Art or Vandalism? Artist ‘Poetry Bombs’ Thrift Stores in Miami

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What is the best way to share your favorite poem? Agustina Woodgate decides to stitch hundreds of tiny poetry tags onto vintage clothes.

As a part of the month-long O, Miami poetry festival—which inaugurated this year with the mission of sharing poetry with every Miami-Dade County resident—Woodgate and the festival coordinators picked two poems by Li Po and Sylvia Plath. For a whole month, she carried a bunch of needles with threads, snuck into the shops and sewed away buried under wrecks of garments.

(VIDEO: Twitter Poetry on the Plinth in London)

“Life is a huge dream why work so hard? – Li Po,” the label on a tweed jacket might say. Or “Even the-clouds this morning cannot mange those skirts – Sylvia Plath” may be stitched on a vintage plaid mini.

There have been other guerilla art project around the world. An artist named Olek had yarn bombed the Wall Street bull with colorful crochet overnight on a Christmas Eve. A Chilean arts collective Los Casagrande had dropped 100,000 poems from a helicopter on the Lustgarten Museum in Berlin as an anti-war statement.

Watch Olek yarn bomb the Charging Bull:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/zT0HhNvDFRQ&w=450]

Watch poetry rain in Berlin:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/5BLsIme-AFY&w=450]

The intrusive nature of guerilla art can be problematic sometimes, especially in the case of poetry storming because clothes are for sale. Luckily for the artist, the stores, don’t seem to care much, even though she had fair amount of coverage in the local media.

When she’s not stitching poetry tags, the Argentinean creative makes rugs out of recycled stuffed animal skins.

(PHOTOS: The Fine Art of Yarn Bombing)