Tour the World’s Street Art with Google Street Art

By far the most enjoy­able part of our recent fam­i­ly trip to Lon­don was the after­noon my young son and I spent in Shored­itch, grop­ing our way to No Brow, a comics shop I had noticed on an ear­ly morn­ing stroll with our host­ess. Our route was evi­dence that I had for­got­ten the coor­di­nates, the street name, the name of the shop… Even­tu­al­ly, I real­ized we were lost, and that is where the real fun began, as we retraced our steps using street art as bread crumbs.

Ah right, there’s  that rooftop mush­room instal­la­tion!

And there’s that Stik fig­ure…

After a while, a FedEx man took pity on us, ruin­ing our fun by steer­ing us toward the prop­er address..

I’m not sure I could ever dupli­cate our trail, but I enjoy try­ing with Google Street Art. Arm­chair trav­el­ers can use it to project them­selves to the heart of ephemer­al, pos­si­bly ille­gal exhi­bi­tions all over the globe,.

Bogotá... Paris... New York’s leg­endary 5 Pointz, before the land­lord clutched and white­washed the entire thing in the dead of night. Each up close pho­to bears a high­ly infor­ma­tion­al cap­tion, much more than you’d find in the street itself. Think of it as an after-the-fact dig­i­tal muse­um. It’s appro­pri­ate, giv­en the ephemer­al nature of the work. An online pres­ence is its best shot at preser­va­tion.

Those of us with some­thing to con­tribute can add to the record with a user gallery or by tag­ging our pho­tos with #Stree­tArtist.

Enter Google Street Art here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Obey the Giant: Short Film Presents the True Sto­ry of Shep­ard Fairey’s First Act of Street Art

Banksy Cre­ates a Tiny Repli­ca of The Great Sphinx Of Giza In Queens

Big Bang Big Boom: Graf­fi­ti Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion Cre­ative­ly Depicts the Evo­lu­tion of Life

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, home­school­er and the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of The East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday