Float On It: A Creative Community

Thursday, October 19, 2006

::VIA:: Wooster Collective :: Map of Legal Walls

"Each and every week for the last four years, we receive at least ten or twelve extremely sincere and passionate emails from concerned parents, progressive teachers, and young kids themselves. They all are inspired by the Wooster site and want to reach out to us to ask advice on one simple thing - how they can get involved in street art and graffiti without having to do it illegally and risk arrest.

Our feelings about this is a bit of a complex thing for us, because we've actually come to think that street art has to be done illegally for it to have any true impact. But more on this later.

And yet, we also recognize that not everyone who reads the Wooster site is at a stage in their life that they can or want to risk arrest. Nor do we want to encourage it. So unfortunately, the only advice we're really able to give teachers and parents is - "try to find out if there are some legal walls in your neighborhood"

So we were absolutely thrilled to get an email this week from Jay, who's taken it upon himself to put together the ultimate interactive map which highlights all of the legal walls across the US.

But to do this he needs your help.

Here writes:

"I had been thinking about doing this for public skate parks. When I started searching for them I found out there are so many skate parks EVERYWHERE, it blew my mind. I don't know when exactly it happened, but even suburbia has embraced skate board culture enough to plop a rinky dink skate park on top of some old tennis court or in the back of a mall parking lot. When I started searching for info on legal graf walls, I found nothing initially. After about 3 hours of hardcore digging I have 8 walls listed. Pretty weak. I'd like to know why America has embraced skate board culture and not graf culture, where both are viewed as destructive youth movements by the general population."

Sara and I would love for as many people as possible to contribute to this map as it will become an invaluable resource for many, many people." ::VIA

You can check out the map and contribute by clicking here.