As the CEO of Global Street Art, founded in 2012, Bofkin was here to spread a positive message on how street art can both offer more opportunities for our cities, as well as alter our perceptions on how we see and experience our built environment.
Bofkin's something of a polymath. He's breakdanced for the UK and has a PhD in maths and evolution. And although an injury forced him to give up his breakdancing, he found an new outlet in
photography, and the world's probably 60,000 street photographs the richer because of this. "I needed to turn my nervous energy [after the injury] into something positive and I took up photography," said Bofkin.
Working in an insurance company in Spain at the time, Bofkin described travelling to different locations in the country to capture street art through his lens, and recalled, "I preferred art a lot more to insurance."
Lucky to find an investor to fund his passion for documenting street art worldwide, Bofkin gradually built up his database of now 60,000 photographs and said, "I wanted to know more about art that I was photographing, so I started classifying the images religiously." Currently, with artists signed up to his platform from 90 countries and over 160,000 social media supporters, it's clear that street art's a phenomenon with some serious cultural buzz.
To date, Bofkin's worked with both public and private organisations on community and commercial projects, and he's set to launch a book on street art on 23 October.
So what's all the hype around street art? According to Bofkin, street art has gone through some major transformations in the last fifty years. Starting in Philadelphia, then quickly spreading to New York, back in the day, it was closely associated with crime. It was a clandestine activity with artists marking trains under the cover of night, unleashing their tags for all to see as trains slipped through different locations.
These days, it's gone online and Bofkin remarked, "most street art tumbles through our news feed now. It doesn't matter where you paint because that photograph can travel through the internet." What's more, there's been a proliferation of different styles and techniques in the street art scene, and with infamous artists such as Bansky popularising it, it's clear it's become a recognised art form.
While Bofkin explained that street art came out of graffiti, and we're probably already aware of it in stencil form, nowadays it's more versatile with artists incorporating tyres into their works, and others syncing their art works with the built environment.
Given the shifts in the advertising industry, Bofkin asked if hand-painted adverts could offer an alternative to conventional forms, and directly enrich our public spaces.
According to Bofkin, street art festivals have also become a major trend over the last five years.
As well as making us think more of our public spaces, "street art sees a city for how it could be. That's it's beauty," said Bofkin.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
