla graffiti’s “nature as graffiti” concept. After growing wheatgrass in small rectangular containers, Alva attached these “biodegradable graffiti” to public fencing spelling out the word “seed”. “ I wake up pretty early before the majority of the people start heading to their respective jobs and decided to do it without being caught”, Alva chuckles. “If you think about it, who is really going to stop you from painting with greenery?” she playfully asks no one in particular.

Celebrating traditional graffiti through look, form, and execution, while simultaneously promoting green guerilla issues Alva’s work is a dichotomy combining the natures of indelible graffiti and transient vegetation. This August look out for her graffiti to “seed” the streets of Bushwick ; “just a visual manifestation of how all this talk about global warming and recycling are really not being considered”, she laments.
For more information visit her website: www.leairbag.com