OLEK‘s entire studio apartment installation will be included in 40 under 40: Craft Futures, a group exhibition curated by Nicholas Bell at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC.
40 under 40: Craft Futures features forty artists born since 1972, the year the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s contemporary craft and decorative arts program was established at its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery. The exhibition investigates evolving notions of craft within traditional media such as ceramics and metalwork, as well as in fields as varied as sculpture, industrial design, installation art, fashion design, sustainable manufacturing, and mathematics. The range of disciplines represented illustrates new avenues for the handmade in contemporary culture.
All of the artworks selected for display in the exhibition were created since Sept. 11, 2001. This new work reflects the changed world that exists today, which poses new challenges and considerations for artists. These 40 artists are united by philosophies for living differently in modern society with an emphasis on sustainability, a return to valuing the hand-made and what it means to live in a state of persistent conflict and unease.
Nicholas R. Bell, The Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator of American Craft and Decorative Art at the Renwick Gallery, organized the exhibition. The museum hopes to acquire works by every artist featured in the exhibition to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Renwick Gallery. Click here to learn how you can help in this effort.
Select works from 40 under 40:Craft Futures provided inspiration to the designers of Washington Design Center’s 2012 DreamHome. Visit dcdesigncenter.com for more information.
1st floor, Renwick Gallery (Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street N.W.)
July 20, 2012 – February 3, 2013
Gaia: Urban Interventions December 10 to December 17
Gaia: Urban InterventionsLocation: Montserrat House, 2016 9th St. @ U St., Washington, DC
Gaia will have a full-room installation at the (e)merge Art Fair, September, 22- 25 (info).
Irvine Contemporary is pleased to present Gaia: Urban Interventions, an exhibition of new works on canvas and panel and on-site installations. Exhibition location: Montserrat House (2016 9th St. @ U St., Washington, DC).
Following on recent projects and exhibitions in Chicago, Baltimore, New York, and Atlanta, Gaia returns to Washington for his second solo exhibition with Irvine Contemporary. Over the past two years, Gaia has been expanding his imagery for interventions in urban environments to addresses the history of cities, urban design, and the failed utopias of modernist re-development. Gaia’s recent imagery of the icons of modernist design and architecture are now combined with his “messenger animal” imagery, most notably his recent use of the carrier pigeon, a bird associated with human communication and wartime sacrifice.
Gaia’s street work and studio work follow a double logic for the contexts of sites and locations. Gaia has become a master of placement on city walls streets and street locations where his work performs a reverse-vandalism, providing viewers an engaging surprise and moment of reflection where there once was merely decay, abandonment, desensitizing neglect, or the numbing regulation visual space. In his studio work, Gaia brings the questions of the contemporary city and the environment into layered reflections on canvas and panel through a combination prints, paintings, and de-collage works with found materials. His craftsmanship in print-making, drawing, and direct painting cut across all forms of his street and studio works.
Gaia will also be exhibiting with Irvine Contemporary at the (e)merge art fair, September 22 – 25, Capitol Skyline Hotel, Washington DC.
About the Artist
Gaia grew up in New York City and recently graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. His studio work and gallery projects have been exhibited in Brooklyn, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. His work has been documented and featured in several recent books on urban art, including, Beyond the Street: The 100 Leading Figures in Urban Art (Berlin, 2010). Gaia lives and works in Baltimore, MD and Brooklyn, NY.
This weekend brings a Spring bounty of delicious Street Art related openings in many cities across this great country of ours. But FIRST, this OLD SKOOL Romanic Boogie Down Production …
Pump Up the Sculpture Jam from SAM3
Sticker Phiends in AZ
Tempeh is a soy product and meat substitute originally from Indonesia. Tempe is a city in Arizona that is hosting the 4th giant Sticker Phiends show tonight. Stickers continue to grow in influence in Street Art and in private collections in black books and refrigerator doors and this is a cool show that gives them away and sells them. They have limited edition “Sticker Phiends” tee-shirts designed by Brooklyn street art collective Robots Will Kill. Also cold beer. Possibly tempeh too because Chris RWK is a good veggie.
FREE HANDOUTS provided by our sponsors
ALL ART for $ale!
Limited Merch for $ale!
Drinks with ID – 21+
Opens at 8pm April 8th!
Cartel Coffee Lab
25 w. University Dr.
Tempe, AZ.
480-225-3899
Some of the names include:
Abcnt, Age, Dolla, DumperFoo, Dissizit/Slick, 123 Klan,Griffin One, Clown Soldier, Mad One, Mat Curran, MBW, 20 MG, Obey, Pez One (U.K.), Sike’, U.W.P., Seizer One
The Carmichael Gallery will be throwing a memorable opening party for Martha Cooper’s REMIX show and, lazy hyperbole aside, this one is one NOT to miss.
Photographs by Martha Cooper
with
Original remixes of these photographs in a range of media by Aeon, John Ahearn, Aiko, Bio, Nicer & B-Gee, Blade, Blanco, Mark Bode, Burning Candy, Victor Castillo, Cey, Cekis, Claw, Cosbe, Crash, Dabs & Myla, Anton van Dalen, Daze, Dearraindrop, Jane Dickson, Dr. Revolt, Shepard Fairey, Faust, Flying Fortress, Freedom, Fumakaka, Futura, Gaia, Grotesk, Logan Hicks, How & Nosm, LA II, Lady Pink, Anthony Lister, The London Police, Mare 139, Barry McGee, Nazza Stencil, Nunca, José Parlá, Quik, Lee Quinones, Kenny Scharf, Sharp, Skewville, Chris Stain, Subway Art History, Swoon, T-Kid, Terror161 and more.
Carmichael Gallery
5795 Washington Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232
April 9 – May 7, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 9, 6-8pm
Click on the link below for more information regarding this show:
In San Francisco ROA will have his opening at the White Walls Gallery with his iconic paintings of nature’s marginalized animals in large scale. Ever the hard worker, ROA paints non stop year round all over the globe on surfaces that are challenging, like this one on the side of a mobile home. If you have only seen his art on line and if you are in San Francisco this Saturday, it’s your turn!
For more information about this show contact the gallery.
White Walls Gallery
835 LARKIN ST.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA. 94109
Phone: 415.931.1500
Chor Boogie in Washington DC
While the Rich Man Party of NO! brings the country to a halt in the Capitol, Chor Boogie will be bringing much needed healing color to Washington DC at The Fridge Gallery.
Chor Boogie is an artist, a conceptual genius, a street romantic, a master of illusion and technique, Chor Boogie is an original. His works can be described as having healing effects by his unique and unmatched use of color, which brings greater meaning and understanding to his works. Every vibrant piece has a story attached to it. Chor Boogie’s colorful paintings are attracting A-list celebrities, art galleries and museums. Originally from San Diego, the artist known as Chor Boogie currently resides in San Francisco but is an internationally known artist and has traveled extensively to exhibit his work around the world.
The Fridge is located at
516 8th Street, SE
REAR ALLEY
Washington, DC 20003
David Ellis and Blu in a collaboration of a loop video from 2009
Yo Son the Boyz from Queens are Comin out With New Jams Next Month!
Chor Boogie is an artist, a conceptual genius, a street romantic, a master of illusion and technique, Chor Boogie is an original. His works can be described as having healing effects by his unique and unmatched use of color, which brings greater meaning and understanding to his works. Every vibrant piece has a story attached to it. Chor Boogie’s colorful paintings are attracting A-list celebrities, art galleries and museums. Originally from San Diego, the artist known as Chor Boogie currently resides in San Francisco but is an internationally known artist and has traveled extensively to exhibit his work around the world.
The intentions behind his art work are to create timeless dynamic moments of Imagination, Creativity, Originality, Meaning, Style, Self Expression, Audience, Taste, and the Visual Elements of Line, Light, Composition, Form, Space, and Color. It is derived from the colors of his soul. It is a therapeutic flow of colors, shapes, and movements combined in to one. A movement of images that has adapted to space giving it the significance of belonging to its surface, coming together as one and forming images of creation. Expressing realms of colors that give a healing sense and encourages you to wake up.
The long awaited Living Walls event in Atlanta officially begins today, even though 30 street artists have arrived over the last week and begun work in earnest. We’ve been hearing some amazing stories – and of course they’re ALL TRUE. Stay toooooned for special reporting from peeps on the ground and on the walls. Check out the Hellbent below from somebody’s blurry Iphone. HELL YEAH! Not a bad pic actually.
It can be a harrowing and a strange trip that some graff/street artists take, and here’s a new video that gives an intimate inside look at some of Eine’s journey from tagging trains to making what might be described as fine art. Just last month a piece by the British Street Artist was given to President Obama by the Prime Minister on a visit to Washington. “So it’s been a weird day today,” says a July 20th posting on Ben Eine’s website. “David Cameron has given one of my paintings to President Obama.”
A stop motion video comprised of 2,600 photos of 20 year old Morgan Tespsic doing public performance art that otherwise may be called exhibitionism, if the locations weren’t so bucolic and unpopulated.
Tackling the little stuff, Street Artist BLU addresses Evolution, the possible end of all life, and the the Big Bang Theory
We’re posting this video online just as New York is going to lunch – or more likely, is ordering lunch for delivery because nobody wants to venture out into the crushing heatwave. This grand opus of animation and ingenious humor deserves the ten minutes you’ll need while crunching on your deli sandwich and potato chips.
Gaia surfs for Italianate beheadings: Carvaggio and Guido Reni
Creating a new symbolic vocabulary based on fables, myths, and Biblical stories as well as his own imagination, Gaia plays with tropes and tangents in pursuit of enlightened understanding. A cultural omnivore of sorts, his own understanding is informed as much by Questlove as Caravaggio, Plato and Panda Bear, metaphor and M Arch, aerosol and oil paint. And linoleum. And wheat pastes. And colored pencils. Well past the digital dawn of all-things mashup, Gaia continues to mess with meanings and modalities in search of a new way to communicate messages that are as old as written history. For now his meme is the human cycle of creation and destruction, with an underlying preoccupation with the latter.
A recent visit to his studio space in Brooklyn finds Boy Wander with his laptop on a makeshift table and linoleum scattered across the floor. His new pieces for his show Saturday at Irvine Contemporary Gallery in Washington, DC nearly complete, Gaia talks about the vocabulary of his symbols and their evolving meanings.
On the significance of animal heads and their interchangeability, “I wanted to work with these decapitated heads and mix with them with the animal and human heads – hybrids – so the animals are never out of the picture – so again it’s this message of the saviour being killed. Like the thing that was going to save us is massacred by us. So it’s like this cycle of saving, destruction, saving, destruction, not listening, listening. – these different prophecies”.
Even as war seems perennial, anyone with eyes can tell you that we are living in a darkened time of pushing the earth’s environment to a precipice, and with good reason the younger generations are taking it quite hard. A legacy of poisoned air, water and diminished resources is more frequently on their mind because that is the legacy that’s been left to them. We talked with Gaia about his take on the state of the environment and how it influences him personally, thus creatively.
BSA: So what’s up with this preoccupation with death and destruction in your work?
GAIA:Well, yeah, death and destruction is just like my generations notion that the world is coming to an end and we have to fix something. We’ve inherited all of these problems. “Global Warming” sort of came into being as a real conscious collective awareness as I was growing up. I remember it coming into being and it just taking over mine and my peers lives. I remember (the movie) “Inconvenient Truth” was like the turning point and noone could stop thinking about it. It’s really just about this collective environmental consciousness that it’s inextricably bound to globalization and us not knowing how to necessarily leave that system, how to exit that circle.
BSA:It does seem like your generation is more aware and more concerned with the topic of environmentalism, environmental degradation, apocalyptic visions than any previous generations.
Gaia: Yeah but not necessarily doing anything about it.
BSA:No? There is not an activist sense?
Gaia: Yeah there is an activism but also there’s also a feeling of hopelessness as well. Just the fact that we don’t know how to deal with it.
BSA:How to turn the tide?
Gaia: Yeah how to turn the tide and also how to live alternatively so we’re not affecting the world negatively.
For Gaia, visions of cataclysm and brutality depicted in the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch and Bruegel the Elder provide hours of entertainment in their detail and somewhat matter of fact presentation of suffering . One favorite (below) is “The Triumph of Death”, by Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Gaia talks about his most important oil painting, “The Rooster is the main messenger. The animal is speaking to us and caring for us and guiding us. The Rooster is more like the presentation of what we have done. He’s more of the guy who comes down and presents the crimes. I feel like this is the most important piece of the show because it’s like the idyllic perfect image of destruction, how we envision the end of the world, and then the interior is the Utopian: the beautiful lurid color of sky. It could be Revelation but it’s also the romance of escapism.”
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
