In Conversation With…Global Street Art’s Lee Bofkin

We spoke to Co-Founder of Global Street Art and Global Street Art Agency, Lee Bofkin, to find out all about their organisation, their mission to live in painted cities, the transformation of street art into a recognised art form, and how their work has been credited with tackling isolation and lessening antisocial behaviour, littering and vandalism

This mural is based in Camden and painted by a team of artists callede Art and Believe, who paint large scale bright, colourful, geometric murals to bring forgotten communal spaces to life.

It’s been 50 years since the advent of modern graffiti, after which followed street art. In recent years, technology has helped the art form to expand and gain new audiences, as the internet and social media are now used as tools to share portfolios of high quality pieces. Lee Bofkin credits its value;

“Within this genre, the techniques, styles, influences and materials have broadened enormously; it’s far broader today than we probably give it credit for. Street art has an amazing ability to interact with the world around it. Relative to constructing new buildings, it’s also potentially a low-cost tool for urban regeneration, because you can change people’s perception of a space by painting.”

Lee has a PhD in Science — Maths and Evolution to be exact, and he originally stumbled into a career in Finance (a ‘useful mistake’ he calls it), at the same time as spending his free time break dancing for the UK. He discovered his fascination for, and love of street art after a knee injury, which led him to travel the world and photograph street art. In a scientific fashion, he proceeded to classify 60,000 photos he had gathered into different themes and categories.

This mural can be found on a housing estate in Chalk Farm and was painted by Naomi Edmonson, the woman behind ‘Survival Techniques,’ which is a collection of paintings that were inspired by a list she wrote to remind herself what to do when she feels low. She felt that the street would be the best, most democratic place to share them.

He believed it could be a much more valuable asset to the community than most people thought at the time;

“What happens is that it creates a nicer environment, it enables people to slow down. It gets people out and talking to each other. It gets people talking to their neighbours who might not do otherwise. People stop and talk and share opinions when they are standing in front of murals.”

So, how did Global Street Art come about?

“We started in 2012. Our mission is to live in painted cities, which we do in 3 ways. We’ve got the largest online street art platform with artists from 100 countries, who have uploaded 100,000 + photos and we have about half a million fans on social media. The second thing that we do is we’ve organised 2000 legal street art murals since 2012, and the third side of what we do is we have an agency that works on commercial projects.”

Global Street Art have already put up large murals across the whole of London, including Kilburn, Holborn and the Chalk Farm Estate, and Lee is an avid campaigner for more spaces in cities for art:

“We are not saying it solves all problems, but what we are saying is art should be normalised for kids. In places where there are anti-social behaviour issues, painting can help reduce that. We’ve seen that happen on a couple of housing estates we’ve worked on but it’s applicable anywhere. Regardless of this, kids should always grow up around art and colour — it becomes a nicer normal for them…

We’ve done so many crazy projects after the last few years and we only hope to do more. We worked on one in the Olympic Park which used 6 tonnes of paint it was 17 and a half thousand square metres. It somehow worked out in the end.”

This mural was organised by Global Street Art as part of their Art for Estates programme, which aims to increase the amount of public art on London’s housing estates. This was painted by street artist Agwa

Lee talks about the importance of street art not being confined to certain spaces;

“There’s a danger that street art starts to get just associated with housing estates. I was at a residents meeting recently and the residents said ‘how come you paint this here, but not there.’ There’s a danger of street art being swept up with gentrification. Our ambition is to get more art absolutely everywhere. Where you live shouldn’t make a difference. Everyone should have access to art.”

This mural can be found on the Webheath housing estate in Kilburn and was painted as part of a street art makeover. A team of international artists created 11 murals across the estate. This artwork is titled ‘Brazil’ and was painted by Prozak

The appetite for street art from the general public has certainly grown in recent years, and Lee only wants to see it growing more;

“There’s 150 housing estates in Camden and we’ve painted 3, there’s clearly a lot of room for growth there. There’s space for lots of art in this city. We’ll continue to add where we can. There’s also an increasing demand for hand-painted advertising, and on the council side, there is a greater willingness to engage with artists painting modern murals. There’s appetite coming from different places, and a lot of it is fuelled by social media, it engages people.”

Global Street Art are currently having conversations with Camden Council and they hope to return to paint that neighbourhood really soon.

Naveen Shakil

If you own a wall, or know of a wall that could be used by one of Global Street Art’s wonderful artists, then please get in touch with Lee: lee@globalstreetart.com.