As we prepare to celebrate 15 years of daily publishing stories and insights about street artists from around the world here on BSA, you’ll know that there are some whose work has merited hours of writing and photography much more than others – perhaps because we first knew her work here in our neighborhood of Brooklyn long before we began this site. Following her through almost every iteration and project, we’ve interviewed her on many stages and in her studio as she continues to unfold, self-examine, recognize the damage, heal herself, give to others, and create on the street, in the studio, gallery, museum, and now on screen.
SWOON: The Red Skein. DRAGO Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2022
For her second bound monograph, Caledonia Curry, AKA Swoon, reviews her path as a collection of psychological and emotional journeys, perhaps one all-encompassing voyage with concurrents and tributaries running alongside and underneath. Whether she is showing you her early work on the streets here or in Italy at a festival called FAME, her Konbit Shelter days, her Braddock Project with the church in Pennsylvania, her Perly’s Beauty Shop, her epic installations at Jeffrey Deitch, LA MOCA in Los Angeles, ICA in Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, or DIA in Detroit, we’ve reported to you on them all – so you have an idea where this new book The Red Skein will take you. It is great to see the memories and the people all pulled together here cohesively and to understand the skeins that all weave as one, whether loosely or tightly.
In many ways, it is now evident that Swoon’s path has been entirely necessary for her and for the many it has touched.
The honorable Gabor Mate describes it so well here at the beginning of the book: “Sometimes people create art and don’t even know where it came from, but it came from some deep place inside themselves. And if they can do that consciously, then it is a form of therapy. Not that it is designed that way, but it can have that effect. People can also express art unconsciously, and to the extent that it stays unconscious, it will not be very healing. So it has to be artistic expression, with some degree of consciousness, which is what her art is.”
”WOON: The Red Skein. DRAGO Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2022
A new book here features six years of selected works from a Polish graffiti writer, muralist, and professor of art and painting at a secondary school in his hometown of Olsztyn, Poland. He reckons that his life is one of ‘Planned Freestyle,’ meaning that having structure imposed upon him is very helpful in focusing his creative mind. You may quickly appreciate this characterization if you know any artists.
The collection of selected works here by Bartek Swiatecki is as luminous and optically rewarding to the viewer as they are opaque to the mind and stirring to the heart. With prolific and gently evolving abstractions in movement, you can see an artist at work, at play, and at his personal best – topping his previous work. The grandson of another painter and professor (of philology), Miroslaw Swiatecki, and the nephew of a famous painter and animator, Marek Swiatecki, perhaps it was only a matter of time before this 90s graffiti writer moved into more formal practices on canvas and walls.
In an in-depth interview, Pener reveals his sometimes complex feelings about the label of street artist, almost as if it diminishes his abilities and craft.
“Almost all of my friends I paint with are graduates of art faculties at universities or academies; most of them are architects or graphic designers,” he says. “Each of us works hard, so I get angry sometimes when we are labeled street artists because it is a huge simplification.”
The sentiment rings true, although we have never had anything but respect for street artists, regardless of their formal training. We witness a struggle for definitions at nearly every juncture along this graffiti/street art/fine art/mural art/contemporary art continuum.
In the end, the work speaks for itself, as this book can attest.
Color-blocked basketball courts appreciated from a plane, cheerful abstract murals for restaurants, hotels and cafes, and massive wood collages comprised of assembled pieces that are each finished before joining. What do these expressions of artist Scott Albrecht have to do with one another? If you study the patterns, in time, you will see.
A handsome cloth-covered hardcopy of works by the Gowanus, Brooklyn-based public/studio artist presents a selection of works from 2017-21 that have a rational color theory, smoothly dynamic geometries, and a soothing certitude in their complexity. Spotlighting public art projects, studio processes, exhibitions in New York and LA, and his residency at Hyland Mather’s place in Portugal, the collection is refined yet human.
In his description of his work, Albrecht is focused on the process as much as the product. “Most of my works are made up of a collection of pieces that go through a series of steps before they’re
assembled. Any single step per individual piece doesn’t take long–laminating, sanding, painting-but if a work has a couple of hundred pieces, and all those pieces go through the same process, time feels less linear and more compounded as I work through the steps.”
Together these steps appear to be a decoding mechanism that is necessary to understand fully. “While the work itself may be speaking to a single idea, it’s made up of a collection of individual elements coming together to form the whole,” he says. “I often equate these individual pieces to the micro-experiences we encounter that inform our relationship to an understanding.”
First encounters with Albrect’s work are gripping and calming – a deliberate collection of shapes and hues arranged in a way that is not readily apparent. It’s all about pattern recognition, says David Pescovitz, a research director at a think tank and co-editor of a tech/culture Web magazine. He writes the introduction to the book and tells us that the works are meant to be meditative, a brain exercise and visual riddle that, once solved, is rational.
“We’re so practiced at seeking patterns – searching for structure in the flood of signals coming our way, connecting the dots, trying to make sense of, well, everything–that we’re usually not aware we’re doing it.” Sighting neuroscientists and various peer review journals Pescovitz makes his case, and you are inclined to go back through the pages and let your eyes glide, parry, sense, and decode the patterns’ greater logic.
In time, you will.
Scott Albrecht: In Time. Click HERE for information about purchasing this book.
One of the exciting book releases this fall drops today in stores across the country – which is appropriate with a name like Spray Nation.
Martha Cooper. SPRAY NATION 1980s Graffiti Photographs. Edited by Roger Gastman. Prestel. Germany, 2022.
The centerpiece of the complete boxed set released this spring, this thick brick of graffiti tricks will end up on as many shelves as Subway Art; the book of Genesis that prepared everyone for the global scene of graffiti and street art that would unveil itself for decades afterward. See our review from earlier in the year, and sample some of the stunning spreads here, along with quotes by the book’s essay writers, Roger Gastman, Steven P. Harrington, Miss Rosen, Jayson Edlin, and Brian Wallis.
“Culled from thousands of her Kodachrome slides from the early 1980s, the celebrated photographer and ethnologist worked with American graffiti historian Roger Gastman over many months during the initial Covid period to select this rich collection of images of tags, walls, and pieces. Each turn of the page more profoundly deepens your understanding of the graffiti-writing culture Cooper captured with Henry Chalfant in their book Subway Art nearly forty years ago. That clarion call to a worldwide audience took years to reverberate and shake culture everywhere. With time that book became the standard root documentation for what many see as the largest global democratic people’s art movement in history.”
“To create Spray Nation, Cooper, and editor Roger Gastman pored through hundreds of thousands of 35mm Kodachrome slides, painstakingly selecting and digitizing them. The photos range from obscure tags to portraits, action shots, walls, and painted subway cars. They are accompanied by heartfelt essays celebrating Cooper’s drive, spirit, and singular vision. The images capture a gritty New York era that is gone forever.”
~ Prestel Publishing
“Martha’s photos have backed up graffiti writers’ tall tales more times than I can count. They’re like this crazy high school yearbook. As a result, Cooper is who every graffiti writer, fan, collector, and researcher wants to come and see. Most of them have not had the privilege of going to her studio and seeing the great amount of work she has amassed over the years – it’s truly awe inspiring. But every so often she pulls out yet another gem where we all scratch our heads and think, “Oh shit, what else is Martha holding?”
Roger Gastman, from the Foreward of Spray Nation
“‘If you want to publish your work, you cannot be ahead of or behind your time,’ she says as she reflects on an impeccable sense for capturing the birth of scenes like graffiti, hip-hop, and b-boying. ‘I was lucky to be at the right place and time.’”
“Martha is heralded today for capturing those trains and scenes along with Henry Chalfant in the seminal graffiti holy book Subwav Art, but few appreciate how painfully ahead of their time they were at that point.”
~ Steven P. Harrington, from Who is Martha Cooper?
“With a single snap of the shutter, Martha Cooper captured the searing rush of seeing a whole car make its debut on the line after being painted all night. You can all but hear the train thunder along the tracks and feel the ground rumble beneath your feet while a gust of wind hits your face. Is that the smell of spray paint?”
~ Miss Rosen, from Better Living Through Graffiti
“Martha took pictures of painted trains and b-boys because few bothered to at that time. Once people caught on, she considered her task completed. Martha followed the paint trail as it rose above ground. QUiK and IZ on the streets with Scharf and Hambleton. Madonna clubbing with Basquiat, Patti Astor with DONDI and FAB 5 FREDDY. Subway graffiti gradually died, street art rising from its ashes. Disinterest, drugs and AIDS decimated NYC’s cultural apex, its brightest stars perishing before their work hit the seven-figure mark – lives as ephemeral as our pieces on the train. These fleeting moments of births, peaks, and deaths live in perpetuity thanks to the foresight of Martha Cooper and a handful of others who tracked cool’s scent like underground bloodhounds.”
Jayson Edlin, from Peter Pan Haircut
“In a sense, Cooper’s photography picks up on the New Documentary approach of the early 1970s, in which independent photographers such as Larry Clark, Susan Meiselas, Jill Freedman, Mary Ellen Mark, and Danny Lyon recorded insider’s views of various closed societies of outsiders, social groups and “others” shoved aside by postwar American society in thrall to consumerism. The alienated drug users, prisoners, bikers, and prostitutes that those photographers lived among and depicted were largely invisible and had been further marginalized in America by class, race and gender prejudices. In a similar vein, Cooper sought to expose and legitimize the young subway writers as earnest and mildly rebellious artists with a purpose and a rational aesthetic agenda, rather than as the lawless urban vandals the police and the media sought to represent.”
~ Brian Wallis, from Graffiti As The People’s Art Form
Martha Cooper. SPRAY NATION 1980s Graffiti Photographs. Edited by Roger Gastman. Prestel. Germany, 2022.
Famed graffiti writer REVS detailed many an illegal ‘mission’ in his first self-published opus – the caveat is you needed to go underground in the New York subway tunnels to read about them. That was a few decades ago but even today when certain train lines are stalled between stations, which happens less frequently than it did in the ragged wild 1970-80s when many New York graffiti writers like REVS began, passengers can look out the window and read a portion of a diary entry. Over time people searching for these works discovered that this artist turned out to be a writer in more than one sense with his self-aware observations, opinions, memories, and aspirations inscribed in a personal/public voice along darkened subterranean passageways. Prolific and determined, he is credited with eventually some 230+ entries on walls that appeared during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Each are now a series of moments frozen in time, receding into New York and graffiti history.
REVS, XSOUP & ARBOR. “Life’s a Mission…Then You’re Dead”
Today the writer expands his reach, compiling with XSOUP and ARBOR the stories of many graffiti writers into a bound volume that will become an instant classic in the largely anonymous and underground realm of practitioners as well as with the growing cadre of researchers, academics and historians studying graffiti/street art/urban art today. With this new passion effort by REVS and a small team, these stories are preserved and documented, ensuring a greater understanding and appreciation for the interconnected/alienated paradox of the graffiti writer’s life and practice.
‘We preserved each individual’s truths, opinions, exuberance, pride, joy, and grudges in an effort to depict the gritty complexities of this scene we inhabit.’
Author and REVS documentarian Freddy Alva below tells us about the upcoming small-run book release that has become a hot ticket for the New York graff (and street art) scene this week.
There’s a book release in Brooklyn on Saturday, September 10, celebrating ‘Life’s A Mission Then You’re Dead’; a comprehensive 510 pages book of blood, sweat & tears-soaked stories by 100 NYC Graffiti writers. REVS and XSOUP, with help from ARBOR, compiled this loving insiders’ oral history of an idiosyncratic street culture that few are privy to.
From the introduction: ‘The history of writing, style writing, or graffiti, is brief but nebulous. Generations turn over every couple of years, scattered across the city’s many neighborhoods and extending to most places on earth. The histories of these small, fluctuating groups are mostly recorded in memory and recounted through word of mouth—some to larger audiences and some reaching only a select few. Outsiders curious about writing have been responsible for much of its documentation… The voices of many writers could together offer a more intricate, nuanced view of the world of writing… We preserved each individual’s truths, opinions, exuberance, pride, joy, and grudges in an effort to depict the gritty complexities of this scene we inhabit.’
Each cover is individually drawn by REVS with images by NYC street photographer Matt Weber aka MALTA. Book design is by Eric Wrenn with editorial assistance by Polly Watson. This is a self-published endeavor with no online link to order at the moment, limit one copy per customer and cash only at the release event 11-6pm on September 10 at: Low Brow, 321 Starr St Brooklyn, NY 11237
You hope for it, but nothing is guaranteed. Transitioning from being an artist with a respected, lauded practice of graffiti/street art to a booming professional career on canvas is not a clearly defined route. Although many have tried, are trying right now.
What does it take, you ask? A potent mix of talent, luck, fortitude, applied effort, guts, and a willingness to change one’s approach if necessary, as necessary. In our experience, the last item proves to be the most challenging.
Yo, but Mad C is mad talented.
MadC – Street To Canvas. Heni Publishing, London.
She’s made it a dedication to studying and learning the craft, fine-tuning the skills, practicing, perfecting, and persevering. All of those qualities will give you a great measure of personal satisfaction even when it doesn’t land you a big bank balance. In the case of MadC, internalizing the practices and codes of graffiti that originated with the 1960s/70s graffiti writers was core – imprinted her creative DNA forever – even though her first attempt to write was not until 1995 in Germany.
MadC – Street To Canvas. Heni Publishing, London.
It’s all here, in “Street to Canvas” and in the introduction by author Luisa Heese, who strikes a confident balance with biographical information and aesthetic description – all placed in context with MadC’s formative culture of graffiti. You track how she moved from apprentice to mastery of the vaunted styles and family of idioms broadly defining graffiti and street art. As her methods, techniques, and visual language evolved and sharpen, a clarion voice rises above it all.
We each turn of the color-drenched plates in this hardcover tome you see a boldly deconstructed freedom with forms that eventually takes flight from the moorings. The planes and shapes begin floating above, below, and over one another, finally cavorting with and supercharging the whole. It is an ever more complex process that ultimately creates deceivingly simple-looking, balanced compositions. If you would like to see the progression of an artist’s professional practice, it’s here for you without reading a word.
MadC – Street To Canvas. Heni Publishing, London.
If you peruse the texts, you are rewarded with necessary, dense, and colorful prose. You learn about the utter tenacity and whole-hearted devotion that brought this woman, now only mid-career after such a prodigious run, to the gallery, to private collections and institutions.
MadC – Street To Canvas. Heni Publishing, London.
One centerpiece of the retelling are the pages devoted to the 700 Wall she painted in Peissen, Germany in 2010. Only 15 years into the game by that time, MadC knocked out the entire glossary of graffiti, even hinting toward our mural-filled present in a massive timeline. With this aerosol autobiography she presents her story with a dramatic psychological and emotional rendering; this colossus wall of dreams and nightmares. It an adventure filled projection of the inner life of an artist in this way is unusual for such a secretive subculture. Still, the strikingly illustrative story reveals the codes of the culture that formed her, told with over-shadings of personal aspiration, disappointment, fear, and grit.
The book contains her own recounting of this passion production;
“Some days I went up and down the ladder more than 500 times; fell off the ladder 4 times; counted in days, I painted more than months every day at least 10 hours; l used 1489 cans; 158 different colours; 600+ caps; 3 different kinds of caps, 100 liters primer; 140 liters exterior paint; painted at temperatures from +2C° to +38C° in the sunshine, rain, storms, day and night; painted my biggest and smallest piece so far and overall painted my name far more than 100 times on this wall.”
MadC – Street To Canvas. Heni Publishing, London.
The contribution of this storytelling to the ‘scene’ informs us all. Completed more than a decade ago, the opus wall foreshadows where she travels next, personally and professionally. Seeing her massive murals completed in cities around the world since then you can appreciate her prophetic quality as well. Author Ms. Heese helps to draw it all into view often throughout “Street to Canvas”, including this time:
“There is no better way to describe the magnitude of The 700 Wall in how the worlds of graffiti, street art, and contemporary visual arts should or should not be related to one another, MadC crosses the boundaries of genres and discourses, the rules of milieus and aesthetic conventions, with charming ease to create a distinctive work that exists in between.”
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Almost a year ago, the Jersey City Mural Festival 2021 was launched. We covered it extensively for you here, here, here, and here on BSA.
Poet, urban author, photographer, and longtime NYC messenger Kurt Boone was there too, camera in hand and ready to record the action of the artists getting up on walls and meeting the public. Kurt throws himself into the scene and knows how to navigate while people are enjoying the atmosphere of creativity all around. With his knowledge of the street capturing graffiti, urban cycling, street photography, skateboarding, and busking, you know that his shots are on point.
Instead of uploading everything to a social media platform, Boone asked his friend Anthony Firetto to help lay out his photos to create a book. This is a genuine work of the heart – a self-published hefty book that captures a moment in time, the various players and styles, and a flashpoint in the development of Jersey City as it continues to change.
Congrats to Mr. Boone for putting this together and thanks to him for sharing it with us and BSA readers. See more about Kurt Boone and his impressive work HERE.
The political caricature is a treasured form of public discourse that still holds as much power as it did when we relied on the printing press. Able to express sentiment and opinion without uttering a syllable, the artist can sway the direction of conversation with skill, insight, and humor. Artist Robbie Conal has built a career from visually roasting the most sebaceous of our various leaders in the last few decades, often bringing his posters to the street and installing them in advertisers’ wildposting manner.
With the briefest of texts, slogans, or twisted nicknames, he reveals the underbelly as a face, dropping expectations into the sewer. If it were as simple as a political party, one might try to dismiss his work as only partisan. But Conal’s work functions more as an ex-ray, and frequently the resulting scan finds cancer.
In this newer book by author G. James Daichendt, EdD, who has written previously about Kenny Scharf and Shepard Fairey and in The Urban Canvas: Street Art Around the World (Weldon Owen, 2017), Conal is thoroughly recorded, examined, and explained. A street artist, among many other things, Daichendt calls Conal an “LA fixture and someone who is universally respected for the passion and vitality that he has brought to his work as an artist and teacher for several decades.”
Chapters of Conal’s interests and opinions are thoughtfully compiled and laid out, the artist seemingly never out of a fresh supply of political figures to skewer. As an object lesson, his practice is what draws him near and dear to the part of the street art community who uses the streets to communicate, advocate, and rebuke the hypocrisies in culture and politics
“I vividly remember the first time I saw Robbie Conal’s art because it felt like the exact thing I was meant to see but didn’t realize it until I experienced it,” says Shepard Fairey in his foreword. In his description, one can see that this artist has influenced Fairey, among others, but particularly.
“From that moment of discovering Robbie’s work forward, I had a clearer vision of what art could be… A poster on a corner utility box caught my eye … it was an image of Ronald Reagan on a bright yellow background with bold type that said CONTRA above and DICTION below. Then, a block later, I spotted another one. Now I was on the lookout, and the Contra-Diction posters seemed to be on every corner,” Fairey says. “This Contra-Diction poster spoke to me as a communiqué from a truthful voice of the people.”
High praise indeed.
ROBBIE CONAL / STREETWISE. 35 YEARS OF POLITICALLY CHARGED GUERRILLA ART. By G. James Daichendt. With a foreword by Shepard Fairey. Published by Schiffer Publishing LTD. Atglen, PA
The human-built city has at times been called a jungle, but the concrete and steel environment flatters itself if it really thinks so. The intelligence and beauty present in the natural plant world far outstrips our modern cityscape, centuries after its origination. At least a few artists have been bringing it back to us in murals over the last few years, introducing a calm, lyrical serenity that dives way beneath the conscious, touching our roots.
The young Italian painter Fabio Petani has been reintroducing a natural agenda to cities across Europe for less than a decade – in a way that only a scientist, botanist, and naturalist with a design sensibility could. What is genuinely original is his subtle re-interpretation of the formal conventions of botany, introducing them to a modern urban audience without lecturing – and rising far beyond purely decorative presentations.
In the first hardcover-bound collection of works called Spagyria Urbana, the Dinerolo-born, Turin-trained Fabio Petani impresses with scale, scope, and sensitivity. More impressive possibly is the ease with which he can command his scientific interests and his ability to infuse his works with warmth, into rather artisanal renderings of art.
The book gives sweeping vistas of his large-scale works as well as many small and personal details about his development as an artist and the tight brotherhood of Italian street artists who invited them into their fold, first as an assistant, later as a peer. With outstanding scholarship and imaginary descriptive phrasing, lead essayist Alessandra Loalè brings the artist and the work into context, instilling a greater appreciation in the reader.
The duality of Petani’s combined and complementary styles is captured eloquently and instructively as analogous to the natural forces of life. “The abstract stroke of his first artworks gives way to a further realistic approach in the creation of the compositional layout, which results in a progressively more articulate combination of simple graphic elements,” she writes “a symbol of a logical conscience which brings order to the whole structure – and botanical subjects.”
“The latter is represented in more recent pieces in two guises: a pictorial reinterpretation, defined by brush strokes and specks of color, and a more realistic graphic approach, which hints towards the typical etchings featured in botanical illustrations, enriched by the meticulous descriptions of thoroughly researched details that are proper to each species.”
In an age of awakening to our true impact on the natural world, it is perhaps more surprising that many 20 and 30-something urban artists are not drawing our attention to its power, intelligence, and inherent beauty. Petani brings the urban passersby straight to the source unflinchingly and with all the respect Mother Nature deserves.
Fabio Petani “Spagyria Urbana”. Torino, Italy. 2021. Texts by Alessandra Loale. Layout by Livio Ninni with translation by Mauro Italiano.
An updated version of his initial “Stay Melty” collection a half dozen years ago, street artist Buff Monster expands and shares with you more of his studio production, paintings, sculptures, murals and ever growing industry of collectibles in this photo book, a candy-coated volume of eccentricities that capture this moment in an artists’ evolution.
Carlo McCormick’s original text perseveres here as well, most possibly because it still captures so much of the dedicated madness that is Buff, afloat upon the detritus that demarcates our late capitalism era in dirty old New York. McCormick sagely comments on Buff’s take on “a realm of magical thinking in contemporary visual culture where a very few rare artists like Buff Monster can invoke alternate realities as palpably believable and emotionally transformative.”
You can see it in his American roots; Hawaii, Los Angeles, NYC – somehow you think he may be in Japan someday as well. For those who look upon this sweetened world full of comedic episodes as perhaps smooth sailing, the author shares a hint of the scene from behind the curtain.
“All the long and tiring days in the studio are worth it when I see the imagery resonate with a growing number of supporters. I’m fully committed to my work, often sacrificing other areas of my life in pursuit of creating the best expressions of these ideas. In spite of all the frustrations and setbacks, I’m still the same optimistic guy from Hawaii, driven to make colorful, honest and uplifting work and share it with the world.”
Born in the Bronx: A Visual Record of the Early Days of Hip Hop
Yes, Yes, Y’all, it’s been a decade since this volume, “Born in the Bronx,” was released. The images here by photographer Joe Conzo seem even more deeply soaked in the amber light of early Hip Hop culture from the late 1970s and early 80s, now taking on a deepened sense of the historical.
As the city and the original players of this story have evolved through the decades that followed the nascent Hip Hop era, it’s clearer than ever that this was nothing less than a full-force eruption, a revelation that cracked and shook and rocket-fueled an entire culture. Thanks to Conzo it was captured and preserved, not likely to be repeated.
The book is masterfully edited by Johan Kugelberg, the true visionary of this project, who established and has overseen the growth of a collection of memorabilia and history for the Hip Hop History Archive at Cornell University – which now boasts a quarter million items. A modestly thick hardcover, it’s rich in its choices. Posters, handbills, album covers, original lyrics by performers, stunning portraits backstage, on stage, on the mike, and on the street; this is a world you can immerse yourself into quickly and without pretension.
Born in the Bronx is full of gems, insider observations, interviews, and personal hand-drawn artworks. One critical cornerstone is a timeline from Jeff Chang that begins in 1963 as the boastful but failed Urban Planner Robert Moses constructed the Cross Bronx Expressway – painfully destroying and displacing people and families, severing culturally significant, vibrant areas of the borough and producing a dangerous malaise.
An ensuing blight only fueled the “white flight” from the city, leaving a growing number of dispossessed black and brown neighborhoods that suffered for decades afterward. His timeline ends in 1986 with Run DMC going platinum and a drug war ramping up to see a booming prison population. With these events as bookends, you know the music, art, dance, fashion, and performance culture that grew out of the Boogie Down was going to be commanding and resilient.
Afrika Baambatta recounts a foreword to Miss Rosen, LL Kool J does a brief “kick-off,” the Cold Crush Brothers hit the stage, and the packed crowd is enthralled. To get the full story about how to document the scene, check out Joe Conzo’s account told to Miss Rosen – the story of a shy chubby boy – the son and grandson of community activists who became his high school’s resident photographer and who parlayed subsequent connections into an exploration of music, performance, and the burgeoning Hip Hop scene at the moment it was happening.
For a richly rendered graffiti context, there is a fully realized recounting of the people and the scenes that informed it in an essay by Carlos MARE 139 Rodriguez called “What You Write?” With it, you get a true sense of a an exciting merging of music, aesthetics, society, street, creativity, and community.
The book closes with a very personal but pertinent poem, it’s short verses ducking and spinning and swaggering with pride at what the Bronx gave birth to; a global culture that continues to resonate worldwide and rock the bells.
“No ends could be made For the price we would pay Economically strapped No time for a nap
‘Cause this is about to go down
The boogie down was burning And my people yearning Just to get a piece of the pie My mind’s eye
Was as big as the sky”
~Luis Cendeno AKA DJ Disco Wiz, from “The Land Before the Rhyme”
BORN IN THE BRONX: A Visual Record of the Early Days of Hip Hop. Expanded edition published in 2020 by 1xRUN with support from ROCK THE BELLS & BEYOND THE STREETS. Detroit, MI. 2020.
The street sticker, be it ever so humble and diminutive, is profligate and sometimes even inspiring. An amalgamated scene that is anonymous, yet curiously stuck together, the organizers and sponsors of so-called sticker jams have been overwhelmed in recent years by thousands of participants.
Hand-made one-offs to slick mass-produced and custom die-cut by the hundred, these adhesive back expressions of personal branding may depict characters, slogans, witticisms, or satirical skewing of pop culture memes. Collectively these are the DNA of a global game played out in the street and in public spaces, a silent dialogue that yells quite loudly.
Artist and organizer IWILLNOT has compiled, organized, archived, and preserved this collection as a ‘field guide,’ he says, and another artist named Cheer Up has laid out page after page. It is a global cross-sample from 60 countries and a thousand artists – a treasure trove of the witty, insightful, snotty, and sometimes antisocial street bards of the moment, seizing their moment to speak and mark territory.
UNSMASHED: A Street Art Sticker Field Guide. Compiled by IWILLNOT, Designed by Cheer Up. A Collection of 1,229 full color sticker designs by 1,000 artists from more than 60 countries. Published by IWLLNOT and Cheer Up. December 2020.
In her latest mural, Faring Purth delivers a powerful reflection on connection, continuity, and the complexity of evolving relationships—a true …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
