In a quest to evoke a faster fix from city authorities, a lone street artist going by the name Wanksy is highlighting holes in the ground with (NSFW) spray paintings sharing one thing in common: the rough but instantly recognizable shape of a phallus.

Like Hanksy, Wanksy is a play on Banksy, a world-renowned art activist. Found all around Manchester, England, Wanksy’s penis-shaped pothole sketches are perhaps crude but they serve more than one point. First, they provoke public calls to officials to clean them up while also filling in the holes. Second, but equally important for the safety of the artist, the phallus represents an easy-to-draw figure that can be sketched quickly with less risk of getting hit bye a vehicle. Third, the rough markings serve as interim warnings to drivers who might not see a water-filled hole at night.

Though the paint washes away over time, making these temporary, this response from a local council member shows that the powers that be are not particularly amused: “Has this person, for just one second, considered how families with young children must feel when they are confronted with these obscene symbols as they walk to school? Not only is this vandalism, but it’s also counter-productive. Every penny that we have to spend cleaning off this graffiti is a penny less that we have to spend on actually repairing the potholes.”

The notion of highlighting or filling in potholes by activists takes many forms beyond this novel approach, including a Chicago tile artist who fills in holes with mosaics, a guerrilla gardener who plants pansies in these street voids and even a pothole robin hood who steals asphalt from the city to fill in gaps with his own work and time. In the grand scheme, one could argue that this newest contributor is somewhat juvenile, but if it solves a real-world urban infrastructure problem, it is hard not to smile at least a little at his attempt to lighten the mood while fixing city streets.

An uniquely elegant solution to a dirty everyday problem, these gorgeous handcrafted tile mosaics are turning unfilled potholes back into functional pieces of city street surface all over Chicago.

This time with an emphasis on beautification, mosaic maker Jim Bachor is back at it again. He is somewhat widely known in the area for using Chicago flags and and other city-themed infill to patch problematic holes in the urban fabric previously.

More on the artist’s background and inspiration: “Volunteering to work on an archaeological dig in Pompeii helped merge these two interests in to my art. In the ancient world, mosaics were used to capture images of everyday life. These colorful pieces of stone or glass set in mortar were the photographs of empires long past. Marble and glass do not fade. Mortar is mortar. An ancient mosaic looks exactly as intended by the artist who produced it over two millennia ago. What else can claim that kind of staying power? I find this idea simply amazing.”

In part, his work on the streets aims to draw attention to the 500,000+ potholes that remain unfixed at any given time, in part a byproduct of the harsh temperature shifts from winter to summer and back again (or as is said in the Midwest: ‘winter and road repair’ seasons).

“Using the same materials, tools and methods of the archaic craftsmen, I create mosaics that speak of modern things in an ancient voice. My work locks into mortar unexpected concepts drawn from the present … it surprises the viewer while challenging long-held notions of what a mosaic should be. Like low-tech pixels, hundreds if not thousands of tiny, hand-cut pieces of Italian glass and marble comprise my work.”

In a city with over a half-million open potholes, one artist is helping address the problem and raising awareness by installing his own creative patches, filling them piece by piece with colorful tiles.

Jim Bachor has been making mosaics for years, and has turned his craft toward the pressing and persistent problem of dangerous potholes in the Chicago area, particularly bad after an especially cold winter.

Variations on the colors and overall design of the Chicago city flag frame text and digits, from self-titled ones (reading simply ‘POTHOLE’) to phone numbers of local car repair shops or individual identification strings.

At dozens of dollars per fix, the work itself is hard to scale but does bring the broader problem to the attention of passers by, as well as the city itself as the project makes its way into the media.