Street-art curator - The Top 100 Issue

• The Age Melbourne Magazine

Issue #39
The Top 100 issue
the (renegade)
Andy Mac Street-art curator

For all the governmental hand-wringing about graffiti, swarms of visitors treat all that street art lavishly splashed around city laneways as a tourist attraction.

If he's not waxing lyrical to visiting primary-school children, street-art supremo Andy Mac is leading art students or National Gallery of Victoria tour groups past the Centre Place light boxes in which he started Citylights in 1996, or the Hosier Lane ones he took over a couple of years later. These, as well as the surrounding, much worked-over walls, primarily show the work of artists more used to exhibiting in the streets than in galleries.

This year, Mac sold to Canberra's National Gallery of Australia some 300 stencils on paper (all proofs of works done on the streets) that he had commissioned from 70 odd graffiti artists. They are now part of the gallery's works on paper collection, proof there's mainstream recognition of the art's value.

Mac (who also runs the commercial Until Never gallery, again in Hosier Lane, and who this year commissioned graffiti artists to paint a tram for the St Kilda Festival) is the first to say, however, that the graffiti focus has shifted to freehand text that is becoming increasingly abstracted. You can see it all in the city laneways, which continue to attract thousands of people each day.

Staff writers