Street Art – Banksy & Co

The social and cultural phenomenon of the urban graffiti has gained a special importance in the contemporary creativity. The works by artists such as Banksy have invaded the major cities in the world, and since the 1980s Bologna has asserted itself as a reference point for many artists too: from Cuoghi Corsello to Blu, from Dado to Rusty have chosen Bologna for leaving their mark on the walls.

The exhibition Street Art – Banksy & Co. is featuring this kind of art, its evolution, wholeness and spectacularity, at Palazzo Pepoli – Museo della Storia di Bologna from 18 March to 26 June.
On this occasion, the collection of the American painter Martin Wong – donated to the Museum of the City of New York in 1994, arrives in Italy for the first time. Therefore, the exhibit is a special opportunity to admire the works by the most famous American graffiti writers and street artists, like Dondi White, Keith Haring and Lady Pink.

Organized by Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, Genus Bononiae. Musei nella città and Arthemisia Group, the exhibit aims to explain the cultural value and the artistic interest of street art, in order to start considering the principles and methods of preservation and conservation of these forms of art.

For the first time, Street Art – Banksy & Co. presents the influences that street art had and still has on the visual arts, passing through that aesthetic which was born in New York in the 1970s as the result of the passion for lettering and name writing of young people living in the city suburbs.
On show the works by authors connected with the graffiti writing and street art, in order to create the similarities between the different productions and to explain how the society has acknowledged them.
The art heritage is the protagonist of this original exhibition at Palazzo Pepoli, whose inner court recreates a kind of city corner, an ideal place where to tell an important step of Bologna history.