Tagster!

I blame my dear friend Christina Sun for this post.  Well, “blame” is the wrong word, but I’ll use it. She started it many years ago with this post on her blog, a project which I believe is “under re-powering and life extension,” to borrow someone else’s phrasing, and needs some encouragement, although she’ll blame me now for speaking that.

I’m impressed by murals, official and otherwise.  Mayor Steven Fulop in Jersey City  has promoted this public art in the city on the west side of the sixth bor.  Enjoy these.

I like the wave here, but even more, love that copper sheath on the cylindrical corner to the lower right.  It reminds me of a firecracker, or old-fashioned “rocket of the future.”

Near FIT in Manhattan, folks were painting

these as I passed.

Here are some on 9th Street in Brooklyn in the block directly south of the Gowanus Canal.

Back in Manhattan, here’s one seen from both ends on the west side of the Maritime Hotel, a once-maritime related building that was left as on the high tide mark when the port receded and left Manhattan.

 

Upriver in Troy and under the Green Island Bridge, it’s Troybot, who in the third panel of four

appears to be saving a sinking passenger vessel.

Also in Troy and under the Route 7 Bridge, someone summoned the spirits of some exotic sirens.

This is a unique form of tagging, drawing on the algae-covered walls of a lock chamber as it drains.

Oswego invites its high school students in.

That Great Lakes city also has this mural about an event in another Great Lakes city that inspired this quite profound hymn.

Here’s a mural visible from the Cuyahoga and under a bridge in Cleveland.

Ann Arbor’s Huron River has never known these faunas, but someone still imagined them.

But it was in Montreal this fall that I saw the best murals, as on this wall, with a variety of influences.

 

 

 

This one commemorates an actress from the Beijing opera. Click here for the back story and the artists.

Here are some in Beacon NY a few years ago.

 

And this brings me back to Staten Island, and Lina Montoya’s projects, these over along the tin sheets screening off Caddell’s.

 

Philadelphia is where I first encountered the result of the city organizing a murals program. See some here.  I’ve heard about the Oakland project, but I’ve never been there.

All photos here by Will Van Dorp, whose point here is that he takes photos of other things while focusing boat to boat.