Wynwood Walls...

I'd only recently heard about the Wynwood Walls within the last few months, but it was set up in 2009 by the same two guys who are responsible for the Houston Art Wall - Tony Goldman and Jeffery Deitch. 

Tony Goldman sadly died in September 2012, but he has been responsible for revitalising a lot of run down areas using street art. The Wynwood Walls is a huge ongoing street art project in a pretty deserted area of Miami.

As we drove over the Wynwood Area in the taxi (on the motorway bridge) we could see block after block after block of old warehouses and garages absolutely covered in colour, the whole district had been taken over by street artists.

The Wynwood Walls is a specific, sectioned off area within Wynwood with a complex of walls and old garage doors that are all used as huge canvases for artists like Faile, Lady Aiko, How & Nosm, Ryan English, Shepard Fairey, Retna, Ron McGuinness and loads more - I think it was 40 different artists in total!

We arrived at the Wynwood Walls, and it looked like a little park, a gated off lawn with a path leading through to a couple of little shops and galleries, with a restaurant area and a bar - it was fantastic...

 The first two walls we saw were a huge Faile wall (under the restaurant porch area) and a Shepard Fairey painted wall...

 Then we walked round the corner and saw so many other amazing walls by fantastic artists that I'd seen around Brooklyn and on the Houston Wall and others that I'd only seen in books, it was a bit overwhelming really...

 (That deer isn't real - it's painted on the wall... amazing!)

 As well as the walls, there was a section called the Wynwood Doors, which was another area of old garage doors that had all been painted - there was also a great old Airstream caravan that had people had written all over...

 The whole place was absolutely brilliant - it's such a fantastic idea, creating an art destination out of what would otherwise be a desolate and probably pretty dangerous area of a big city. Tony Goldman's done a lot to help revitalise areas in America and he's done a lot to help promote emerging street artists as well as change the perceptions of street art in general, so I hope the Wynwood Walls will keep running in his honour for many more years.

I think we could have happily spent hours and hours walking around, but the sun was setting and we needed to be heading back to the hotel, so we had a little drink on the astro-turf lawn and left Wynwood for the night.