Shepard Fairey, Swoon and other top street artists reimagine the city

Conventional maps seek to rationalise, define and control our metropolises. Through maps we see our streets as uniform, inert and impersonal. But our lived experiences of urban spaces couldn’t be more different— when was the last time your city looked the same hour to hour, let alone week to week? Of course, these maps do serve a purpose, helping us get from A to B. They are efficient and functional and they expect our streets to behave in the same way.

It is precisely this attitude to urban space that Rafael Schacter, creative director of Approved by Pablo, hopes to challenge with Mapping the City, which opened recently at Somerset House under his curation. The show brings together fifty different works of art, the large majority of them especially commissioned, from a global cacophony of street and graffiti artists. But this is not an exhibition of street art. “This isn’t graffiti art, this isn’t street art, it’s something that as yet hasn’t really got a name apart from just art,” Rafael explains. “The important thing that we’re presenting here is work by street artists or by graffiti artists.”

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