Mural Arts Teams With Google to Highlight and Preserve Local Street Art
A still from “Philly Painting” one of the Mural Arts exhibits featured in Google’s new street art initiative. | Photo by of Mural Arts
Philly’s Mural Arts program joins 68 organizations around the globe who have teamed with Google on an initiative to preserve our quickly fading street art through digital archiving. The Philadelphia Business Journal has more on the Google Art Project:
The digital collection contains more than 10,000 images, 160 new exhibits and animated “GIF-iti” art from more than 30 countries around the world, bringing “vibrant street art off the walls to computers, mobile phones and wearables with just an Internet connection,” said Amit Sood, director of the Google Cultural Institute and head of the new art project.
“When the street is your canvas, the world becomes a gallery for everyone to enjoy. Technology provides a way to preserve these ephemeral artworks and make them available anywhere and anytime,” he said.
Mural Arts spokesperson Nicole Steinberg says Mural Arts jumped on board the initiative as a way to share Philly’s vibrant street art contributions with the world—and perhaps provoke travelers to visit the city. “The point is to put that work on a platform that people can reach all over the world,” she told the Philadelphia Business Journal. “It allows us to craft these exhibitions and say everything we want to say about them in one space.”
Click here to check out the three exhibition currently being shared by Mural Arts on the site. They include a retrospective of Mural Arts that looks at 30 year’s worth of contributions from the organization; Katharina Grosse’s “Psycholustro,” the outdoor exhibit that stretches along the Amtrak’s Philly-to-NYC rail corridor; “Philly Painting,” which focuses on murals and other beautification projects in North Philadelphia.
