A Fresh Take on Urban Renewal

Although I live in Los Angeles, we don’t have city sponsored, street cleaning in my neighborhood. Since I also live near a popular look-out/make-out spot, trash tends to accumulate quickly. I have noticed that the more my neighbors and I pick up and beautify our street, the less trash and graffiti collects.

Artist Christine Finley has taken this philosophy to a whole new level. She wallpapers dumpsters with lovely, colorful wallpaper. She first began wallpapering dumpsters in Los Angeles, then New York and is now wallpapering dumpsters across Europe.

She says of her work, “”Wallpapered dumpsters transform environmental activism into unexpected beauty. I like to think of these interventions as polite graffiti. This project is an inquiry into urban waste, free art, and notions of femininity, beauty and domesticity.”

Her work also has an interactive component. She has a brief tutorial on how to wallpaper a dumpster, if you are so inclined, on her blog, and she also has covered dumpsters and scaffolding with “while you were out” blank posters which are just begging to be filled in by other artists.

Not only is she beautifying a previously ugly contraption, which no doubt has a positive effect on the surrounding neighborhoods, it’s also a call to action. Wallpaper your neighborhood dumpster and a simple act of improvement can turn a rusted eyesore into an unexpected moment of joy.

You can read her blog and see images of the dumpsters here. And you can see video of the dumpsters and here about the project here.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

Is what Christine is doing any different from the colorful works of taggers armed with a can of spray paint? Or does the claim of “polite graffiti” make it all right?