Taking street art from the wall to your screens

For hundreds of years, street art has transformed our public spaces into open-air galleries, adding vibrancy to urban landscapes. But using the city as a canvas often means these artworks are here today, gone tomorrow. With the Google Art Project, we’re working to preserve this ephemeral art form and make it available to fans around the world, anywhere and anytime.

Last June, as a first step, we added more than 5,000 images of street art and around 100 exhibitions, curated by galleries around the world, to the Google Art Project. Today, we’re more than doubling the number of street artworks available in high resolution to over 10.000, working in tandem with 86 art organizations from 34 countries.

Dulwich Outdoor Gallery exhibit

New immersive experiences
From stencil to sculpture installations, mosaic and collage, a great variety of styles from around the world are now represented on the Google Art Project.

Are you ready for an urban art safari around the world? Hit the streets with Street View and listen to the stories behind the art: travel from Sweden’s most famous street festival to New York city’s rooftops where you will discover water tanks wrapped with art. Or enjoy a break in Buenos Aires, where abandoned walls in the northern neighborhoods of the city became a source of inspiration for street artists from all over the world.

If you want to know more about local street art scenes, places and practitioners, don't worry - we’ve put 260 digital exhibits online [link] for you to explore and a dozen immersive street view tours! For example you can now take a virtual tour of London’s trendy East End, home to some the world’s finest artworks, enjoy the colourful murals of Los Angeles’ Winston Street (aka Indian Alley), learn more about the longest open air gallery in the world in Berlin and see how street artists get inspired by 17th and 18th century paintings.

The Water Tank Project exhibit

When the web and street art meet, the walls can come to life: discover the mesmerizing work of artists like INSA or Checko who painted, photographed, re-painted and then re-photographed a wall to create animated street art: the so-called GIF-iti.

Bringing street art into our daily lives 

We're also excited to offer new ways of experiencing street art in your daily life - at home, at work, on the go - with the introduction of street art to Chrome, Chromecast, Android Wear and to your mobile devices.

Turn your TV screen into a vibrant backdrop of street artworks, download new partner apps on your phone or tablet for a tour of Melbourne's famous laneways, an art safari in Portugal, or a glimpse of the multicoloured murals that are covering Delhi, Lima and Honolulu. Finally, turn your smartwatch into a colourful artwork with our new Street Art Watch Faces! And if you want, you can discover a new artwork every time you open a browser tab in Chrome with the new Google Art Project Chrome extension.

So much goes into making a piece of street art. Yet its transient nature puts it at risk of being scrubbed out and lost forever. The Google Art Project allows these works of art to transcend the walls, be transported to your screen and live on. Visit the Google Cultural Institute and follow @googleart to discover more.

Posted by Lucy Schwartz, Program Manager, Google Cultural Institute