Reverse Graffiti Project: "No One Owns The Dirt"

by MADDY MADISON · June 17, 2008

    Reverse Graffiti Project, Laura Morton[Photo taken by Laura Morton]

    If you had to guess what a "professor of dirt" does for a living, what would you come up with? A farmer in newly-submerged Iowa...a garbageman with an extreme affinity for his work...a homeless entomologist? Now, the answer is clear. It's the brains behind the Reverse Graffiti Project. Touting their "philosophy of clean" while producing ecologically sound works of art, Green Works has turned the traditional notion of graffiti (social nuisance, indication of community decline) completely on its head to produce what can only be called stunning works of art.

    Remember, when asked how he managed to sculpt something so magnificent as David, Michelangelo simply answered, "I just chipped away all the parts that were not David." That's pretty much what's happening with the Reverse Graffiti Project, on a much more modest scale and sans nudity. One last amazing piece of graffiti-as-performance-art comes from the artist BLU who composed a painstaking work using murals and time lapsed videography entitled MUTO. Truly spectacular.