The absolute highlight of my year in 2019 was organising this project. With amazing help from P1xels, we got a group of some of Melbourne’s most celebrated street artists together to create a large-scale mural eleven metres tall and thirty metres wide in Easey Street, Collingwood. The mural is a tribute to iconic New York artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and was inspired by the recently opened summer blockbuster exhibition Keith Haring & Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines at the National Gallery of Victoria. Renowned muralist Heesco created portraits of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, against an abstract background painted by street artists Conrad Bizjak and Chehehe with local graffiti writers Ling, DVATE, Phibs, Sabeth and Duke along the bottom. The decision to create the mural in the location of Collingwood also pays tribute to a significant moment in Melbourne’s cultural history, when Haring painted a mural at the Collingwood Technical School in 1984 during his first and only trip to Melbourne.
