Asheville’s I-240 street art makes CNN

The “Lexington Gateway” I-240 mural from Arts2People and the Asheville Mural Project appears alongside art from Portugal, NYC, the Netherlands and Singapore.

Great Asheville quotes:

Gino Tucillo of Asheville, North Carolina, said street art is a familiar site in his city. “Sometimes it’s beautiful and interesting graffiti and other times it’s beautiful elaborate murals that just show up randomly on local business walls,” Tucillo said in a CNN iReport. “Much of it finds a home with a lot of appreciation for quite a while until someone replaces it with something new.”

Whether graffiti should be criminalized, however, can be subjective.

“If it’s just random tagging to scar property and identify someone’s ego — it’s a crime,” Tucillo said. “However, when you happen to walk through some dilapidated back alley and you find a giant, beautiful, sweet face of Yoda staring at you on some old forgotten brick wall and it simply says ‘Jedi’ next to it, that to me expresses something powerful.”

Read the CNN article here: From graffiti to galleries: Street vs. public art