Street Art: A gallery at your doorstep

My girl Lauren has given me the gift of vision.  From time to time, while we cruise around, she'll point out new additions, in the form of street art, to our local urban landscape.  But not the typical, obvious street art like graffiti, commissioned murals, or even those sketched-upon US Post Office Priority Mail stickers that have been stuck to telephone poles.

This is modern art on your sidewalk instead of at the MoMA.   There are three-dimensional collages composed of wooden blocks, dryer lint, wires, and anything else disposable (or available?) that can be recycled into art.   Drawings/sketches/paintings, on what appear to be butcher paper, are cut and pasted (the old-fashioned way) onto boarded-up buildings or under an overpass.

While some of this art is flamboyant and demands your attention, there is a fair share that requires more than just a cursory glance to notice.  By letting me in on the secret, she helped create an awareness in me of these more subtle, alternative forms of artistic expression that exist in public space.  She has shown me how to see my neighborhood with new eyes.

Let me show you some examples.  These were all up on Milwaukee Avenue between Western and Damen.

 A wooden collage boarded up among bar advertisements.  Does the collage have meaning independent of its location?  Or is its showcase in public space the art?

This paint, wood and fiber creation is protected under plastic.

On this fence are two works by, I suppose, separate artists. I wonder if they know each other.  Or if this location is, for some reason, significant.

Pasted onto a metal door.  Might be the artist Melt.

*Thank you to the artists who positively contribute to our communal space.*