KnittaPlease

The columns at the National Gallery of Art are tagged in 2009.

Image courtesy of flickr user The Shopping Sherpa

KnittaPlease is a group of anonymous knitters who have been tagging the urban environment with yarn bombings since 2005. You've probably seen them somewhere in the city: a meter, a stop sign, a tree, and on and on. It started as a "response to the dehumanizing qualities of an urban environment. By inserting handmade art in a landscape of concrete and steel, she adds a human quality that otherwise rarely exists." The softness of the fabric in conjunction with the building materials is a new type of spatial graffiti. For a while, on the KnittaPlease website, you could download tags, print them out and attach them to your own knitting graffiti, and they accumulated projects all over the globe, expanding their network far beyond the initial Texas crew. (There is a Knitta Book that is a compilation of global tags in the works). There is also a blog which chronicles their travels and artwork. They have also started doing ad campaigns for clothing companies, apparently? It will be interesting to see how they ride the line between mainstream advertising and underground art culture...