We come with so many different shapes, sizes and abilities, yet the world is built as if there’s a “standard human” whose access and comfort takes precedent over everyone else. If you’re close enough to that artificial norm, you may not notice all of the ways in which people can be excluded.

A project called “A Sidewalk is a Wall” aims to call attention to one major barrier to accessibility: a lack of sidewalk ramps, particularly in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, where they can be exceptionally rare. Organized by Brazil-based youth disability justice movement NGO Movimento SuperAção, the project invites artists to find a sidewalk without an access ramp and decorate it. Each small work of art bears a stencil with the movement’s Instagram handle so people can learn more about the movement and call the city to request more accessibility.

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Accessibility should be a crucial part of any design that’s meant to serve people. Collectively, we have a long way to go to make this happen, but even small steps add up.

“For a wheelchair user, a sidewalk without an access ramp is a wall. And, according to the latest census, only 9% of sidewalks in São Paulo have access ramps. Therefore, to draw attention to this lack of accessibility, we invited artists to do what they do best to the city’s walls to do their art on walls that only wheelchair users are aware of.”

“This is how A SIDEWALK IS A WALL came about, a project by NGO Movimento SuperAção that took on the responsibility of raising society’s awareness about the importance of including people with disabilities. Not only because of the basic human rights principle, but also because of the obvious and inherent advantages of coexisting with differences.”

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You can learn more about the movement at Facebook.com/movimentosuperacao or by following the project on Instagram @calcadaemuro.

Indian street artist DAKU brings one of his signature text-based shadow installations to Las Vegas for the Life is Beautiful Festival 2019, using a Shakespeare quote to ruminate on the passage of time. Placed upon on the facade of a former bookstore on Fremont Street, the piece reads “very slow for those who wait, very fast for those who are scared, very long for those who lament, very short for those who celebrate.”

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The installation is invisible at night, appearing in sharp italics as the sun rises and best viewed when it’s directly overhead. Created in collaboration with global creative house justkids, the piece is a continuation of DAKU’s “Time Changes Everything” series.

Previously, the artist has suspended text over pedestrian streets in Goa and spelled out a series of words on a building facade in the first dedicated public art district in India. Check out more of his work on Instagram @daku156.

In Brooklyn, the latest iteration of BEYOND THE STREETS lets visitors check out the work of more than 150 street artists from around the world. Curated by graffiti historian and “urban anthropologist” Roger Gastman, who’s also known for co-authoring books on street art and co-producing films like Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, the show first opened in Los Angeles last year. Now, it’s up at the new 25 Kent Avenue space on the edge of Williamsburg and Greenpoint with a whole new collection of art spread out over two floors.

Among the biggest names you’ll find at the show include conceptual artist Jenny Holzer, feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls, Shepard Fairey and Takashi Murakami. Sculptures, works on canvas and immersive installations share space with a Beastie Boys installation featuring “artifacts and ephemera” from the band’s 4-decade history, a functioning tattoo parlor by Bert Krak & Alexis Ross and a room of puppets made of trash by Paul INSECT and BAST.

For Gastman, what distinguishes the show isn’t just its diverse array of work, but the fact that it celebrates artists who spent years illegally working on the street. While the developers who are drastically changing cities and making them more homogenous might actually like to see officially sanctioned murals around as a way to “clean up the neighborhood,” graffiti artists who broke the rules (and sometimes paid the price) shaped street art as we know it, says Gastman. Many of the artists in the show started working under the cover of darkness, but now have their own prolific studio practices.

“You know, this culture—which was started by youths writing their names over and over again for the sake of fame and fun and notoriety—has ballooned into a worldwide cultural phenomenon,” says Gastman in an interview with Artnet. “So many of the pioneers are still with us today. A lot of them are getting older. But let’s learn from them. Let’s respect them. And let’s preserve the history as much as we can while they’re with us, before it’s too late.”

BEYOND THE STREETS NYC opened on June 21st and will run through the end of August 2019. If you can’t make it in person, peruse the artists and their work on the BEYOND THE STREETS website and check out some of the standout pieces at Gothamist and High Snobiety.

The latest in street artist Felipe Pantone’s stunning Optochromie series splashes across the facade of the Town Ballroom concert hall in Buffalo, New York, giving it a dramatic makeover. Black and white geometric prints overlaid with prismatic pixelated colors interplay with stretched out metallic elements, all created in computer modeling programs before they were painted onto the wall.

For fans of Pantone, this is familiar imagery reimagined in a fresh new way. The self-taught multidisciplinary artist, who does a lot of gallery work as well, is known for juxtaposing graphic patterns to achieve dynamic compositions, sometimes in sculptural form. Pantone’s signature style is highly influenced by the look of computer graphics in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when he was a child

The artist, who began painting on the streets as a preteen, cites Op Art and Kinetic Art of the 1960s as additional major influences, including the work of Victor Vasarely, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Julio Le Parc and Luis Tomasello.

“I was always trying, as every graffiti writer, to stand out in the streets so I started to emphasize on the contrast pictorially ending each piece in black and white,” Pantone says in an interview with Wide Walls. “I ended up realizing that by painting so much black and white I was approaching nearly optic pieces, so I slowly started adding up the full colour spectrum, which made my pieces more visible, with fluorescent colours. Quoting Joan Fontcuberta, there are more images generated than the number which we can consume, and as the artist has to out stand and graffiti has so much to do with art, I thought I should focus my effort on remaining visible over time.”

Why, Banksy wonders, has he never been invited to the Venice Biennale? Perhaps because they knew he’d do something just like this, invited or not. The elusive British street artist set up an unauthorized stall in what appears to be the city’s famous Piazza San Marco, displaying a nine-panel oil painting of a cruise ship. The piece references the chronic problem of overcrowding in Venice due to tourist activity, leading many residents to call for a ban on cruise ships.

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Posting a video of the kiosk on Instagram (which is essentially the artist’s way of verifying that a work is his), Banksy reveals that he was ultimately told to leave due to lack of a permit.

The artist also claimed responsibility for a new mural that popped up on the wall of a private home along the canal, showing a migrant child holding a pink flare. That piece is likely a response to Italy’s recent actions against migrants, which have led to the closure of ports. Italian forces are said to have ignored ships full of refugees, allowing them to capsize with hundreds of people on board. At least 250 drowned.