It’s Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, and we proudly declare that Black Lives Matter. One day we won’t have to say it because it will be prominent and evident in people’s actions, but until then, we must continue.
We found some great stuff on the street this week – strong, simple works that make their statement quickly as you zoom by. Perhaps you pause and consider, but this is the city, bro, and you are busy.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: REVS, BK Foxx, Nina Chanel Abney, 1010, Zexor, CP Won, Glare, Hip Hop is My Religion, Pulp, Zaver, Jim Tozzi, Martymart54, Medi, Rothko Rowdy, Detor Lak, Indigo Kids, Tocer, MTA Original, and a poem by Adi Helman.
It’s officially Spring here today – the Spring Equinox beginning in the Northern Hemisphere will be at 11:33 am. Outside of the city, away from the glare, people will be able to glimpse Mars, Saturn, and Venus. The geese have been heard honking on the river, kids have been heard screaming on the playground, aerosol cans have been heard spraying under the bridge.
We’re relieved to glimpse fresh creativity on the streets – a sure sign that people are responding to their lives in a productive visual expression. As citizens of the Precariat, the opportunity to offer unfiltered artistic expression often requires a gatekeeper to approve it. When you are a street artist, you regularly circumvent the taste-makers and the influencers, hoping to reach people directly on the street. This week we found a number of unfiltered images and messages on New York walls and felt like these works are just as fresh as crocus popping through the soil, just as relevant as the blooms pushing through branches on trees. Here we have new shots from Jersey City. These are signs of Spring!
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Beau Stanton, UR New York, 1010, Chupa, Blaze, Melski, The Cupcake Guy, SAMO, Acro, Sory, Niceo, Mona Caron, Cheez.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Isaac Cordal’s Installation at Urvanity 2019
2. Penique Productions Site Specific Installation at Urvanity Art 2019
3. Pro176 Mural for Urvanity Art 2019
4. 1010 Pedestrian Installation in Madrid
BSA Special Feature: Homemade videos at Urvanity 2019
Just in case you didn’t catch these verite recordings of some scenes in Madrid last weekend for Urvanity – here are the original captures by Jaime Rojo, seamed together.
Isaac Cordal Site Specific Installation at Urvanity 2019 Art in Madrid
Penique Productions Site Specific Installation at Urvanity Art 2019 in Madrid.
Pro176 Mural for Urvanity Art 2019 in Madrid
1010 Pedestrian Installation in Madrid for Urvanity Art 2019
This week BSA is in Madrid to capture some highlights on the street, in studio, and at Urvanity 2019, where we are hosting a 3 day “BSA TALKS” conference called “How Deep Is the Street?” Come with us every day to see what the Spanish capital has happening in urban and contemporary.
It is a series of surprises on the streets that are planned here in connection with the Urvanity Art Fair, including some tricky geometricks overhead and underfoot from artists Moneyless and 1010.
A 3 dimensional turn on the abstract lineplays that you may associate with the murals and canvasses from the Tuscany-based Italian Ted Pirisi, aka Moneyless, his ongoing investigations of shapes and geometrical spaces has led him to suspend his newest piece between two fine examples of Spanish architecture only a five minute walk from the fair.
As you approach it, walk under it, gaze upward to continually re-frame it within the sky and between the facing buildings on this small street full of pedestrians, shops, and lottery ticket sellers. The story is the form, and the form keeps changing.
Hamburg-based visual illusionist 1010 commands a larger swath of the street, literally, with his wavy cartography of a fictional nature with his “color caves” playing with perception as you stroll along this thoroughfare.
Pedestrians gazing down at their phones stop periodically as the earth layers beneath them appears to dip deeper, throwing off your sense of interpretation. It is crazy how these large installations affect perceptions even as they are getting a little weathered by the feet passing over them – a tribute to the effectiveness of 1010’s mastery of visual illusion.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Shredding the Girl and Balloon – The Director’s Cut
2. JKS Crew in Italy & France
3. Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle For Expression / Trailer
4. The Hut – A Partial X / Felipe Pantone
BSA Special Feature: Shredding the Girl and Balloon – The Director’s Cut
We start our weekly selection with the followup release that takes hold of the narrative of the moments leading up to this month’s Banksy auction and self-destruction at Sotheby’s.
In it you hear the auctioneer chit-chatting beforehand saying things like “It’s a fun auction, you know. Everyone’s got a chance.” And by ‘everyone’ he means…everyone here in this room and on the 30 phones who are also bidding.
In other revelations this week, the Financial Times is reporting that the original artwork contained a “dedication reading ‘Thanks Jo’, which art market experts said could be a reference to Banksy’s long-time publicist, Jo Brooks.” Not so fast there Mr. Brillianteen. Perhaps Banksy is just a Jimi Hendrix fan (Hey Joe) or it was a gift to rapper Fat Joe (I’m Not a Player I Just Crush Alot) (RIP). Joe the Lion? Smokin’ Joe?
JKS Crew in Italy & France
Okay class, who wants to tell us what they did on their summer vacation?
Looks like JKS Crew were on spraycation this summer in Italy and France. The jazz bassy groove that accompanies the scenes in this video make us pine for those dreamy days of July and August already, and its only mid-October.
Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle For Expression / Trailer
Who owns public space? The oligarchs, yes, but after them?
You do!
Who should paint it?
When graffiti writers and Street Artists take it over with acts of transgressive painting one may expect that the next step is probably the buff, unless you living are in an aesthetic lawlessness like Berlin, or Athens, or 2000s Detroit. It is infrequent that one may countenance the self-appointed citizen buffer, but they exist in many a neighborhood. A combination of ornery rebel and a justice-minded citizen; This is the vehement, street cleaning vigilante.
If you were writing a bespectacled urban guidebook about characters found on city streets you may advise, “Think twice before crossing this curiously civic interbreed, broken windows can be sharp.”
The Hut – A Partial X / Felipe Pantone
A Liberian surfer camp that just happens to capture the artworks of some of the biggest names in Street Art? Organizers say that its to reduce the stigma that surrounds the country that was hurt so badly by ebola a few years ago. Perhaps that what has drawn artists like Faile, Conor Harrington, 1010, Martin Whatson, Marke Jenkins, Herakut, Ted Pim, Sandra Chevrier, Ben Eine, and Seth Globepainter here to create new works here. Today we see works by Felipe Pantone, JR, and Slinkachu.
This week BSA is in Detroit with our hosts 1XRun for the Murals in the Market festival they are hosting with 50+ artists from various countries and disciplines and creative trajectories. In a city trying to rise from the economic and post-industrial ashes it is often the dynamic grassroots energy and vision of artists that sets the tone for how the community evolves.
Detroit rocked in many ways this week, not least because Roula David and Jesse Corey know how to manage a big moveable feast of walls and artists and food and lodging and parties and openings and donuts and a print business and gallery and still manage to have quality time with Oscar, their four year old chocolate pug-mix master who pretty much goes wherever he wants and investigates the scene.
Together David and Corey and the team spread their wings wide to make sure everybody gets taken care of, and we salute their talent and passion. The 1XRun crew, and there are like 20 of them, don’t mess around when getting equipment and cold water bottles and cans of paint and ladders to the artists, along with a hundred other small and large favors and forms of assistance that make this thing run smoothly. And kindly.
The details can really make the difference, in life and in art of course. Today we’ll show you some of the details of a few pieces that resonate from this years collection of vibrating visuals on the street in this part of east Detroit. And you can see that some murals are close to being finished as well. A selection of the completed walls will follow soon from this successful second year of Murals in the Market.
This week BSA is in Detroit with our hosts 1XRun for the Murals in the Market festival they are hosting with 50+ artists from various countries and disciplines and creative trajectories. In a city trying to rise from the economic and post-industrial ashes it is often the dynamic grassroots energy and vision of artists that sets the tone for how the community evolves.
Every city, every neighborhood it seems, has its own beat on the street. It is a rhythm of movement and sound and light comprised of different elements that meter the activity, determine its pacing, its lilt, its cadence.
Cars figure heavily into the beat of this wide-spread city of Detroit of course, an inherited trait central to the story of this factory town that gives certain deference to cars and trucks careening around corners and flying up battered blocks. Riding bicycles, as we do to quickly cover ground and see murals and artists, is a curiosity and not always respected by drivers.
But the rhythm of the human-powered bike is not entirely foreign here either, as the city boasts some of the most tricked out custom rides you are likely to see and posses of show-biking clubs like Detroit’s East Side Riders, who can shut down a few blocks at a time with flashy illuminated music thumping parades of stylish riders parading through.
The Slow Roll, which is a now a seasonal weekly biking event run by the non-profit Detroit Bike City, Inc. brings as many as 3- 4,000 bicyclists at a time to the city streets, a communal event that reintroduces people to each other and to their city.
There is cacophony in the market, with deliver trucks, sixteen wheelers, and construction and forklifts and all the hallmarks of light industry. Right now there are colorful and oddly dressed artists weaving like mangy cats through the sidewalks and streets with cans in their backpacks and visions in their heads.
Add to the mix the golf-cart driving 1XRun folks who are bringing bottled water, ladders, electrical generators flying around corners and rumbling up and down The Dequindre Cut, a below-grade pathway that used to carry the Grand Trunk Western Railroad line here on the east side – suitably covered with graffiti along its sidewalls.
Toss in a few art gallerists, dreadlocked organic farmers, meat cutters and conduit benders in their respective aprons, graphic design shops, lifestyle brands, waitresses, drug dealers posing as fans, intrepid looky-loos with white-sneakers and cameras and maps of murals, watermelons, gladiolas, bags of string beans, the occasional pop-up DJ tent, camera grip, skateboarder, wide-eyed sophist, tattooed Romeo, army-booted art-school woman, and a random chicken who is pecking among the grass between street bricks by a dumpster and you’ll get an idea of this particular menagerie of sights and sounds.
It’s a beat on the street that is full of rumbling, beeping, clicking, thumping – sometimes placid, sometimes crashing. All full of life and possibility, and one that is only contained in this very moment.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Carlos Cruz-Diez & Spectra by Selina Miles
2. Djalouz – Petites Chroniques Urbaine
3. Between The Lines With RISK
4. Nychos x Traktor Wien
BSA Special Feature: Carlos Cruz-Diaz & Spectra by Selina Miles
Optical art, public experimentation, scientific research, kinetic engineering have all contributed to the half century of study by artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. He’s “been doing street art longer than most people have been alive,” says the narrator.
Now 92, based in Panama, he continues to work in-studio with geometric abstraction putting to the test color and its measuring its effects on us and our built environment. A current generation of street artists are invited in studio to work with their hands, to conceptualize visually and oversee production of their work in material and form. The initial contemplation evolves into a way of thinking and a way of imagining the work and the artists place in relation to public space that transcends image making and creates a different dialogue.
Hearing Mr. Diez compare this moment of convergence in technology, communications, and creativity to the 1960s is undoubtedly an inspiring spark to the generation that will continue forward. Now that the artists have grasped the material world, they delve into the virtual. Like many artists and creators who are working with the newest tools of virtual reality, this collection of street artists are still experimenting – all the time realizing how appreciation is rooted in the perceptual abilities rather than the materiality. One of the speakers talks about being at the starting line, but in many ways it is clear that race already has already begun.
Djalouz – Petites Chroniques Urbaine
Parisian graphic designer turned graffiti artist Djalouz has a unique volumetric approach to his wildstyle shards that envelope the city’s remaining phonebooths. He explains how he fell in love with a medium of expression that he is committed to while he’s sketching out a Winnie the Pooh character. Stay a little longer and see the wildness of his expressive 3D forms that crawl across every surface, including the ground.
Between The Lines With RISK
Risk talks about his evolution from a kid in New Orleans sketching in his notebook at school to getting up with a crew in LA, painting all over public space and property to gain a higher profile and retain the thrill of hit-and-run, and some highlights of his professional career. In route from illegal to legal he developed a reverence for color, form, and technical experimentation and aspirations for museum quality work and large scale public sculpture. Just don’t tag his stuff please.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. 1010 Creates a Crater in Paris 2. Mario Mankey: The World Is Not Over Part 2
3. Giorgio Bartocci from Blindeye Factory
4. Interview with Specter at Vantage Point
BSA Special Feature: 1010 Creates a Crater in Paris
And you thought New York had potholes? Be careful in Paris!
Mario Mankey: The World Is Not Over Part 2
Debuting here, the newest video from Mario Mankey. See him knock out a wall inside Berlin’s former Institute of Anatomy.
The creepiness of this place is possibly the inspiration for the title: “The World Is Not Over: I’m Still Alive”.
Giorgio Bartocci from Blindeye Factory
Interview with Specter at Vantage Point
Happy we were able to bring this guy with us to Berlin in March, and very happy to hear this excellent interview that James and Tom did with him while he was there!
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
