International Cooperation Will Speed Progress 2007

Summary

In 1996, street artist Andy Mac (Andrew MacDonald) founded the Citylights Projects with Richard Butler-Bowdon, Lyndal Walker and Richard Brownfield. Initially focused on the enclosed garbage collection point off Centre Place, this independent arts initiative displayed the work of artists in lightboxes, thereby hijacking a key medium of advertisers and creating a small guerrilla gallery. Within a couple of years, the enterprise was Andy Mac’s alone, and he expanded it to other locations – most notably Hosier Lane. The project’s name was possibly a nod to another iconoclast: the famous San Francisco indie bookshop and publisher, so fundamental to American counterculture. Over a period of 20 years, Andy Mac built up an enviable collection of street art, essentially a history of this dynamic movement in central Melbourne’s public byways and alleyways, its back lanes and brick walls. In 2012, Leonard Joel auctioned Mac’s personal collection, enabling the Art and Heritage Collection to purchase this rambunctious ‘documentary’ lightbox, which was made in 2007. Bar the itinerant crates and boxes, every surface of the lane and its bins is painted or tagged – the permanent and semi-permanent surfaces activated by the power of the spray can. It is one of several works purchased from the auction, including ‘One Way Street’, which you can also find on this website.