HAWAII STREET ART BOOK
VOLUME ONE - Big Island
A Visual Time Capsule Beyond Graffiti
Author: A. Tarantino
Release: April 2015
Publisher: Createspace
Pages: 104 Full Color Photos
Language: English
Product Dimensions: 8.25 x 6 x .5 inches
BISAC: Category: Art / Popular Culture
Previews:
| DRAFT Book Introduction:
Hawaii Street Art Volume One contains over 100 original street art and graffiti photographs taken on the Island of Hawai'i, also known as the Big Island. It is the largest island in the United States, with a population of 185,000. It's the home to the world's tallest mountain Mauna Kea (White Mountain), a volcanic peak over a million years old. Measured from it's base on the ocean floor, Mauna Kea is 33,480 feet high, significantly greater than the elevation of Mount Everest.
People here reclaim and use their public spaces as a communication tool, a venue to express themselves and as a way share their ideas with others. In many cases, more can be gleaned from street art than from what is covered in the mainstream media. Walking around the islands of Hawaii, you'll find thousands of legal and illegal public art pieces in the typical street mediums - murals, spray aerosol work, stickers, stencils, wheatpastes, installations, mosaic, reverse graffiti, moss graffiti, guerilla gardening, cuprocking, yarn bombing, and many more. They sometimes touch on the cultural challenges found in most cities, including:
- The impact of a tourism based economy
- Modern day agriculture practices and their affect
- Environmental pollution in various forms
- Hydrogen sulfide emissions from potential geothermal projects
- Reliance on resources that are brought in off island
- Hawaiian sovereignty movements and the 1893 overthrow of Queen Lili'uokalani by US corporations and landowners
- Change in natural cultural resources needed by the Hawaiians who rely on them
- Disruption of sacred sites, burials, and other places of high value in Native Hawaiian culture
- Purchase of lands by offshore individuals and corporations who do not interact with the communities
- Homelessness, one in five is classified as near-homeless
- Trash removal and the lack of suitable places for disposal
- High cost of living
- Dramatic population increase
- High electricity costs
- Drug abuse
- US Military presence
This book is a small window into the ephemeral world of street art in Hawaii. It's urban canvas is everchanging and in constant flux. This visual time capsule is not meant to be a comprehensive representation of Hawaii street art, its artists, or its history. It's meant to give you an opportunity to view Hawaii from a different perspective. Some of these works only existed for a day or two before being washed away, written over by other artists or removed completely. These creative expressions serve as a reminder that nothing is permanent and that control is often just an illusion in the chaos of civilization.
* Information taken from the Wikipedia entry for Hawaii and it's references.
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