In New York today it is Mother’s Day. Today we send out love and thanks to all the moms, grandmoms, and motherly people who have cared for us. Thank you.
This weeks pics include pieces by Chris Stain, Swoon, Imminent Disaster, Dain, Fauxreel, Shin Shin, Michael DeFeo, and Word to Mother.
Here it is – a fantastic documentary-style short about Street Art duo Broken Crow’s first trip to Mexico City and some of the stencil based installations they undertook as guests of MAMUTT Arte and the Antique Toy Museum of Mexico (MUJAM). We don’t usually see this level of sophistication in a graffiti/Street Art video, so these guys are taking it up a notch.
As you may remember from the two missives (1) (2) we posted in March for their Mexican Travelog, Broken Crow painted a total of five murals in different locations in D.F. The new video, which we proudly debut here, shows some of their work along with a very personal insight into their relationship as friends and painting partners. The larger piece entitled “Robot Thief” drew a regular crowd during it’s installation, while some of the smaller pieces were a more personal scale.
Congratulations to the Broken Crow gents and to Filmaciones De La Ciudad for making such a compelling and insightful piece. Enjoy.
Another point of interest in the video is the placement of “Robot Thief” next to a huge installation by Street Artist ROA, who also worked with the esteemed team of Roberto Shimizu of MUJAM and Gonzalo Alvarez of Mamutt Arte during his visit to Mexico previously. With friends/fans/promoters like Shimizu and Alvarez, international Street Art is quickly gaining a solid foundation in a city already blessed with a rich arts and cultural scene, historical and modern.
SABER at Opera Gallery now and Print Release Saturday
Los Angeles based artist SABER is in New York City for his solo show at Opera Gallery “The American Graffiti Artist”. The gallery is open from 11 to 7pm.
The folks at Pandemic Gallery really know how to throw a party that is at once welcoming, neighborly, and debauched. Tonight they invite you to the closing party for Leon Reid IV “Identity Theft” A Decade of Public Art.
After half decade, Elik returns with a big opening in BedStuy tomorrow at Brooklynite Gallery. Always a good show and a good time – special guest music maker the legendary DJ Kool Herc.
According to Rae and Hope at Brooklynite, “ELIK’s been hoarding scrap wood, furniture, metal signage and a hell of a lot of city trash with plans to turn this place into some sort of ‘shanty town’. He’s politely insisted we turn the space over to him and find something else to do until opening night.”
Musical Guest: DJ KOOL HERC Brooklynite Gallery is located at 334 Malcolm X Blvd., Brooklyn, New York 11233.
Phone 347-405-5976 • BrooklyniteGallery.com
Martha Cooper “Remix” Ends this Weekend
In Culver City, California Carmichael Gallery invites you this Saturday to view the landmark show Martha Cooper “Remix” before it closes. This is the last weekend this show will be on view and if you have not seen it you must go!
“Hi-Graff” is an installation-based street art exhibition that explores the concept of Graffiti as a contemporary art movement. The exhibition, which opens on May 7th 7-11pm, showcases graffiti in its most original form –collaborative murals applied directly to walls.
Artists and humanitarians Jeffrey Waldman and Dave Harmatz came up with a nice little project for Mother’s Day in The Mission neighborhood of San Francisco.
Forever Stamp
“Mission Statement: To send some much deserved love to moms and to be a part of strengthening a relationship. More than that, it was to inspire and motivate people to go out and create works of their own. To showcase how simple and cheap a project can be while still delivering a tangible product amid a fantastic and universal message. Plus we had all these old envelopes to get rid of.”
“Going Nowhere Fast” went somewhere with the pedal to the metal – mainly private collections. The almost sold out show at the Corey Helford Gallery in the Culver City section of LA flew out the door like a ’57 Chevrolet with tail fins last week so RISK, CRASH, and FREEDOM could take over the joint.
The gorgeously mounted show by English street artist D*Face is fuel injected with Pop vernacular while kidnapping some Pop masters of the last half century with prankish lo-brow witticism. Driving with almost surgical precision and fastidious attention to detail D*Face slickly amuses with Lichtenstein cells and flying knives, customized Warhol warping, and a mounted Hot Rod skull butterfly collection. For his fans these now familiar cruelly clever customizations by D*Face are amalgams of advertising-soaked memories and associations – a happy blast to an inexact past, graphic images afloat in the timeless area of a citizen/consumer mind.
With the help of French Street Artist 3TTMAN, a social fundraising/art/tshirt project in Spain called The N-spired Story Project built a homeless shelter. 3TTMAN is one of the first artists for this project, and the design of the house is super cool.
The foldable painted concept house on wheels is playfully offered as a possible solution to shelter the homeless and is colorfully striped and patterned. Did you ever see those red tents that homeless people in Paris have been living in thanks to the “Children of Don Quixote”? According to the Wikipedia page on the red-tent project, “the NGO Médecins du monde (MDM) had taken the initiative, in 2005, to give tents to all homeless people in Paris, in order to provide them with minimal privacy and to make misery visible.”
Dude, one time the Fire Department kicked everybody out of our building, which happens periodically in artist-settled buildings in Brooklyn because building codes are not even a consideration when you are building your fantasy chicken shack inside an old factory for art shows and performances and seances and what-not. Everybody had to find a new couch to sleep on pronto! But that’s only temporary homelessness, and not completely dire like a lot of people’s situations.
In artist communities like those in Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Greenpoint Brooklyn, grassroots non-profit non-corporate collectives and groups have been doing projects together for years that involve community, collaboration, joint action, and art. Street Artist Swoon used the power of community organizing and planning to hatch an idea for building the “Konbit Shelter” project in Haiti. 100% grassroots, that sustainable building project raised funds from donors and Swoon was instrumental in the conception and construction of those shelters. Currently she is working on similar community-based projects for displaced persons.
It’s uplifting and spirit-raising to see these N-spired projects pop up seemingly out of nowhere based on goodwill. According to the website of the company that created it, the project is part of a PR/marketing campaign in the “Social” space, perhaps for clients like those listed on their site. According to the materials on the site, a percentage of proceeds from this project go to charity.
If you wish to learn more about the project The N-spired Story click on the link below:
Troy Lovegate AKA Other (image courtesy of the curators)
Startingon May 12th, a New York City home will play host to a new type of street art exhibit. While the community concentrates on artists creating larger murals in often controversial public spaces, the subtle nuances of the genre are lost in the hype. Up Close and Personal explores the craft of artists who usually work in large-scale formats outdoors, by challenging them to create pieces that conform to the intimacy of a residential indoor setting. The works will be no larger than 30 x 30 inches, as small as a Metro card and exhibited on the walls of a small city apartment. As street art continues to morph into an all-encompassing art genre, Up Close and Personal will showcase works by talented artists whose work is impressive both indoors and outdoors. Up Close and Personal is curated by RJ Rushmore of Vandalog, and Keith Schweitzer and Mike Glatzer of M.A.N.Y.
Participating artists include:
Aiko, Chris Stain, Clown Soldier, Don Leicht, Edible Genius, Elbowtoe, Gaia, How & Nosm, Jessica Angel, John Fekner, Know Hope, Logan Hicks, Mike Ballard, OverUnder, R. Robot, Radical, Retna, Skewville, Tristan Eaton, Troy Lovegates aka Other and White Cocoa
Logan Hicks. Detail on anodized aluminum. (image courtesy of the curators)
Dates: May 12th– 15th, 2011
Times:
May 12th, 7 – 9pm
May 13th, 7 – 9pm
May 14th, noon – 9pm
May 15th, noon – 7pm
Note: Due to the limited exhibition space, people may be admitted in block times every half-hour.
Location: Apartment on the Upper West Side (217 West 106th Street, Apartment 1A, New York, NY 10025) – Between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenues.
Cost for entrance: Free
M.A.N.Y. (Murals Around New York) is a team of artists and curators who organize street and contemporary art exhibitions around the United States.
Vandalog is an international street art blog that covers the art scene as it evolves. Posting interviews, art news, show critiques and photographs of relevant works, Vandalog has gained a loyal following among the street art world. Founded in 2008 by then teenager RJ Rushmore, Vandalog now includes various writers and publishes across a number of social media platforms. Vandalog was Arts Media Contact’s top art blog of 2010.
Shai Dahan misses New York Street Art. But he’s discovering new inspiration in Sweden, and finding an emotional component in his work he didn’t know before, and its’ exciting. As the Street Artist and fine artist prepares for his solo show May 27th at Artpace and Us Gallery in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city, he is also bringing the natural world to the streets.
“Finding Street Art in Sweden is like trying to find a deer in Manhattan,” Shai remarks as he gets a little nostalgic for the layers of built up wheat pastes and posters that clump together in certain parts of New York’s streets. “I think that was a huge part of the inspiration as well – finding the torn wheat pastes and dripping dry stencils on the street. They really had my mind think about texture and color combinations.”
“It is a bit funny to me that in New York, with the exception of a short cab ride to Central Park, I had a lack of access to nature and animals, whereas here I miss the street art that I could find with the ease of taking a cab ride down to the Lower East Side.”
You can see the effect of Shai’s new home in his work; horses, deer, zebras, birds are featured through out. Can’t imagine that there are too many zebras wandering through his backyard. Thinking about that a little, maybe his animals are more symbolic than literal. “The natural elements, the green forest, it all has a huge inspirational affect on my work and me I think for me, the biggest transition was influence to inspiration,” he explains. “When I was in New York, the city, the art on the streets, the culture, all of it really had a big influence on me even if I didn’t think it did. It all came out one way or another into my work. Once I moved here, I really was more inspired than influenced.”
Of course he has brought his guns from New York. His bird guns that is. And now deer guns too. A busy entrepreneur on the New York street art scene, his Bird Gun blog has given shine and opportunity to a number of street artists looking to stretch their wings. His own design of the same name, an iconic merging of a New York pigeon with a revolver, is undergoing a reinterpretation in his new home, and taking on additional meaning for him as he reflects on “man v. nature” mythology. “The animal/gun hybrid always expressed the never-ending need for animals to protect themselves or feel like they had a choice to fight back. We only hunt animals because we feel we know how to pick up a gun. The animals are just fighting adaptation. When humans kill animals, it is considered a sport but when any of these animals harm a human, it is a threat or savagery.”
You have heard people refer to living in New York as a rat race, and with good reason. For Dahan in his new environment, the inclusion of so much animal imagery in his new work has been a study of the relationship between humans and animals. “Those paintings really symbolize the “fight or flight” aspect of the natural world. Animals can’t really fight back and we humans tend to feel very brave knowing we can have power over them. We hunt for fun; we set fires and cut trees down. It makes us feel powerful. It is a very strange dynamic.”
It’s relevant to explore core assumptions about the world with regularity, especially during these times of continuous tumult. As an artist, change can be a strong motivational tool to re-examine work and open areas previously unexplored. It looks like Shai Dahan is on a journey and he’s sharing it with you.
Taking the broad view of the new work, Shai reflects on his growth, “I am very proud of the work for the solo show. I think I am most proud of the pieces because they are very emotional. My paintings for this show really show the level of emotion and transition I endured when I moved. I began working for this show only a month or so after I moved here and you can really see the different emotions I was going through. It is expressed a lot by the colors, the movement in the brush strokes, the imagery itself…all of it really is what I went through as an artist moving from the Big Apple to…the small Smorgasbord.”
Among the thousands of people who make up the graffiti community around the world, there are few names that carry the same legendary quality as SABER. Born in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, SABER was raised by creative parents and discovered his passion for art at an early age. At 13, his cousins introduced him to graffiti when they took him to see the spray paint-covered Belmont Tunnel. From that moment on, he was hooked. After honing his skills on local walls, SABER joined MSK, and was later inducted into legendary piecing crew AWR.
SABER was already a fixture in the Los Angeles graffiti scene by 1997 when he completed the largest graffiti piece ever created. His piece on the sloping cement bank of the Los Angeles River was nearly the size of a professional football field, and took 97 gallons of paint and 35 nights to complete. In a famous photograph—taken by his father just after it was finished—SABER stands on the piece and appears as a tiny speck amid a giant blaze of color. It catapulted SABER to legend status in the graffiti world.
SABER began exhibiting in his fine art in 2002. While known for his elegant and aggressive abstract letterforms, SABER’s artistic output has also included drippy, surreal cityscapes and his painstakingly rendered “new reality” canvases. SABER has also worked corporate projects with Hyundai, Scion, Boost Mobile, Roland Sands Design, Montana Paint Company, and Karmaloop. His monograph, SABER: MAD SOCIETY, complete with stories of his graffiti misadventures, was released by Gingko Press in 2007 and is now in its second printing.
In October 2010, SABER released a video in which the year’s heated debate about healthcare was spray painted over the American flag. While some saw it as desecration, SABER advocated for healthcare reform in the video, revealing that he had epilepsy and was un-insurable. This work led SABER to create a large group of American flag paintings called the Tarnished series.
In 2011 SABER’s artwork is featured in two museum exhibitions, “Street Cred” at the Pasadena Museum of California Art and “Art in the Streets” at MoCA Los Angeles.
Brooklyn-based, Gabriel Specter is internationally known for precise street installations that revitalize forgotten environments. Taking an anthropological approach to his subject matter defines Specter’s aesthetic. Striking paintings and sculptures document change, celebrate the marginalized and ultimately become monuments to common urban experience.
In his first Chicago show Specter addresses the culture of repetition in street art that he notoriously denounces. He generally refuses to work in multiples, but in this work, REPEAT OFFENDER, Specter plays with repetition on his own terms.
First, he garners images from previous projects to hand-paint, carve and paste a central, large scale 8’ x 8’ piece. Using that as a reference he re-paints selected sections resulting in works that vary in scale, color and medium from that of the original. Specter stretches his muscles in figurative and abstract painting with this new body of work. Each piece is meticulously made employing a range of techniques and materials to impart an authentic, ‘stolen-from-the-street’ quality.
We will be hosting an event on Saturday May 14 from 6-10pm for Gabriel Specter: Repeat Offender at Pawn Works; Artist will be in attendance.
PawnWorks
1050 N. Damen Ave.
Chicago, Illinois 60622
A Colorful Sprightly Enigma Emerges from his Private Brooklyn Shack
With visual mashups and genre-defying glee, Street Art in 2011 is making new rules for itself almost monthly at this point. Breaking from many graffiti and street art traditions there appears a new generation of what we’re calling “Storytellers” on the street today. It’s a New Guard of visual omnivores weaned on MTV and nourished by the Internet who consider all of recorded high art and low art history as an unending supply of small buckets available to dip their brush into. With individual, personal, frequently one-off pieces that are laboriously handmade this D.I.Y. decentralized army is hitting the streets with paper, brush, home made wheat paste, and other decidedly lo-tech materials.
With just a couple of years on the New York scene, El Sol 25 is a droll mashup enigma, pasting up fully formed composites of people in doorways and on construction walls. Dropping a mix-n-match irreverent Girl Talk style, the warmth and continuity come from the fact that everything is handmade and painted. Pulling images from magazines and books and using anything from skulls to tutus to dildos and Obama, El Sol 25’s plundering is almost Dadaist except that the outcome is reliably figurative, and each element is meaningful to him. But as to how you interpret it, the artist is happy if you make your own story.
Frankly, many a viewer doesn’t know what to think or who this is coming from – as El Sol 25 has let the art do the talking until now. And as the odd and sometimes humorous eye-popping work keeps appearing, it has also been gathering a buzz from street art fans wanting more details on this anonymous artist. What are these figures of? What do they mean? And why is the work primarily in one neighborhood?
“Williamsburg is an amazing place to work for me because you’ve got your Puerto Ricans on the block, your hipsters on the block, your old Polish ladies on the block, and everybody in between and they are all appreciating the work. That motivates me. It makes me feel like we are not as separated as we like to think we are. We are actually all together, “ explains El Sol 25 on a recent tour of his hand-built “shack” inside in a Brooklyn basement. 60’s jazz – John Coltrane and friends – spins on a vinyl platter on the old record player in the corner of the one room structure as the alert artist sits next to the Teepee he’s been sleeping in. Every part of this environment is his, an inner sanctuary of peace to seek spiritual tranquility, and of course to make collages and paint them.
A former graffiti writer from down south, he’s onto something more multi-dimensional and challenging artistically now. No longer writing, the self-described “sort of” hippie is seeking to be in tune with his personal quest of spirituality and with all receptors switched to “On”. Preparing for a fine art show in a gallery in early summer the dial is at full throttle as he is sending and receiving energies and color and images and messages all at once – thus the need for the sublime serenity of this shack.
With the opportunity to see many works in progress, including some for the upcoming show which pairs the artist with poets, Brooklyn Street Art sat down for the first public interview of El Sol 25.
At the end of the posting, be sure to see the brand new video “Howdy”, directed by Conor Hagen, to see the process of producing just one piece.
Brooklyn Street Art:A lot of your work is inspired from a variety of sources – where do you get your inspiration from right now? El Sol 25: I get my inspiration from everything from walking to work or bad music or bad films or great films or good days or bad days. I get my inspiration from everything. I’m dependent on my work spiritually so I really like the idea of incorporating anything and everything into it. I take inspiration not just from what I’ve put on a pedestal – I enjoy everything.
Brooklyn Street Art:Have you always been an omnivore like this? El Sol 25: No, not at all. When I was first coming up and learning about expressing myself on the streets I had a specific idea. I was like, “It can only be this way and it can’t have any outside influences” and I learned very quickly that that is not fun. That’s not a way of integrating your everyday life into your work so I learned very quickly to let that go and let my work be as much a part of my life as my life is a part of my work.
Brooklyn Street Art:Do you see a connection between what you used to write and the work that you are doing today? El Sol 25: I think the obvious difference for me, coming up as a graffiti writer, was just that a lot of time what motivates me is in the action. Seeing the aftermath of someone’s work to me is to appreciate that they took a huge risk to do it – to express whatever they wanted to express. When I was doing graffiti it was that immediate gratification, that immediate stimulation.
Now I can feel “in the moment” and it and does something that is very stimulating and wonderful and it takes me somewhere else. But I can also observe it the next day and appreciate it just as much as your everyday man can.
Doing graffiti, you do it and some people appreciate it, and most people don’t. They don’t like it and they want it gone. But with Street Art it’s little bit more for everyone, and I like that a whole lot more than the constraints of the graffiti culture.
Brooklyn Street Art:There is another Street Artist who sometimes puts pieces up and then walks around the block and comes back and hangs out and listens to people’s conversations about it. Do you ever think about the stories people make about your work?
El Sol 25: Often times, most of the time. When I’m creating a collage I have a very specific attachment to it symbolically. When I’m painting it, it changes. When I see it on the street, it changes. So I like the idea of having these cryptic messages that people can absorb in whatever way they want. You can explain to someone the meaning behind a painting until you are blue in the face, and it’s not going to matter. They are going to have their own personal connections to it and that makes things interesting for me.
Brooklyn Street Art:Sometimes people do have an agenda and they have a specific message in their work but there is no way to really control the message. El Sol 25: My hat’s off to them if they can but I’m sure you can relate – Art is a living thing – you learn from it. If you let it, art can be very transcendental. I learned very early on down south that you couldn’t spell it out for people. They’re going to figure out their own stories and if you embrace that, then that can bring more power to your work.
Brooklyn Street Art:Can you talk about the process? I think people on the street wonder what it took to get to the finished piece. El Sol 25: I collect magazines, for a year sometimes. I recycle through them over and over and sort of absorb new elements that maybe I didn’t see before and I didn’t appreciate. I definitely go through books over and over and collect pieces for a long time until I feel like there is something there that I can connect to. And then there is the building of the original collages… and a lot of time I make these huge series of collages that I organize in a way that I feel like, “I can feel good about painting this as a street piece, or as a canvas piece in a gallery” So a lot of times I’m just collaging constantly.
I’m really into the idea right now of making figures that are multi-gender, multi-race, multi-everything, because I don’t want to speak to one specific demographic. I want everyone to take something from the work. I definitely don’t want to speak only to people who are into the “street art” aspect of things. I think it is silly. I think people are going to connect to your work either way or I think it’s very considerate to think of how to connect with everyone, not just one type of person. That’s what ultimately motivates me so I definitely keep that in mind throughout the whole process.
Brooklyn Street Art:How long does it take to paint one piece? El Sol 25: It depends. Sometimes I give myself small projects where I can do a lot of work in a small amount of time. Other times I really need to have some “alone” time where I need to have some time to reflect on my life and my work and my interactions with people I love and I definitely have times when I need to do pieces that are elaborate and pronounced – when I’m trying to work some things out. So sometimes it takes me an hour to do a piece, or sometimes it takes me two days.
Brooklyn Street Art:Why wouldn’t you just photocopy or scan and print one of your collages and enlarge it on a large printer and paste it. Why is it more important to hand-paint your work? El Sol 25: A lot of artists do that and I think that’s a great way of taking an idea and making it large and be able to put it all over the place and I certainly enjoy some of those works a lot. But for me personally I really like the idea of putting so much love into something that it is very specific to the passerby’s experience. I’m sort of a hippie so I really like the idea of putting a lot of love into a piece and for people to respond to that.
Brooklyn Street Art:Where do get your sense of humor? El Sol 25: My mom, definitely. She’s the wild one. My dad’s the “by-the-book” OCD one – that’s where I get that. My mom is the life of the party, “I’m gonna make flan for everyone and they all have to have a piece and tell me what they think!”
Brooklyn Street Art:Right! So she is fully engaged. El Sol 25: She’s fully engaged. Brooklyn Street Art:But not in an overbearing way. El Sol 25: Sometimes in an overbearing way but for the most part she’s lovely. Brooklyn Street Art:So she celebrates the humor in life and we can see a lot of humor in your art. El Sol 25: It’s there. It’s dark and it’s fun and I think people can take more than one idea from it as opposed to some artists who may have a very specific idea and that’s great and I’m glad you’re expressing that idea but that’s not what I’m doing.
Brooklyn Street Art:You use many historical references, historical figures in your pieces. You put in faces of presidents and they are wearing panties and basketball jerseys and you mash up history with pop art and pop culture and it can be very humorous and intensively detailed. El Sol 25: Yeah the humor is definitely from my mom and it definitely a direct response to a lot of the artwork that is out there. I mean I love anyone who is willing to go out and take the risk and express themselves but I’m a little more interested in people who are provoking thought and provoking an emotional response.
You can be like, “I’m badass. Check out how badass I am” but you are really only expressing one thing.
Brooklyn Street Art:Badassness?
El Sol 25: Yeah, and coming up as a graffiti writer I already experienced that. I already experienced feeling badass. “I just conquered that space! I’m badass!” But now I’m more interested in connecting with everyone, not just people in the graffiti scene or any scene. I love the idea of speaking to everyone. So that motivates the humor behind my work – take it a little seriously but not too serious.
Our weekly interview with the street hits some bright notes including new arrivals from El Sol 25, Specter, and Faile along with some shots Futura did of HAHA in Melbourne and even a taste of Kentucky Street Art.
The roll call this week; Bast, Billi Kid, Clown Soldier, El Sol 25, Faile, L.E.T., QRST, Rae, Romi, S, and Specter.
Stay tuned on BSA this week as we’ll bring to you an interview and studio visit with enigmatic El Sol 25. This self described hippie artist has bounded onto the scene in the last three years with his colorful, witty and well executed hand painted collages.
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BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
Did you ever see those red tents that homeless people in Paris have been living in thanks to the 
