About Graffiti Museum

Hello!
My name is Alexey Melnikov and I’m founder of the first and only Graffiti Museum in the country and I love cake “kartoshka”.

Contact details
Our Museum doesn’t have an exhibition hall yet — that’s our next step — but in reality it has the biggest exhibition in the world, just go outside and look around.

Have you remarks, requests, any ideas re Graffiti Museum growth and development, please do not hesitate to send me a personal e-mail at leshamelnikov@gmail.com or Facebook or VK.

Museum History
Once on my return from London I noticed small animal stencils on the walls in the busiest places of the city which reminded me of leaflets from “12 Monkeys”. I suspected somebody was thinking over an affair discussing it in public while people were busy with their own lives and didn’t actually care about those stencils. For a time I was in exiting expectation of the coming Doomsday waiting for somebody creeping out of the ground with an unknown virus that will kill the whole city within a day (to be honest – I’m still waiting). Meanwhile, as all film stars who collect newspapers articles, I started to make photos of stencils. And that was the beginning of my collection.

Every week I went outside to comb desert yards and streets of St. Petersburg for new stencils, while Doomsday didn’t come and I decided to share collection with my friends via website www.urbanizm.ru. A year past and new stencils became rare in the city, that’s when I had to choose – whether to quit the idea or to begin a serious collection. An idea struck me to ask all my friends for stencils from their journeys over the world and that’s how my collection became international, but still with seldom updates, I wanted more! My next step was a request to all website visitors to send me any stencil they will notice in any place of the world. Hah! That was the deal!

I still feel great gratitude to absolutely unknown to me people for their photos of graffiti seen in their cities, realizing that there are lots of people who watch around and notice beauty among dirt and destroy.

Graffiti Museum foundation was next step in the collection development. There were several reasons for this: huge enlargement of the collection, and a longstanding decline of museum life in the country (allover the world museum is an interesting and cool thing while beer is cool in our country) and other different trifles.

Targets and Super Mission
This website is just the beginning. Going forward I plan to open a comprehensive modern museum, perhaps a small but really cool one and enlarge list of goods we are eager to offer with GRAFFITI MUSEUM trademark for both nonprofessional admirers and artists.

Though above is nothing in comparison to prejudice that graffiti make city landscape ugly and spoil it. Our global mission is to change people attitude to graffiti culture.

Pallid statistics
Museum collection now includes over 4000 graffiti photos from 180 cities of 72 countries. This is the largest structured collection in the world.