Wheat-Pasting in Denver: Mark Sink

Denver has embraced street art. There are city grants that celebrate mural-making, intended to enrich communities and prevent graffiti. Crush Walls, RiNo's annual street-art festival, documents much of that neighborhood's wall art for a year, going so far as to map out each mural or installation by intersection. With the rise in love for murals, where does that leave other, non-mural forms of street art?

Wheat-pasting, the act of using a liquid adhesive to put up artworks or posters, falls in that "other" category. The art form, largely popularized by such artists as Shepard Fairey, is accessible; the paste can be made at home, or wallpaper paste can be used. Wheat-pasting has roots in graffiti and often resides in the same gray area as that medium. Mark Sink, fine-art photographer and co-founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, uses wheat-paste for The Big Picture, a series that spans the Month of Photography and beyond. For The Big Picture, Sink takes images from local, national and international photographers and puts them up as large-scale wheat-pastes around town. Here's a look at his approach, the fifth in a series on wheat-pasting in Denver.