5 Edgy Street Art Websites You Should Check Out

Make your own website one that is edgy, exciting and thinks outside the box. Check out these street art websites for inspiration and a fresh take on the norm.

Street art is taking off on both the pop culture and gallery fronts, earning a new respect and creating a new scope for itself that encompasses not just graffiti, but conceptual installation pieces, freestanding sculptures, and unexpected plays on daily life and objects. Street art challenges viewers to look at the everyday world in a new way, be it humorous, satirical, or controversial. Check out these websites for a heavy dose of inspiration and take a page for them as you make your own website.

Wooster Collective

The Wooster Collective was founded in 2001 and takes its name from a street in Soho, New York. Yet the collective doesn’t focus on its city alone, but rather makes it their mission to establish relationships with street artists from around the world. Their scope is impressive: everywhere from Buenos Aires, to Paris, to Shanghai, to Tuscany, to Germany and even Tehran is represented. Not only a site for posting pictures, what makes the Wooster Collective unique is the in-depth contact they have with artists and the background information sharing that this enables. Youtube videos show artist interviews and many of the photographs are accompanied by written explanations by either a member of the team or the artists themselves. Recommended books and films are showcased in a sidebar. You can also sign up for their Facebook page or mailing list, to receive daily updates.

Banksy

This is the personal website for Banksy, the anonymous British graffiti and street artist whose satirical works and social commentary have become known internationally. While his identity remains hidden, Banksy can be considered the world’s preeminent graffiti artist, whose work has crossed over from that of the street to the gallery and, in 2010, even became the subject of a film. Banksy’s website employs a simple design, with only three sections: outside, inside, and shop. “Outside” showcases his street art, while “inside” hosts an art portfolio of his drawings, cartoons, and sculptural items. “Shop” is an irreverent take on artists who create an online store, giving fans permission to download any images off the site, but making it clear that the artist is neither represented by a gallery nor wishes to be contacted further.

Art Of The State

Art of the State focuses primarily on London’s street art and artists. It’s an in-depth and comprehensive site that includes images, street art events, reviews and literature, a forum on Banksy, and a linked blog. The photo gallery is divided into several digital portfolio subdivisions, from shots around London, to graffiti works, to punk rock photos, to miscellaneous images from around the world. It’s a great example of how to make your own website that is an in-depth and varied look at a single location in the street art scene, and offers both content and design ideas for how to make your own website. The web page background color of simple black, crisp and clean layout, and clearly divided sections with underlined links all help to make the site professional, organized, and user friendly.

Streetsy

Taking its name from Banksy, and sponsored by the Wooster Collective, Streetsy is an open-community, photo streaming blog of street art highlights. Viewers are invited to share their favorite finds from the streets or on the web and the selections are culled through and monitored by a small group of curators. With a web page background design of, appropriately, a grey brick wall, the site takes its art seriously and keeps the focus on the images, not any fancy design elements. The result is a very manageable selection of images from around the world that are stunningly impressive in their innovation and visual impact. From graffiti, to sculpture, to window shades, to even a print laid down on the sands of a beach, Streetsy’s photography portfolio reflects both the community and curators’ great eyes for detail and international reach.

Global Graphica

Another New York City based website, Global Graphica was started in 2004, branching off from the pop-culture web magazine Air Massive. Focused in the beginning on street art found in the downtown neighborhoods of New York, Global Graphica has now expanded its international in an orderly and easy-to-navigate fashion. With an in-depth listing of categories, it’s easy for viewers to scan and find the images in which they’re most interested: pick to view art by city, topic, medium, artist, or range of years. It’s a cool mix of street art and everyday product design, with posts about other style bloggers and subjects as varied as bike models, candy wrapper graphics, and map blueprints. In this way, it shows just how much ground you can cover when you make your own website.