Street Art

Twenty years ago Zenka made a decision that has shaped everything since: the work belongs outside the gallery first.

The street art lineage began in 2012 in Córdoba, Argentina, when she co-organized one of the first Before I Die walls outside the United States, a participatory public chalkboard wall inspired by Candy Chang's original. Within days, the wall held hundreds of handwritten answers from passersby: things they wanted to do, see, become, and forgive before they died.

Later in 2012 she co-produced an Inside Out installation at the Mercado del Abasto in Buenos Aires, the JR project that wheatpastes large-format portraits of ordinary people onto the buildings of their own cities. The portraits stayed up until the weather took them down, which is how it should be.

The Words of the Future stencil series, which began in 2018, lives on the same shelf: language and concept work that bypasses the gallery and meets the city where it already is. So does the AR Mural work that grew out of it, where physical paint on a wall triggers a digital animation when you point your phone at it.

The thread through all of it is access. The point of putting an artwork in the street is to let it meet the person who would never otherwise meet it.

“Out where the people who do not go to galleries live.”