The Lost Cat Art of Ithaca, NY

https://www.lostcatithaca.com/map/

by jdsleppy • 5 years ago

42 17 5 years ago

smolder2• 5 years ago

I think it's a little weird to go to the effort of cataloging a low-effort serial graffiti like this, but I suppose the frivolousness is part of the fun.

eurasiantiger• 5 years ago

It shows that people unconsciously accept graffiti, even when it is a simple tag. Rejection stems from not being able to read and understand the writing.

Then again, one could argue that this is not graffiti in the modern sense, but simply traditional street art. I suppose it comes down to whether the artist considers ”lost cat” to be a mark of their cultural identity.

davmar• 5 years ago

i love it. this is brilliant.

varelse• 5 years ago

My favorite Ithaca moment was a t-shirt in a t-shirt store there that made fun of a New York State lottery ad campaign about what people would do with their lottery money that stated "I would buy a mountain of crack and live in a whorehouse." - Joe Blow

Never change, Ithaca!

dtompkins3• 5 years ago

This is super neat but I think understates the absolute scale of this set of graffiti. I live in Ithaca and it is just everywhere.

My favorite is the one near Sweet Melissa's (here called Large Fence Cat: https://www.lostcatithaca.com/cats/10/large-fence-cat/ )

abetusk2• 5 years ago

Fellow Ithacan here!

jason_slack• 5 years ago

And me…

smolder2• 5 years ago

Not from there exactly, but it is gorges, as they say.

TaupeRanger• 5 years ago

Spent 2 years at Ithaca College. Some of my fondest memories are of hiking and exploring the gorges.

psychomugs• 5 years ago

I'm also here; I've even seen it on cars.

TedDoesntTalk2• 5 years ago

I went to university here, but lost cat did not exist at the time. What is this about? Can anyone provide background? (The Website does not, as far as I can tell)

dtompkins3• 5 years ago

I go there now - It's a set of graffiti images that resemble a stick-figure cat with sometimes square features. They're usually on the back side of signs and things like that. There's quite a bit of it throughout Ithaca now

TedDoesntTalk2• 5 years ago

Thanks. Do you know how it started?

pcurve• 5 years ago

lol typical Cornell alumni response. We don't mention school name... instead, we'll say, "I went to school upstate".

I guess it dates back a few years.

https://ithacavoice.com/2017/11/introducing-ithaquestions-lo...

Visually, they're clearly done by several different people. Some related, some probably not, as a copycat.

ckastner• 5 years ago

We had something similar here in Vienna, Austria. A person sprayed the name PUBER all over the city [1]. The person was eventually caught, and given a 10-month prison sentence, given the total damage caused.

You can see the name all over the city now. It's everywhere. It's so common that I assume that most occurrences now stem from copycats.

[1] https://www.thelocal.at/20160217/vienna-gallery-shows-convic...

The Lost Cat Art of Ithaca, NY

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