If you are wondering why you are seeing a lot more lumpen and average people than usual on the streets of NYC recently it may be attributable to the wheat-pasted everymen and everywomen from the Chicago humorist and existential list maker named DONT FRET.
Hand-painted and one of a kind, the painfully quotidian is also often entertaining, perhaps granting permission to not take yourself too seriously. With characters who are reacting to and possibly resisting the subtle indoctrination of civil society guidelines and values, DONT FRET is giving you a look inside his head as well. A devout Simpsons follower, he knows our foibles are freeing. Is there drama in the mundane? Of course. Humor in our contradictions? Without a doubt. Laughter at Street Art? Try not to smile at these, we dare you.
In Street Art and graffiti news, New York has had some “whole car” pieces on the subway line recently, including one that looked like a whole train! Old timers were rubbing their eyes. According to a local media outlet, legendary graffiti artist Chris “Freedom” Pape gave his assessment; “..based on the artist’s philosophy, he gives it an “A” but based on the quality of the graffiti on old subways, he gives it a “C”. Also a new film about New York octogenarian Street Artist Robert Janz opened this week at the Anthology Film Archives. Janz in the Moment is the passion project of Filmmaker Joanna Kiernan that features many corners and crazy details of New York’s streets that are familiar to us – and probably to you.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Miami, and this time featuring Add Fuel, Atomik, Bisco Smith, CRKSHNK, Dal East, Feik, Hysterical Men, Jilly Ballistic, Kai, Mr. June, Pure Genius, Rick Azevedo, WCKT, What Will You Leave Behind, Will Power, and Winston Tseng.
“Big Trash Animal” is the name of this series of installations for the UpNorth Festival by Portuguese Street Artist Bordalo II, here in a seaside city in the northern sector of Norway called Bodø.
The artist has been using his recycled sculptures as commentary on a modern culture of consumerism (and its deleterious effect on ecological matters) for the last decade or so, which great success.
His animals
are a marvel in their likenesses; his talents for evoking their character by
sculpting with people’s detritus are unrivaled. The connection he makes is
between mindless garbage-making and the lives of animals. It’s a powerful one,
a testament to the potential role of the Street Artist as a mindful citizen who
contributes to the greater good.
Last autumn he researched, collected materials, and methodically created 12 of these animals for a recycling company rooted to this seaside town of 50,000 which boasts the Norwegian Aviation Museum. In the case of this region, bringing Bordalo II is not simply to “artwash” a brand or city, as some companies and municipalities try to do.
According to UpNorth Festival organizers the region has laser-focused their attention on recycling – reportedly planning to reach the European Union’s target for recycling 65% of municipal waste by this year, about 10 years ahead of schedule.
Reading a press release from the events, it looks like the people of nearby Salten took it upon themselves to clear coastal waters of pollution a couple of years ago. “In 2017 they placed 50 tons of marine litter in front of the public library in Stormen.” The marine litter was collected as a stunt to motivate the community and show them that collecting litter is of great value.
Bordalo II has now given them additional ideas for what to do with it.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “Gestures of Caring” Jan Vormann 2. Drones Printing Walls, Stop Us if You’ve Heard This One. 3. Dan Kitchener x Wynwood Walls 2019 4. El Mac: Making a mural of Hope in San Jose 5. Jeff Parker and the New Breed – “Max Brown”
BSA Special Feature: “Gestures of Caring” Jan Vormann
Gestures of Caring
Monuments. Architecture. Mosaics. Street Art.
These interests provided Street Artist Jan Vormann with a launchpad for a cute idea when he began repairing broken walls and filling in street crevices with children’s colorful plastic building blocks. Now along with those miniature interventions he’s added oil stains to his repertoire. He acknowledges the ecological disaster that these gorgeous iridescent patterns imitate, and says somehow these attractive mosaics may start maybe, in the best case, a discussion about it.
Here’s another conversation starter: The outdated and dirty fossil fuel industry continues to spill millions of gallons into our groundwater, streams, lakes, and oceans and has for decades. Also, most wars in this century have been about securing access to oil, or outright stealing it.
Jan Vormann – “Gestures of Caring” Bien Urbain 2019. A film by MZM Projects
Drones Printing Walls, Stop Us if You’ve Heard This One.
Katsu may have started this, or the original developers of a mechanized printer called SprayPrinter, both of whom we published years ago, but now there are other pretenders to the throne, like Urban Flying Opera. Let’s see them hit the high notes!
Dan Kitchener x Wynwood Walls 2019
El Mac: Making a mural of Hope in San Jose
Jeff Parker and the New Breed – “Max Brown”
Time to let go, do a few dance moves, relax and revel into the weekend with some serious masters.
Maybe its because animals are safe subjects to paint and make it
past the neighborhood censors, maybe its because they are handily metaphoric
when it comes to communicating a complicated or difficult idea. Maybe it is
just because they are cute and everybody on Instagram is going to offer a
clever rejoinder on your new painting in Miami, you cool dude/dudette.
From unicorns to hippos to lions and alligators, the street is
full of them right now around every corner in the Wynwood District and you can
still enjoy them until the neighborhood becomes so developed that they kill
them all. Well not all of them. One or two will still be creeping up on you in
the occasional abandoned lot that has a high tax bill or a hefty remediation of
toxic soil that still makes it too pricey for potential investors.
All of that wild conjuring aside, here is a selection of currently
running creatures of the gritty urban jungle in this humid and hot southern
city for you to marvel at.
You’ve probably already seen this wall by Elfo so its probably a boring topic. But we also enjoy his self-deprecation – after all he is marketing this wall to us to display digitally. Who knows if it’s even real. It’s better than just another portrait of 2Pac.
The Church of Santa Maria Novella, The Opera del Duomo Museum, the Uffizi
Gallery. Florence is forever tied to Renaissance art history and shares its
cultural riches with the world daily, including an endless stream of graphic
design and art history students who study in this Italian city every year. The
only drawback is, there is often a complaint by people creating art today that
there is only proper reverence and space given to those dead artists in this
city – not the ones whose hearts beat today.
Giacomo RUN x Basik. Florence, Italy. 01.2020 (photo courtesy of the artists)
Which may be why RUN and Basik had to run to a suburban area of the city to paint this new large scale mural. “Not much renaissance around,” RUN tells us. “Nothing like the center of the city with all the untouchable art from the past.” The Italian graffiti artist has matured into a fully realized modernist interpreter of form and sophisticated master of color on the street. Here he joins with Basik to depict a rumble between two wrestlers.
Giacomo RUN x Basik. Florence, Italy. 01.2020 (photo courtesy of the artists)
The style of these wrestlers may not be evocative of the style of “Hercules and Antaeus” by Antonio del Pollaiuolo at Ufizzi, but it definitely commands modern Florencians’ attention on the street today – a spectacular example of art on the street for everyone, not just a privileged few. In fact, RUN tells us that these wrestlers are more of an allegory for the people and the struggles people are having right now.
“We feel that people here are put in a constant challenge to combat conditions of poverty and ignorance.” Seeing this work here we are reminded of something BSA has been saying for some time; It is evident with the work of Street Artists globally over the last decade and a half that we have entered into a New Renaissance, but this time it is happening around the world. It is exciting to see this latest example present in the outskirts of Florence to help us put it into context.
Giacomo RUN x Basik. Florence, Italy. 01.2020 (photo courtesy of the artists)Giacomo RUN x Basik. Florence, Italy. 01.2020 (photo courtesy of the artists)Giacomo RUN x Basik. Florence, Italy. 01.2020 (photo courtesy of the artists)
Today we celebrate the life of and honor the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. on this very cold winters’ day in New York.
Among his many writings and speeches are the ones that ultimately identified the class system and the power dynamic that underlies systemic inequalities. While the country is now more than ever in the deadly embrace of an entrenched military industrial complex that looks to perpetuate its own income by starting wars, eating up the lions share of our annual budgets, we realize how some of MLKs harder truths about financial inequality were the ones that made him most hated as well because they threatened a status quo. As bad as it looks to you, it looks absolutely perfect to some.
Chris Stain’s “Winter in America” (courtesy the artist)
As we have watched a precipitous decline in the average American’s standard of living in the last 40 years, we can now see that the poor are poor not because of some moral failing but because the system is deliberate; designed to keep them there. With robots and other forms of automation preparing to sideswipe the workers of the world in the next five years, MLK’s ideas about a guaranteed annual income seem not only fair and wise, but also pragmatic and prophetic.
Seen in the NYC Subway
Banner photo credit Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. locks arms with his aides as he leads a march of several thousands on March 17, 1965 in Montgomery, Ala. (Credit: AP)
We’re up to our necks in deep frosty wind-whipping winter, and yet the Street Art right now is verbose, detailed, bright eyed, distinct, political, critical, stylish, dense, richly colorful.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Miami, and this time featuring Armyan, Captain Eyeline, Cash4, China, City Kitty, COMBO, CP Won, Food Baby Soul, Glare, Jaroe, Jaye Moon, Jazi, Marameo Universe, Plasma Slug, Rodak, Sara Lynne Leo, Smells, UK WC, and Winston Tseng.
Miguel Ángel Sánchez AKA SATURNO is an artist from a small town near Barcelona in Spain. A self-taught painter and illustrator, he’s become a recognized name in the European graffiti scene since he began in 1995, biting off a bigger piece of fame with each project.
Since 2012 he’s developed his own, unmistakable style that frightens and thrills in equal measure, and he has been painting his fantastical creations on walls big and small across Europe. With an illustration style that boasts ultra-real monsters and characters of exaggerated proportions and serious high gloss, he’s led and collaborated on many commercial projects and brands in the last few years with fire-breathing success.
The 2019 edition of Art Basel/Wynwood this past December allowed him to showcase his imagination and skills in quite remarkable ways on a couple of murals in Wynwood, Miami. One, in particular, is this astoundingly baroque beast dressed in the finest regal threads, dripping jewels, and saliva with bulging eyes and a voracious appetite for consumption.
Fans say Saturno examines the subconscious and darker aspects of people and behaviors with his work – which may lead one to conclude that this epic character is a thinly veiled metaphor for opportunist alligators whom you may meet here who are trolling flamboyantly through this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, regaling themselves with so many shiny baubles. Certainly this reptilian socialite is audacious and confidently showy, and Saturno has hit gold with a likeness that is both repulsive and compelling.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “Dinner For Few.” A short film by Nassos Vakalis. 2. NYCHOS. Five Weeks Of Rabbit Eye Movement 3. Futura X Wynwood Walls. Chop ’em Down Films 4. Shok1 in St. Petersburg, Florida
BSA Special Feature: “Dinner For Few.” A short film by Nassos Vakalis.
“Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry of wonderful times to come,” an applicable bromide for all those folk who got the big Trump tax cut last year. Meanwhile, you are rationing your insulin.
“(The capitalist machine” solely feeds the select few who eventually, foolishly consume all the resources while the rest survive on scraps from the table. Inevitably, when the supply is depleted, the struggle for what remains leads to catastrophic change.”
NYCHOS. Five Weeks Of Rabbit Eye Movement
A road-trip film is an ideal vehicle for mythmaking and definition of persona, especially when accompanied by timely music choices and distracted stares into the burned horizon. This amber-tinged panoply of rockstar travel shots, nomadic spraycation side trips, behind-the-scenes production, off-the-grid hippy encampments, rusted detritus sculpture, post-apocalypse signposts, and the energized, intensely industrious, exquisite dissection of Nychos that puts his oeuvre under the microscope and behind the looking glass. Alternately elegant and violent, this is a laboratory sweep of imagined scenarios that can make the mind cavort with fear and lust, toil and soil, pensive thought and power chords, ready to be sliced and peered into.
Futura X Wynwood Walls. Chop ’em Down Films
A
brief look at Futura as he recounts his revisiting of a mural he made in Miami.
Calling to the fore his inspired abstractions that first set him apart from the
pack in the late 70s/early 80s, it’s a treasure to see engaged with his past,
his process, his futura.
Shok1 in St. Petersburg, Florida for Shine Mural Festival.
2nd in a row from Chop ‘Em Down Films, this look at the technique of Shok1, who reveals the world through his brilliant mastery of x-ray and fantasy, is a rare treat and a great way to close this week’s survey.
A
man of leisure these days, BSA contributor Lluis Olive-Bulbena took a three day
trip to Valencia, Spain to participate in the festivities of El dia del
Cabanyal.
El Cabanyal is a 333 acre (134 hectares) neighborhood in the old part of the city by the Mediterranean Sea, backed by a series of sandy beaches and a palm treed promenade. Its name is derived by the complex of barracks along the shore where the fishermen used to live when the town was purely a fishing village.
With the passage of time and change of the Spanish economy, El Cabanyal caught the eye of the leisure class who fill the streets with souvenir shops, cafes, and late-night clubs. The fishermen went someplace else. Not surprisingly perhaps, this tourist attraction is also a hot spot for Street Art – along with the greater city of Valencia for that matter.
We are told that many Street Artists have actually set-up studio here as well. Why not? The quality of life is nice, and the cost of living is much lower than in Barcelona and Madrid.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
soundtrack by Jamie xx – Gosh 
#artbaselmiami #saturnoart
