Sidewalk Art

The lamentable state of Russia’s roads and sidewalks has long been fertile ground for memes and jokes. Irkutsk artist Ivan Kravchenko decided to turn the problem into an art project. For over two years he has been patching ruts in city sidewalks with colorful ceramic tiles.

- Yulia Skopich

If you plug in the hashtag #заплатки_для_города (“patches for the city”) on Instagram, you will see several dozen photos in which eye-catching “patches” stand out against a background of grey, chipped sidewalk. The Instagram account dares followers to undertake something of a quest: artist Ivan Kravchenko posts photos of his latest installations and challenges his followers to find them.

“A lot of people don’t stop there, and they start trying to track down earlier examples of my work around the city. They send me direct messages and send photographic proof,” Kravchenko says. “I totally love the idea of a quest and am only sorry that it was not me but my subscribers who thought it up.”

When he finished high school, Kravchenko never suspected he would become a ceramics artist. He actually entered Irkutsk State Transport University with the intention of studying mechanical engineering and robotics. But during his third year he realized he had chosen the wrong path. Bored with his studies, he often found himself sketching in the margins of his notebooks, and his friends praised the art they saw there.