Doing-Good Street Art
Street Art Break in VR
I find exceptional works of street art on Google Street View, then I bring them into Virtual Reality to make worlds that feature them. Groups of people can then experience the works on-location, where the art was created and where it was meant to be seen.
Finding street art in Africa is not like finding street art in Europe or North America, where Google cars have traveled almost every road multiple times starting in 2007. The majority of African nations are not part of the Street View database, but some are. In addition, photos can be uploaded by individuals so that works a Google car would miss are sometimes available.
There is another important factor: Some cities and nations in Africa are welcoming street art, seeing street art as a tourist attraction, seeing street art as part of being modern.
Nowhere is this more evident than Cape Town, South Africa, where graffiti first emerged in the 1980s. Now the neighborhoods of Salt River, Western Cape, Woodstock, Langa, and many others are open air public art museums.
Liberty Du was born in Cape Town in 1979 and took the name Faith47 or Faith XLVII when she began painting in 1997, after the end of apartheid.
Instead of opposing apartheid, her work often depicts the violence and poverty that still exists in South Africa.
In Harvest, she doesn’t just depict — her art is directly involved in a vital community project that could not be more visible.
The multi-story mural is on the side of a Council Flats Building located on a busy street, DeWaal Drive. Thousands of southbound commuters leaving the city see the work five days every week.
The woman in the center is a laborer, carrying long sheaves of some kind of grain, maybe wheat or barley. She is barefoot, wearing simple clothes. There is a circular emblem behind her.
It is a beautiful portrait of a real looking person, enigmatic in her expression, layered with symbols I do not fully understand. And the portrait is only half the story.
This area of Cape Town, once known as District Six, was zoned “Whites Only” in 1966 and over 60,000 residents were removed. Most of them were relocated to a large area of shacks and corrugated tin structures on the outskirts of the city.
Even though apartheid was overthrown and independence was achieved over 20 years ago, most of the people who were moved still live in Khayelitsha and other areas like it. Poverty and crime are deeply rooted. Walking to the communal tap water source at night means walking in the darkness, when there are no lights.
Lights make an area safer, which is why a crowd-funded project for getting a basic street light system into the Monwabisi Park section of Khayelitsha was launched in 2014.
AnotherLightUp was the project’s name and the organizers planned to rely on continuous small local donations, which meant they would need to keep energy and enthusiasm flowing somehow.
Street art was part of the plan.
When Faith47 planned the Harvest mural, she worked with a community group and a design firm named, Thingking to embed an intricate lighting pattern into the background. Each time enough money was raised through VPUU (Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading) to buy one more light on the pathway in Khayelitsha — the wall was illuminated at night
It was a visual reminder of progress that helped sustain the project.
It took about a year, but bright lights are now installed and working on a 700 meter pathway between a residential center and the only water supply.
The streets are safer to walk and the project motivated people to do more. Now, there is a volunteer safety group in place for an another layer of protection.
The mural is still on the building, sending its message in plain sight. AnotherLightUp is an on-going triumph of cooperation and design. Art in service to the people who need it the most.
Tom’s work has not appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, The New Republic, the New England Journal of Medicine, or anything New at all.
He only publishes in obscure journals and, once upon a time, PBS Program Guides. Otherwise he just gives his work a URL and sends it packing on the web at places like Medium and Sub-Stack, where he enjoys a modest following.
