Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Not much to say this week, except we’re all in the thick of it and 20,000 are dead in the US.
Stay positive, stay strong, say a prayer for the families who have lost someone and the medical personnel who are working so hard. Happy Easter! Happy Passover!
Check out Andrea Bocelli singing live from Milan today. Love to you all.
So here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring P.V, Devils Fools, Hoacs, and Patrick Picou Harrington.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. “Serenity” with SNIK in Manchester
2. Hellbent in Albany, NY
3. And Now a Message From Our Sponsors: Aphukenbrake
4. Low Bros in Rabat, Morocco
“To women who stood against injustice. We honor you. We witness to your courage and are humbled by your sacrifice,” says the narrator and activist Leigh Cook about the suffragettes in this new video following the duo SNIK as they create “Serenity” on Little Lever Street in the northern quarter of Manchester, directed by Doug Gillen at Fifth Walls TV.
And below is a behind-the-scenes reporter-on-the-ground-and-in-cherry picker video where Mr. Gillen speaks with organizers who attempt the gentrification issue that accompanies the mural campaign they’re expanding and Laura takes a swing at the topics of feminism, empowerment and the #METOO movement. Doug does some dancing.
A promotional video for a mobile company using the mural painting of Street Artist Hellbent painting in Albany, New York.
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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
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This article is also posted on The Huffington Post.
As the global geopolitical-econo-social storms continue to swirl us into and out of oil wars and natural disasters and disease and pestilence and famine – or at least the threat of them, you may rightly feel as if you are living inside a comic book or a late summer blockbusting thriller.
The gift of an illustrator like Sheffield-based Street Artist Phlegm is that he can, at will, play the master of chaos in a Dionysian drama, creating the horror afoot, and he can as well create the salvation. It is up to his imagination and his hand/can. Today we look at a new installation of exodus, the stretching and contorting competition of man and animal to flee imminent disaster. Or maybe they’re headed to the Apple store.
The New York State capital of Albany hosted an extensive series of walls across many neighborhoods two years ago this month, but has since been relatively quiet, as local Street Art fan and photographer Bob Anderson can attest. But for the longest time Bob says, “I have had my eye on an 85′ wall of Earthworld Comics, the oldest comic book store in town.” As luck would have it, Phlegm was in Bushwick BK finishing up a wall just as this one opened up north, and the floodgates of exodus were let loose across the expanse of brick.
Not a bad venue for an outsized illustrator like Phlegm, who is as adept at small hand-rendered drawings as he is of this happily hellish scene of a rumbling and frenzied herd charging forward. It helps that the wall is shot by an artist behind the camera and augmented by the invisible hand of the god of light and shadow.
If this is a film still, it is still moving. If this is a painting, may it never stop. Long live Phlegm.
Our special thanks to Bob Anderson for capturing and sharing these images with BSA readers.
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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
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Big murals are proliferating at the moment but it is still the domain of the individual street artist to smack up smaller works, stickers, stencils, wheatpastes and the like. We’re featuring quite a few of these smaller personal pieces this week in the mix of some larger ones.
Here’s our weekly interview of the street, this week featuring 1986, Bortusk Leer, ELV, FKDL, Icy & Sot, JR, Martha Cooper, ND’A, Pigeon, Wakuda and XAM.
Just checked out this long wall by two graffiti/Street Art buddies from Baltimore who have made many a collaborative piece over the years. Seems like Chris Stain and Billy Mode team up 3 to 5 times a year on expansive installations that utilize Chris’s everyday folk before a city skyline and Billy’s reatment of text to tie it all together. In this case Mr. Mode carried the silhouette of the city skyline into the fills for the 3-D letters. “Set If Off” is slang for getting a party started, or maybe to light something big on fire, and the sentiment was actually yelled out the window of a passing car while Jaime shot this one in Albany on Easter day.
Put up over a few days last July in cooperation with Samson Contompasis and the 518 Prints posse, the 90′ by 15′ wall originally had a pack of wolves feasting on a carcass by Broken Crow installed during the New York capitol’s “Living Walls” festival a few years ago. Now it looks like the grassy lot that the wall faces is undergoing a facelift of some nature because the first foot of topsoil has been scraped away. Anyway it’s good to see the aerosol brothers work in person if you have the opportunity.
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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
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Street Artist Overunder just completed his astounding tiled installation this weekend in Albany on the wall of L’esperance Tile Works, a local tile maker with a special 1920s “dust press” that the artist also worked into the piece. For an artist with such a fluid and freewheeling figurative style with a spray can, it is surprising to see it interpreted with such permanence and cogitative consideration. As part of “Living Walls : Albany”, Overunder had already smashed a few walls around the city in the weeks leading up to this opportunity, but after touring the small tile press facility with co-owner Donald Shore, he fell in love with the idea of tiles as medium. “A lot of these tiles were in the backyard up north at our other facility – he and White Cocoa were standing in the pouring rain digging through these boxes of discards and overruns and he brought these back with him,” explains Shore.
Overunder’s initial sketches in his sketch book. (photo © Overunder)“I think collaboration is a huge part of being an artist. That being said, I was excited when I learned I was doing a mural on a tile manufacturers building. I had never used tile for a mural let alone doing a full out mosaic but now the opportunity was right in front of me. Don was more than willing to teach me as I went and I was more than willing to experiment with this crazy, new medium, ” says Overunder.
“I particularly like the way he’s marking the tiles with his spray can for us to cut,” says Shore, who owns the business with his wife and founder, Linda Ellett.
With assistance from a number of young helpers who live in the neighborhood, the project took a little more than a week to complete, and the results take his stuff to a new level. With a patterned face like an Alexander McQueen model, the figure’s limbs get added dimension with Overunder’s mastery of the can. Small details let you know you shouldn’t be too serious about this, like the painted toenails. As the materials are all discards and overruns from other projects, it’s interesting to note that a number of these same tiles are actually in buildings right now, including the Kol Isreal Synagogue designed by Robert Stern in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the Lt. Governors building in Albany, and even the home of Bill Gates.
“The patterned tiles are created using the encaustic method – an inlaid clay where you take a plaster impression using clay and it leaves a reservoir that you fill with different colors and you plain it smooth and it gives you a very nice two dimensional image — that’s a technique we believe was developed in the medieval period and it was reindustrialized in the 1860’s,” explained the enthusiastic as he gave us a tour of the mural while Overunder and his assistants Roberto and Messiah worked.
It’s not often that Street Art has this heft, and certainly it’s pretty rare to take this much time to complete a piece and manage to include the participation of the community at this level. In fact, certain arts critics and public arts academics might want to reclassify this work as something other than Street Art, but we grant wide berth to the term. One thing is for sure, the resulting piece is no less than a tribute to everyone involved and as a business owner in Albany during the first year of Living Walls, Mr. Shore is sold, “I totally support this thing”
This weekend in Albany very important Street Art presentations were made at the New York State Museum during “Living Walls: Albany”, including one from Street Art duo Broken Crow, pictured here in custom made aluminum foil head gear that reflected light rays all around the Clark Auditorium.
Mike has the remote for the Powerpoint show in his right antenna. Broken Crow at the New York State Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)There were so many moving parts in this large and easy going cultural festival this weekend, and we were really happy to meet so many people in the street, at the Marketplace encampment, in St. Joseph’s Church, at the tile factory, and during our keynote lecture at the New York State Museum Saturday. Thanks to Samson Contompasis for asking BSA to partner with him for LWAlbany and a quick shout out to other local partners James Shultis at Grand Street Community Arts, Sivan Shimoni, the staff at NYS Museum, and local blogger KC Orcutt at KeepAlbanyBoring.com along with photographers Andrew Franciosa, Bob Anderson, MC3, Frank Whitney, and Ken Jacobie. Also big ups to Monica Compana, who c0-spearheaded Living Walls Atlanta, which we covered a lot when it began last year. For all the locals mentioned, they are just the tip of the iceberg of a large committed creative and professional community in the Upstate New York region who helped to pull this thing off with almost zero dollars and tons of planning and hustling. For the first year, it is/was a major achievement.
Of course our main focus is always the Street Artists and the creative spirit that is alive and well on the streets so it was a total honor to see the artists and see brand new stuff going up, like the last one before catching a train last night – Broken Crow’s ram under a bridge. There are still some pieces being finished by NohJColey, Clown Soldier, Doodles, and one we missed from Michael DeFeo. Also coming up should be Hellbent and possibly some other artists this fall, so we’ll get back to you on that. Not all these pics are from Living Walls : Albany by the way — when you are combing the streets you find all kinds of stuff you didn’t expect.
Check out all BSA coverage on the archive page here.
Take your own tour this fall with the Living Walls : Albany MAP
For the last 10 months this initiative to bring Street Art and public art to the forefront of the conversation in New York’s capital has been a boon to discourse, unusual during a period of retrenchment and an ongoing financial crises that is rocking every segment of society in the US. After years of incremental cuts to arts programming in public schools and cultural institutions at every level, it is a perfect opportunity for artists to re-assert their voices as this Street Art movement continues to evolve and develop in an organic way. Ironically this scene with roots in graffiti has shape-shifted and its emergence looks like a democratic movement, messily yet constructively filling a creative void for this new generation while the budgetary axes continue to fall around them.
As Street Artists have been installing their new works on walls around Albany these past 10 days or so, the common story one witnesses is the level of engagement of adults and kids stopping on the sidewalk, in their cars, watching the process, photographing and discussing the art, and exploring the creative process. Some folks have even become assistants to the artists, creating a sense of ownership, and yes, community. There is obviously more to this evolving story, and we’ll continue to track it.
Below are photos from photographer Jaime Rojo to give you an idea of the wealth of creativity that is alive in Albany at the moment. And we commence with our weekly interview with the street this week featuring Broken Crow, Chris Stain, Gaia, How and Nosm, Joe Iurato, LNY, Nanook, ND’A, NohJColey, OverUnder, Radical! ROA, Shin Shin, and Wing. First, we go to church with Joe Iurato.
Joe Iurato (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Words by KC Orcutt
Images by Andrew Franciosa and MC3
Overunder is a firecracker. From my initial participation in witnessing the Living Walls unfold in Albany, he has been nothing but a friendly and tireless ball of creative energy (in the best way possible) showing me parts of the city I grew up in that I didn’t even know existed on Google maps of places he’s been exploring. As a first time visitor adapting to the town, we joked about him about being able to give directions better than I, myself, could as a local.
Overunder (photo © Andrew Franciosa)Overunder has work installed currently at the Marketplace Gallery and his pieces have been sprinkled throughout Albany, such as one gem tucked away in the South End sharing a building with Broken Crow. His portraits are as engaging as the quirky characteristics of each building or wall themselves, picking up on elements of the city (such as painting people that he’s met during his stay here) and his attention to detail in his work brings out new characteristic aspects of walls that otherwise would have continued to blend in unnoticed with the city’s surroundings.
Overunder’s pieces are as conversational as the artist himself and his work has breathed fresh air into these community spaces. Just judging off of our several conversations over the past week, I’d say it’s a safe bet to make that he has more tricks up his sleeve and more work will surface as the weekend draws closer.
Within moments of ROA’s arrival on site to his designated building for “Living Walls : Albany,” he spotted a recently departed squirrel, took it as a sign and it became quite clear what he was going to do next.
The squirrel population in Albany is (somewhat) jokingly of a “different” breed – they are as tough as they are territorial, while still somehow managing a natural presence and a non-intrusive interactivity with passer-bys. Squirrels are everywhere in Albany, making it a more-than-fitting subject for ROA’s large-scale contribution to the Living Walls project.
ROA (photo © MC3)Cosmically or maybe even comically enough, as ROA was working up in the lift adding detail to the animal laying on its back, a man associated with the building’s owner shared an anecdote of how a couple years back a pesky squirrel’s nest almost resulted in the same building burning down, with firefighters called to the scene and all.
During ROA’s time creating the piece, people stopped by to inquire more about the wall and what was going on, with many lingering on the “why a squirrel” question.
“People are bored with simple messages,” said ROA “they want something deeper.”
With the inspiration of the piece still laying off to the side, ROA entertained the public’s curiosities with a grin saying, “Its for you to figure out if it’s dead or alive and the meaning behind it. It’s a very simple message – just a squirrel on it’s back,” as another onlooker proudly repeated his take on ROA’s work in succession, “that symbolizes something!”
Wooooo Hoooooooo! It’s Friday in Brooklyn! Great news in the mailbox from the postman this morning about a big Keith Haring exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum this April “Keith Haring: 1978-1982”. Guess it was meant to coincide with the big “Art in the Streets” exhibit that was moving from LA MOCA to Brooklyn in 2012 but was cancelled recently. That’s okay, we still get Keith, a patron saint of Street Art. And we are completely convinced that “Art in the Streets” will be coming to New York, so don’t be surprised.
BSA has been partnering with Living Walls : Albany to bring you the new Street Art and other stuff and today is the official kick off day, coinciding with a big Fall festival Albany has every year. Props go to Samson Contompasis for his unwavering commitment to artists and the creative spirit.
Yo, check the archive to see all the BSA coverage http://mim.io/5e3391 . Also follow the Twitter Feed at @LivingWallsALB . The list of participating Street Artists includes How & Nosm , Chris Stain ,Gaia, Cake ,Michael DeFeo, Broken Crow, Over/Under, Nanook, Jon Burgerman ,Veng, Depoe, Radical!, White Cocoa ,Evereman Scott, Michael Ackerman, Uneek, Clown Soldier, Marcus Anderson, Joe Iurato ,Papertwins, Jacqueline Brickman ,VRNO , Hellbent, ROA ,Gregory Maxwell, Dunn II, YARK, Army of One, Deacon Czar
Saturday, September 17th
Located in the Clark Auditorium of the New York State Museum
3:30-4:45PM
KEYNOTE LECTURE
“Street Art Stories: A New Direction on the Street”
Presented by Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo, founders of Brooklyn Street Art
In Street Arts’ latest chapter, the storytellers are hitting up walls with all manner of influences and methods. More than ever before, formally trained and self taught fine artists are skipping the gallery route and taking their work directly to the public, creating cultural mash-ups and highly personal stories of their own, altering the character of this scene once again. Eclectic, individual, and as D.I.Y. as you can imagine, these Street Artists may have knowledge of who came before them or not, but they are determined to be a part of one art scene that is perceived as authentic, relevant, and alive.
Join Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo, authors (“Brooklyn Street Art”, and “Street Art New York”, published by Prestel/Random House) and founders of Brooklyn Street Art (BrooklynStreetArt.com) and contributing Street Art writers for The Huffington Post ARTS, as they show and compare examples of work from New York’s streets today. Then join a lively discussion in a Q&A session to help explore this storytelling practice and discuss how it may be evolving what we have been calling “Street Art” for the last decade.
Hosted by “Living Walls : Albany”, Samson Contompasis, Director, and Grand Street Community Arts, James Shultis, Executive Director.
KRAKEN’s solo show “Fantasmas” this on Saturday:
For more information regarding this show please click on the link below:
http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/?p=24457
Isn’t that nice? Neckface and his fine feathered friend “Fuck Life” have a dainty little show at New Image Art this weekend in West Hollywood. Bring your Barbies!
For more information regarding this show click on the link below:
http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/?p=23978
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Thanks to JUXTAPOZ for showing us the Tom Hanks Weather report GIF. See more of their GIF collection HERE.
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