Winter Fresh in July (?!)

For this 350th post on the Tucson Murals Project blog, I couldn't think of a better topic than something I know almost nothing about. :) Actually, I started to learn about the annual Winta Fresh "convention" when I met painters who were watching Rock Martinez painting the front window of Posner's Art Store. Winta Fresh is a place where graffiti artists (who don't live in a neighborhood with a community mural project to work on) can paint -- and learn from other artists -- without worries about being arrested.

If you haven't spent much time looking at graffiti art (a.k.a. sometimes as "urban art"), don't get too much idea from that first work about the rest of them. There's a big variety in urban art, just as there is in more-traditional art. For instance:

The venue is a vacant lot south of Undisputed Fitness & Training, 1240 N. Stone.

The wide, long and high space is like a walk-in art gallery, with works of art in blocks on both the north and south walls. (The fence around it can be closed, though, so bring binoculars or a zoom lens.)

Rock plays a big role at Winta Fresh (and, when it happens, the corresponding Summer Fresh), and he told me that the murals on the building's east wall (along the alley) were made by nationally-known graffiti artists who came to Tucson especially for Winta Fresh. You can see their work at the very end of the January 10, 2010 post.

There's a Winta Fresh every year, so I'm not sure which photos from the archives are from which year. The post I just mentioned must have been showing the work from Winta Fresh '09 or '10. I'll try to straighten that out! In the meantime, here are two more scenes from my early-morning ride to the "gallery" this week:

If you'd like to see more, try one of the page, image or video search engines on the Internet. Here's a Google page search you can click on:

[ tucson "winter fresh" OR "winta fresh" OR wintafresh ]

From the results of that search, you can also click on "Video" at the left edge.

Here are a couple of other things I found in a quick hunt through Google results (for other searches). One is the poster for the Winta Fresh December 13, 2008:

I also found a Myspace page for Tucson Graffiti.

If you have more resources about Tucson graffiti to share — or comments, or complaints, or whatever — please leave a comment below or send me some email.

Happy 350th!

Update (February 16, 2013): I've just posted photos of the WintaFresh 2013 painting party.