Crossing the line of "vandalizing" public property, artist Peter Gibson a.k.a Roadsworth was arrested a few years ago for his spray-painted art on Montreal's roads. The Canadian Film Board has a film about his work and struggle with the legal authorities (thanks to Mark Shouldice for telling me about him). The law may have been against him but the public was quite sympathetic.
Peter's first stencil was a bit of bicycle political activism. In his own words is was his "belief that every street should have a bike paths."
Peter soon graduated up to some great, fun stencils provoking our ingrained assumptions of "public" space that has become highly controlled and more often than not given over to the dominant creature, the motor vehicle. One of my favorites is the giant footprint, a simple but smart way to bring back the pedestrian: "A huge boot print dwarfs the surrounding area implying that the streets, ultimately, belong to pedestrians."
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