Reverse Graffiti’s Green Art

Yesterday was Earth Day (the fortieth anniversary!). On my local public television station WGBH, I watched Earth Days, a beautiful, thoughtful documentary about the modern environmental movement, featuring the story of important activists and thinkers including “the era’s pioneers — among them Former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, biologist/Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, Apollo Nine astronaut Rusty Schweickart, and renewable energy pioneer Hunter Lovins.”

Paul “Moose” Curtis may just be the most modern of modern environmentalists.

Like those who tell their story in Earth Days, Curtis and the reverse graffiti movement merges art and environmentalism. Remember the way you wrote “Clean Me” on the dirty windshield of your family car? (It was a peach-colored Pacer in my family–how I loved that car.) Reverse graffiti pays homage to your childhood doodles, elevating the burden of cleaning to art. Take a look at this fantastic list of the 35 greatest works of reverse graffiti and Curtis’s art/cleaning of San Francisco’s Broadway tunnel.

Filed under: art, environmentalism, art, earth day, paul "moose" curtis, paul curtis, paul ehrlich, reverse graffiti, stewart brand, stewart udall, street