Make Your Mark: The New Urban Artists

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In an age when Banksy’s installations are protected by Plexiglas and graffiti artists exhibit in galleries as well as on the street, Make Your Mark explores the work of thirty-five urban artists who use mark-making techniques—drawing, painting, and other methods—to create a diverse array of work.

Ranging from figurative painting, illustration, and comic book drawing to tattoo art, poster design, and mural-making, the work is stylistically original, often incorporating experimental techniques or elements of the handmade. This is the intersection of traditional and “street” sensibilities, from Mexican-born artist Carlos Donjuán’s paintings of masked figures to the atmospheric drawings of Bucharest-based artist Mark Francis Williams, whose work responds to the new shopping malls around his city that offer “a hyper-real, super-beautiful sense of certainty” but conceal an ominous underbelly. Other featured artists include the French illustrator and graffiti artist Bault, the American muralist Zio Ziegler, and the Japanese painter Fuco Ueda.

As in his previous books on street art and other nontraditional genres, author Tristan Manco’s curatorial eye is a valuable guide at the frontier of a new genre. Students, artists, and anyone interested in art will be inspired by the integrity and grit of these unconventional creators on the rise.