It’s not just in Dubai that this is happening, and it can make for strange bedfellows. For the artists, they get a blank canvas (how blank depends on the tightness of the brief) and, crucially, they get paid. Aside from the odd tag here and there, street art in Dubai is very much a sanctioned activity – from the tourist board, perhaps, or brands hoping to to co-opt their coolness. The common thread running through these pieces? They were all commissioned. He described his lenticular mural, which used the angular blocks of a building to create three separate perspectives, as one of the most challenging pieces he has ever created. One of the most interesting pieces is from American Beau Stanton. The breadth of the work showed the possibilities this art form offers – from Blek Le Rat’s whimsical stencils to D*Face’s large-scale pop art. Its developer Meraas brought in 15 international street artists to produce work as part of another initiative, Dubai Walls. Take the Dubai Street Museum, where sixteen large murals cropped up around 2nd December Street, created by a host of global artists including German maestro Case Maclaim, and the Russian Julia Volchkova.Ĭity Walk, a hip outdoor complex in Al Wasl, has also embraced the art form. But it has been Dubai’s takeup of the practice that has perhaps been the most unusual.įrom the relatively new City Walk to the long established streets of Karama, it’s hard to travel anywhere in Dubai in 2018 without coming across pieces of large scale outdoor art. The art has spread out from New York’s five boroughs to become a global movement, embraced everywhere from São Paulo to Shanghai. They would be shocked at the global acceptance it has now won.

Many New Yorkers at the time saw the burgeoning movement as nothing more than vandalism. Some of the early taggers in that chaotic period turned into world famous artists, like Keith Haring or Lee Quiñones, whose work now hangs in galleries rather than on street corners. Soon, those scratches became paint, and crude tags became works of art. Street art was born in New York City in the late 1960s, when kids would scratch their names into walls. It started, as most cultural movements do, with an act of defiance. 30 July 2018 Anathema to graffiti purists, street art has been embraced the world over, particularly in Dubai.

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