Renowned street artist Hanksy thought it was a shame that an abandoned brownstone in Manhattan was going to waste, so he invited a few friends to join him in turning the multilevel building into a gallery.
Guests who were invited to attend the gallery were told how to find the building by locating a particular mural out front, and those who were lucky enough to be invited to the event were treated to a building full of colorful works by the likes of Royce Bannon, B.D. Wong and ELLE that filled every room of the house.
Russian artist Nikita Nomerz took the idea of refacing abandoned buildings literally when he started adding faces to a bunch of abandoned structures in Nizhniy Novgorod.
Nikita even gave facial features to old steel drums, fallen trees, and facades – anything laying around the abandoned buildings got its own face.
Nikita’s works are not always confined to one building, but many of his faced buildings are on the same lot, forming a kind of outdoor street art gallery of comedic characters.
The Z Project is an underground art initiative striving to bring new life to abandoned buildings around Detroit. Their biggest, most colorful endeavor so far is the transformation of a ten story parking garage into an art gallery.
The pieces cover walls within the parking garage levels, and in the future they will be painted over and new art will be put up, that way the gallery will continue to allow different street artists to proudly display their works.
Baltimore, Maryland is full of derelict buildings which are nothing but eyesores to the community, so a group of residents decided to turn these abandoned relics into something the locals can be proud of.
They let street artists add much needed color to the crumbling structures in hopes of bringing attention to the fact that slumlords are letting these buildings decay.
They call their beautification efforts The Slumlord Project, and they’re turning the entire neighborhood into one great big art gallery, one building at a time.
The exteriors are painted with large murals, or wheat pasted posters, many of which feature inspirational messages and imagery to remind the residents not to give up the fight.
Brazilian street artist Herbert Baglione was on vacation in Italy when he came across an abandoned psychiatric hospital just begging to be turned into a gallery, so he began painting shadows of the former residents on the walls.
Herbert’s creepy shadow themed art seems to fit right in with the wheelchairs, crumbling walls and medical equipment left behind when the building was vacated. The spectral figures can be seen throughout the hospital, so it’s no longer left abandoned!
The Caped Crusader is alive and well in Europe, thanks to street artist PETE ONE and the amazing Batman-themed graffiti pieces he painted all over the walls of an abandoned building in Ronse, Belgium.
PETE ONE has some serious artistic skills, painting spot on versions of Batman: The Animated Series characters alongside stylish versions of the Joker and the Dark Knight himself.
PETE ONE chose to put an abandoned building to good use, perhaps inspiring other street artists to help him build up his superhero-themed street art gallery.