Wall Therapy
The city known as “The World’s Image Center” will once again be living up to its title as it welcomes nearly 30 world renown street artists for the third installment of WALL\THERAPY. They will be transforming walls both large and small throughout Rochester into works of art, serving our collective need for inspiration.
Expanding upon the success of its previous years, WALL\THERAPY will be hosting a week long event starting on July 19th, showcasing the extraordinary talent of artists from across the globe and from our own back yard. Faith47 and Chinese artist DALeast, both hailing from Cape Town, South Africa are returning to Rochester for the third consecutive year. New additions to the artist lineup include Gaia from Baltimore, Binho from Sao Paulo, Brazil, Wise Two from Nairobi, Kenya and London-based Irish artist Conor Harrington. Rochester-based artists Mr. Prvrt, Range, St. Monci and Sarah C. Rutherford will join other local artists and our visiting “wall therapists” to create 30 original pieces of art throughout the city.
To kick off this week long mural festival, there will be block parties in each neighborhood where the murals are being painted featuring local musicians and performers, adding to the experience as crowds watch the “wall therapists” at work. An open community dialogue with the artists will take place mid-week.
WALL\THERAPY is brought to you by The Synthesis Collaborative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving health in the developing world using the tools of teleradiology and cloud computing. The common thread is “Imagery,” which has the potential to preserve and enhance life by addressing the needs of both the body and spirit. Its co-founder Dr. Ian Wilson envisions this event and the art it will create to be a lasting influence on the heart of the Rochester community. WALL\THERAPY brings these talented individuals together as a community-level intervention to use mural art as a vehicle to address our collective need for inspiration.
The 2013 WALL\THERAPY has also been made possible by the generous individuals who donated through our indiegogo campaign this past Spring. With their help and donations from local artists, our campaign was able to reach its goal of over $30,000.
Members of the press and public are invited to visit and engage the “wall therapists” as they paint their murals on the various walls generously donated by individuals and businesses in the South Wedge and El Camino Trail area.
Big week for street festivals on BSA where we blew up our server on the LODZ murals in Poland, the MURAL Festival in Montreal, and now the most community based of them all – the Ad Hoc Wellington Court block party Street Art jamboree thing in Queens, which we have some new images of today. Not to mention we got up on some roofs and Klub7 got down on the ground. So much fun, sun, and good times to be had with art and the creative spirit cut loose in the streets.
Here’s our weekly interview of the street, this week featuring Alice Mizrachi, Amuse, Andy Pants, Billy Mode, Chris Stain, Dan Witz, Dennis McNett, Droid 907, Icy & Sot, JCHM-IX, Lucx, Nice-One, Okuda, Olek, PRTL, Stefan Ways, This is Awkward, and UNO.
Shout out to Garrison and Alison Buxton for the big throw-down at Welling Court, which they do so well and with such love. We’ll have more images coming up.
A recent sunny day brought Baltimore Street Artist Toven outside to install some new work, including his humorous mashup of American romantic writer Edgar Allan Poe and an astronaut. An avid reader, this ex graffiti writer has also done large wheatpaste tributes in the past to some of his heroes like Burroughs, Bukowski and Kerouac.
While he experiments with images of wildlife of the elephantine variety and dips into more gothic or macabre imagery periodically, it’s his twisted portraits of these thinkers and dreamers that have more clearly established Toven’s insider status in outside art like this.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: Premiere of the Baltimore Documentary “One City-Eight Artist-Seven Days”, The Re + Public augmented reality software in Miami, Brain Killers in Chicago, and Andy Warhol Enthuses About Professional Wrestling.
BSA Exclusive Premiere:
“One City-Eight Artist-Seven Days”
We’re pleased today to debut a new short film documenting the work of eight street artist over the course of a week in the city of Baltimore.
A collaboration between The Heavy Projects and Jordan Seiler’s Public Ad Campaign, mural art is used as trigger to activate animations that are created with the artist’s work to create a 3-D scene you view with a tablet.
Brain Killer: Villains in Chicago
Friends in Chicago have a blast with paint bombs on a wall.
BSA is not just Brooklyn, you know. Last year we brought you new Street Art from Atlanta, Arizona, Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Bronx, Brooklyn, Brisbane, Bristol, Costa Rica, Chicago, China, Dominican Republic, The Gambia, Guatemala, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Istanbul, Italy, Jamaica, Johannesburg, Kenya, Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, Miami, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Norway, NYC, Palestine, Panama, Paris, Perth, Queens, Reno, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, and Trinidad. And that is a partial, incomplete list. Remember that the next time someone says we cover just Brooklyn and New York. Not quite.
Also while we were surveying what we did in 2012, we were curious to see which were the top stories we covered for the Huffington Post, measured by hits, social sharing, and emails sent to us. Here are the top stories you liked the most of the 44 we cross-published with Huffington Post Arts & Culture in 2012. (A complete list at the end of the posting)
Street Artist Gaia regularly highlights people from whichever community that he’s painting or wheatpasting in. Passersby commonly stop to talk while he’s working, often adding layers of history, knowledge, opinion, and nuance to his piece while he works. With his newest wall in Sandtown, a neighborhood of Baltimore, Gaia draws attention to a dying local profession that is hanging on, but barely.
Arabbers, pronounced locally with a long A (“A-rab”) were salespeople who had as many as 400 commercial carts offering fresh produce and other items rolling daily through the streets of Baltimore at one time, according to some accounts. Horse-drawn carts were a normal part of the early 20th century street life and amazingly B-Town still supports a few of these small business people on the streets in the 21st.
Because of new zoning and bylaws enacted during a period of urban renewal, the city restricted where horse stables existed, and many were put out of business. But during our travels through Baltimore with photographer Martha Cooper, who grew up there, we have had occasion to meet a number of the people who still carry this trade forward, some for many generations. Their small fenced off plots of land and stables appear suddenly like an oasis of farm life from another era in the middle of otherwise urban blocks. Once able to provide a good living to a family, Arabbers still brings fresh food to under served communities at reasonable prices. Unfortunately the proud profession is now endangered by the economic pressures of rising fees, the costs of animal care, and stable upkeep.
“The Arabbers are a dying Baltimore tradition,” says Gaia, “that have long been a staple of this remarkable city.” The NYC Street Artist, who has been living in Baltimore for a handful of years while attending university as an art student, feels a kinship to the families who are still enduring to keep this kind of livelihood sustainable. “These men and women define the word ‘hustle’,” he remarks, “trotting along both desolate and vibrant landscapes selling their goods and making ends meet. This mural depicts four generations; starting with the great grandfather Manboy in the middle and up to Fruit’s son on the top right.”
As the many expressions of Street Art freely bleed into all of art’s disciplines, many of Gaia’s more recent work clearly overlaps the traditions of community murals, where local residents are called out and celebrated, deified, congratulated, and mourned. In this case, the tradition also extends to being a little bit educational as Gaia points to some of the contributing factors that endanger a profession here, “ The Arabber portraits are mixed with the logos on the containers in which their produce comes: a global economy meets a fading, tough tradition.”
This week we saw pumpkins piled at the corner deli, the Yanks pushing on toward the series, Streisand returning at 70 to sing again in Brooklyn, that Rasta MC goin’ hard over his stack of speakers outside the barbershop on a sunny cool day, Christopher Columbus as a giant sculpture in somebody’s living room, and we can confirm that underground art parties are now moving to Bed Stuy, bypassing Bushwick. Stranger things will undoubtedly keep happening because Halloween is on Wednesday this year; pretty much guaranteeing a solid week of sexy horror on the street because people won’t know when to party, and you’re going to see at least 3 mock boxing fights between two guys dressed up as Obama and Romney with gloves because the Presidential election is 11/6. The actual 2nd match-up of the candidates is this Tuesday in Long Island to debate. Are the Yankees playing that night?
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, an eclectic trip that takes us to Brooklyn, Paris, Baltimore, and Russia with Cern, Overunder, Philippe HÉRARD, Lili Luciole, Concrete Jungle, Hot Tea, Love Child, Dain, Sorta, and Cynthia von Buhler. We start of with this faux neighborhood painted by Concrete Jungle on a building in Vladivostok.
“By far the best exhibition we’ve yet created,” says Martyn Reed, organizer of the Nuart 2012 street art festival as it draws to a close in Stavanger, Norway. What’s left after two weeks of painting, panel discussions, and parties stands on it own; The Art.
On old factory buildings, bricked stairways, in labyrinthine tunnels, and hanging on gallery walls, the city itself has welcomed international Street Artists to do these installations over the last decade and the funding for the events, artists, and materials are largely contributed to from public grants.
It’s a stunning model of arts funding that we’d like to see more of; one that is sophisticated enough to make behavioral and aesthetic distinctions and that is appreciative of the positive contributions of Street Art to the contemporary art canon. Here is one model that recognizes the importance of art in the streets as something necessary, valued. And the city of Stavanger keeps inviting a varied mix of well-known names and newcomers who show promise year after year.
At some point during the panel discussions at Nuart Plus this year there was talk about the dulling effect that the growing popularity of Street Art festivals specifically and sanctioned public art generally can sometimes have on the finished pieces. Certainly we are all familiar with those brain-deadening community murals of yesteryear that include lots of diversity, droning morality lectures and cute ducks. But we think the right balance of currency, community, and unchecked creativity can often catalyze great results, and smart people will know how to help keep it fresh.
Solidly, Stavanger took a lead in the Street Art festival arena early and is still setting standards for high quality as an integrated cultural event without compromising integrity with so-called ‘lifestyle’ branding. These images from 2012 show just a sampler of the many directions that Street Art is taking us, with traditional graffiti and letter-based influences and new overlays of 20th century fine art modernism keeping the scene unpredictable and vibrantly alive. Nuart artists this year included Aakash Nihalani (US), Dolk (Norway), Eine (UK), Ron English (US), Saber (US), Sickboy (UK), Mobster (UK), HowNosm (US), Niels Shoe Meulman (NL), Joran Seiler (US), and The Wa (France).
Thanks to Ian Cox for sharing these images, some exclusive and some previously published.
A one woman urban renewal project, Street Artist Gilf! has been prettifying the decay in a few cities over the last year or so with hand made fluorescent blooms. Not purely decorative, she thinks of them as sculptural, a public works project, and a sort of rorschach test that reveals as much about the audience as the artist. As with any artworks put out on the street, the public will render a verdict. In New York, they ride for about a minute before someone rips them off the wall – to take home in many cases. Also, New Yorkers don’t like “pretty” as much as they like tough stuff – skulls, violence, brooding, etc. With recent blooms popping up inside abandoned buildings, it will be interesting to see how long the garden grows.
We’ve collected a number of these for you to look at together, a sort of urban bouquet for Tuesday. While not wholely representative of Gilf!s various ventures on the street, these installations have a certain signature that’s revealed through these shots from Brooklyn, Baltimore, and Detroit.
It’s a BSA Fun Friday and we’re gonna tell you all about some stoopendous Street Art shows this weekend from Brooklyn to Chicago to Paris to Vienna but first….Everybody get up and do some FF dancing like my homeboy PSY in Korea.
This sh*t is Gangnsta, bro.
SEOUL, YOU THINK YOU GOT TALENT…
1. VIDEO “Gangnam Style” Dance Frenzy from Korea
2. Bäst Sells Olive Oil and Opens New Show at Opera Gallery (NYC)
3. “Just Your Type” at Low Brow Artique (BKLN)
4. LUDO “Metal Miltia” at Galerie Itinerrance (PARIS)
5. “All Write You Scumbags” with Reyes and Steel at Klughaus (Chinatown, NYC)
6. “Dominant Species” by ROA at 941 Geary (San Francisco)
7. GAIA, MOMO AND MICHAEL OWEN in “Zim Zum” (Baltimore)
8. Don’t Fret in “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Chardonnay”(Chicago)
9. Tel Aviv: Israeli Street Artist and poet Know Hope “Others’ Truths”
10. The Black River Festival in Vienna, Austria
11. Stephen Powers AKA ESPO “A Love Letter for You”
12. “Permanence at Space 27 Gallery in Montreal, Canada
13. eL Seed in Tunisia (VIDEO)
14. When Lucent Met Herakut (VIDEO)
15. Voice Of Art “Graffiti Against The System” Presents GATS (VIDEO)
Bäst Sells Olive Oil and Opens New Show at Opera Gallery (NYC)
Street Artist Bäst has always mixed a savory chopped image salad. With his dicing, cutting, collaging and stencilling work on the street over the last decade, a lot of his recent stencils are twisted Bodega style signs advertising basic staples for the pantry. But of all the collaborative advertising that Street Artists have been getting into, we never could have predicted this; Olive oil. You can actually go to snooty classist foodery Dean and Deluca and buy a bottle of Bast style olive oil right now. Only 500 were made in this limited edition and the oil smells better than the petroleum-spilled brownfields in industrial Bushwick where you usually see his work, so why not?
This Brooklyn native artist has been amusing, hijacking, and inspiring with his work on the streets of New York for well over a decade and it’s also cool to see his gallery work at his solo show “Germs Tropicana” opened last night at Opera in Manhattan. If the pieces are too pricey, Dean and Deluca is just a couple of blocks away!
For further information regarding this show click here.
“Just Your Type” at Low Brow Artique (BKLN)
Outside is the brand new wall piece by ND’A and Dirty Bandits. Inside this art store/gallery they are joined QRST and Gilf! in this new small show called “Just Your Type”, opening tonight.
For further information regarding this show click here.
LUDO “Metal Miltia” at Galerie Itinerrance (PARIS)
Parisian Street Artist LUDO was in multiple shows around the world and blanketed the Paris Metro and bus shelters with his subvertisements for two years before a gallery in his native city invited him inside. Tonight Galerie Itinerrance will have LUDO’s first solo show entitled “Metal Militia”.
With a truly unique approach to social critique that serves as a cunning indictment of the advertising industry and the military industrial complex, you won’t find anything like the pretty disgust than the work of LUDO.
For further information regarding this show click here.
“All Write You Scumbags” with Reyes and Steel at Klughaus (Chinatown, NYC)
Ever the ballsy wiseguy, the Klaughaus Gallery in Manhattan continues to produce and present quality shows that challenge your possibly prejudicial pre-formed perceptions of propriety and pugnacity. This time they invited West Coast natives Reyes and Steel to exhibit at their space with a show titled “All Write You Scumbags”.
From the press release, “The New York debut for both artists and showcases a distinct chemistry cultivated over years working together as friends, creative partners and members of MSK, one of the highest regarded graffiti artist collectives in the world.” To find out what this means go to their show opening tonight.
For further information regarding this show click here.
“Dominant Species” by ROA at 941 Geary (San Francisco)
Street Artist ROA concludes his US Summer Tour 2012 in San Francisco at his own victorious opening Saturday at 941 Geary Gallery. The show is aptly called “Dominant Species” and will feature many of the cast of creatures you have grown to expect.
For further information regarding this show click here.
To read BSA’s feature on ROA this week and to see beautiful images of his work in Mexico, Africa and Cambodia earlier this year click here.
GAIA, MOMO AND MICHAEL OWEN in “Zim Zum” (Baltimore)
GAIA, MOMO AND MICHAEL OWEN are transforming the space at the Creative Alliance Gallery in Baltimore with a collaboration that promises to spill over the street and beyond. If you want to see what the trio is up to put the gameboy down and head out to the gallery for their opening tomorrow night with an exhibition titled Zim Zum.
Don’t Fret in “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Chardonnay”(Chicago)
Chicago based Street Artist Don’t Fret has a new solo show, “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Chardonnay” opening Saturday night at the Bizzare Gallery in Chicago. So if you are planning to arrive naked, BYOB and put your wallet under your armpit. Lo-fi comic book doodling that make most people look like family day at the tractor pull, Don’t Fret drawings are people you know and often dang hilarious.
For further information regarding this show click here.
Also happening this Weekend:
If you are in Tel Aviv: Israeli Street Artist and poet Know Hope is releasing a new zine titled “Others’ Truths” and he’s mounted a small exhibition of the drawings that illustrate it. This exhibition will remain open all day today until 4:00 pm. Click here for more details on this show.
The 2012 Edition of The Black River Festival in Vienna, Austria is now open. The festival has an important selection of Street Artists putting up works throughout an entire week of programs. Roster includes Blu, Evan Roth, Florian Riviere, Isaac Cordal, Mark Jenkins, and ZukClub. Click here for more details on this festival.
The film screening by Stephen Powers AKA ESPO “A Love Letter for You” is being hosted by the Joshua Liner Gallery in conjunction with their current show by the artist “A Word is Worth A Thousand Pictures”. The screening will take place tomorrow at The Tribeca Grand Hotel. The artist will be in attendance along with the director and a Q & A will follow the film. Click here for more details on this event.
“Permanence” is the title of the new group show at Space 27 Gallery in Montreal, Canada. With an ambitious line up international and Canadian artists this show aims to juxtapose the “ephemeral nature of street art with the permanence of collectible art.” From their press release. Click here for more details regarding this show.
In the spirit of Unity, we present Street Artist eL Seed in Tunisia (VIDEO)
This week there has been much news of sadness, discord, and suffering in Libya, Egypt, and Yemen. Street Artist and painter eL Seed gives us a moment to pull back and reflect on the beauty and poignancy that a religious belief system can contribute to the lives of some.
Here he creates ‘Madinati’ Calligraffiti on Jara Mosque in Gabes.
When Lucent Met Herakut by The One Point Eight (VIDEO)
“A short documentary which presents the show involving graffiti duo Herakut and the Lucent Dossier group, detailing both the rehearsal process and the final performance in a unique and different way.”
Voice Of Art “Graffiti Against The System” Presents GATS (VIDEO)
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Cassius Fouler, Cruz, Dan Witz, Distort, Don John, Faust, GR170, Hellbent, Knarf, Leon Reid IV, Lumpenpack Crew, Meer Sau, Noah Sparkes, Rae, Ryan Doyle, Sobekicis, Sofia Maldonado, Swoon, and Toven from places like Brooklyn, Baltimore, Copenhagen, Vienna, Austria and Croatia.
Special shout out to photographers Meer Sau, Henrik Haven, and our own Jaime Rojo for getting all these great exclusive shots for BSA readers.
ZimZum Show Explodes Street Art World with Genre-‐Defying Piece Created by Street Artists MOMO, Michael Owen, & Gaia Opens Sept 15, 2012, 7-‐9pm
ZimZum turns street art on its head with a first-‐time collaboration between renowned artists Michael Owen, Gaia, and MOMO, by merging the work of multiple street artists into one unified piece that subsumes the individual styles of the artists into a new, singular voice. Such an intertwined, profound collaboration is rarely done in the street art world, where maintaining one’s unique imprint is at the essence of the genre.
The colossal work will fill the Main Gallery and spill onto the street, thereby pushing street art and the artists in a second way. The work must resonate with two radically different audiences simultaneously: the gallery world and the pedestrian consumer of street art, the casual passer-‐by. ZimZum is the kabbalistic idea that the creation of the universe was caused by God breathing in then out.
With large wheat paste line drawings of animals and historic figures referencing urban development, Gaia has burst into public view since 2009, exhibiting internationally from New York to Seoul, and Los Angeles to Amsterdam. Michael Owen is known as the artist behind the Baltimore Love Project, a planned series of 20 murals across Baltimore with silhouetted hands spelling the word “Love.” He’s also a Resident Artist at the Creative Alliance and has completed numerous public and private commissions, including one of the world’s longest murals in the underpass near the Baltimore neighborhood of Highlandtown. MOMO garnered early notice for “the world’s largest tag,” an innocuous, wobbly, 8-‐mile line of orange paint, spelling his name across the streets of Manhattan. He has since emerged as a leading presence internationally, with beautiful, site-‐sensitive, geometric-‐abstract murals pushing both abstraction and street art in new directions.
Following the opening, stay for the Sweatboxx Dance Party, from the producers of the successful FUSION series, paying tribute to the Baltimore club scene. We dare you to dance ALL NIGHT LONG! Two DJs, Booman (B-‐More) and Jav (Chocolate City), bring you the best of Baltimore Club and classic Hip Hop in one night. DJ Booman Is well known for his Doo Dew Kidz classics like “Watch Out For The Big Girl.” He’s engineered remixes for Usher, Katy Perry and Michael Jackson. DJ Jav (Javier Velasco) is a regular on WPFW’s “Decipher” Hip Hop Show.
Creative Alliance at The Patterson
3134 Eastern Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21224
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BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
