School's In

In recent People Doing Cool Things For A Cause news, we have RE:FORM SCHOOL, an event taking place last weekend throughout the St. Patrick's Old Cathedral School building in NYC. A combination art show/event series designed to raise awareness for American public school reform, there was everything from Shepard Fairey and Marc Ecko installations to a retro bake sale and a poetry slam workshop for kids by the WORLD UP Human Orchestra. Read more here, and on a similar note, go see Waiting For "Superman," a documentary on lagging public school education that came out on 10/8.

Text Molly O'Brien

Graffiti Two Ways

Remember carving your initials into your desk in elementary school and how satisfying it was to mark a piece of your own territory, even something as silly as a fake piece of wood? Well, here are two ways to take that to the next level. You can check out the Flickr pool of “The Knitting Graffiti Group" , full of pictures of knit “tags” in public places, from colorful yarn flowers on playground fences to scarf-like tubes around trees. It may not be spray paint or wheat paste stickers, but yarn proves to be a pretty cool graffiti alternative.

For another option, there’s Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Art, a Taschen book that brings together urban art, graffiti and performance art all over the globe into one tome. Everyone from Banksy and Jenny Holzer to Barry McGee and Shepard Fairey is represented. Sure to be a fun, fascinating read.

Text Molly O'Brien