All posts tagged: Basquiat

BSA Images Of The Week: 04.28.24

April 28, 2024 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Welcome to BSA Images of the Week!

Spring is astoundingly colorful on the street in New York this year, with many new graffiti writers and street artists joining the existing throng and bringing their skills to a wall near you. At times, it appears now that we have as many artists as tourists in New York, but if they roll a suitcase, it is probably full of cans.

Here is our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Ron English, Homesick, Basquiat, Huetek, Biggie Smalls, Hops Art, Akira Toriyama, Blanca Romero, 2DX, Nike Kasio, Gouch NKC, Theme KED, Maximilian Romero, EA EO, Browine, Sintez One, FSG Park, and Jaek El Diablo.

Ron English. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Jaek El Diablo. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Sintez One at FSG Park (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Unidentified artist (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Maximilian Bagnasco for The Bushwick Collective. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Maximilian Bagnasco for The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

HUETEK 2DX. Tribute to Akira Toriyama. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

HUETEK 2DX. Tribute to Akira Toriyama. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. Spring 2024. Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA HOT LIST: Books For Your Gift Giving 2020

December 16, 2020 Art Book Review, Artists, Street Art Book Review

It’s that time of the year again! BSA has been publishing our “Hot Lists” and best-of collections for more than 10 years every December.

In this year that has been so heavy and difficult for many of the BSA family we thought it would be inappropriate to do things the way we always do, out of respect for this moment. The one list that we feel good about this year of course is our shortlist of some of our favorite books from 2020 that you may enjoy as well – just in case you would like to give them as gifts to family, friends, or even to yourself.

From BSA:

Crossroads, the new monograph from Alice Pasquini is full of the young daring and confident girls and women whom have been traveling with her since she began painting walls around the world two decades ago.

Rendered in aqua and goldenrod and midnight, withstanding winds and rains, these figures are willing to be there as a testament to the daily walk through your life. A survey and diary of her works and experiences, her style is more human than international in its everyday appeal, advocacy gently advanced through the depiction of intimate personal dynamics and internal reflection.

Perhaps this quality alludes to the invitation of interaction, the ease of integration with the public space in a way that the cultural norms of her Italian roots influenced her.

“In Rome, where I grew up, everything is urban art. Any little fountain or corner was made by an artist. And there were always a lot of expressions of freedom in this city,” she says in an interview here with writer Stephen Heyman.

Alice Pasquini “Crossroads” Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy, 2019

From BSA:

Bill Posters knows his street art and activism history.

From Beuys’ practice of ‘social sculpture’ and John Fekner’s blunt upbraiding of urban planning hypocrisies to AIDS activists using street art to shame government homophobia and the paint-bombing of a Mao portrait that led to the arrest and torture of the artists/activists for counter-revolutionary propaganda, he’ll give you a solid foundation on precedence for this rebellious art life in “The Street Art Manual.”

He also knows how to yarn-bomb.

And myriad other techniques for freelance intervening in city spaces that you own, that all of us own, but which are often commandeered for commercial messages, political propaganda messages, or commercial-political propaganda messages – otherwise known as fascism.

“The Street Art Manual”; Rebel Artivism and Good Manners with Bill Posters

The Street Art Manual by Bill Posters. The Street Art Manual new US on-sale date is now Sept. 8th. 2020. Published by Laurence King Publishing Ltd. London, UK. 2020.

From BSA:

Taking a decade long view of your creative life can be astoundingly instructional if you are brave enough; perusing over the body of work that you have taken with eyes focused and blurred may reveal broad outlines and finer features of a creative life-path – a psychological mapping of the inner world and its outer expression with all its impulses, longings, expressions of received truths and newly discovered wisdom.

Franco Fasoli aka JAZ has looked over his last decade (2009-2019) of work as a street artist and fine artist and offers you the opportunity to examine his public and private side as well in this new two-volume compendium. Painting on the streets since the mid-nineties and his mid-teens in his hometown of Buenos Aires, the visual artist knew his path would be a creative one. His family and role models, comprised of well-schooled artists and educators, had provided a foundation of critique and appreciation for him to build upon from the earliest years.

Artist Franco JAZ Fasoli Goes “Publico Privado”

Franco Fasoli. Privado. Publico Privado. Jaz Franco Fasoli. 09-2019

From BSA:

Belgium’s ROA, whom we have featured in perhaps 30+ articles, put out his “CODEX” monograph this spring, and while sitting inside your lockdown we thought you would enjoy freeing your mind to travel the world with him.

A gypsy by nature, a naturalist by practice, he has investigated and heralded the animal world, complete with its heartless savagery. Accurately depicting many of the most marginalized and endangered specimens, this uncanny portraitist spooks you with the scale of his animals, draws you in to their presentation without guile.

Willing to let his work do the talking, ROA is still anonymous after more than a decade on the global street art stage. Following his own path, we recognize his achievements here, and wish him good travels wherever he goes.

ROA “CODEX” Reveals His Wild World Wanderings

From BSA:

In addition to lush photo spreads of Martha’s documentation over 6 decades, we have essays written by art critic, curator and author Carlo McCormick, UN Executive Director Jan Sauerwald, author and photographer Nika Kramer, author, curator, and Hip Hop historian Akim Walta, National Geographic chief photo editor Susan Welchman, curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York Sean Corcoran, and the curators of this exhibition Jaime Rojo and Steven P. Harrington.

The hefty hardcover, a richly illustrated and modernly designed book, is timed for release simultaneously with the exhibition opening this Friday, October 2. In addition to the essays, we have 40 quotes about Martha from her peers, artists, authorities in photography, folklore, graffiti, and Hip Hop, along with long-time friends and her family. The cover of the book features a photograph rarely seen of graffiti writer Skeme train surfing in NYC taken by Martha in 1982. The introductory texts to each of the 10 sections are written by author and curator Christian Omodeo.

“Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures”

Published by Urban Nation Museum Berlin & Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo.

From BSA:

To accompany the exhibition “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a substantial catalogue has been released to support the show and place the artist in context with his time as well as his influence on the future as it pertains to contemporary art and so-called art in the streets.

Accessible and erudite, the catalogue unpacks the social connections, the various emerging music, art, and performance sub-scenes of “Downtown” and “Uptown” New York culture, the opaque underpinnings of the dominant culture, and the urban syntaxes that formed this young Brooklyn artist and his work in the 1970s and 1980s. To faithfully set the stage for this story; to conjure the atmosphere, the moment, the context that Basquiat evolved himself into, you would need to create an interactive urban theme park with an impossible set design budget, a cacophonous sound-music map, a handful of public policy and political advisors, an anthropologist, a warehouse of costumes, too many actors, too many attitudes, and even more drugs.

Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation. Published by MFA Publications on the occasion of the exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Edited by Liz Munsell and Greg Tate with contributions by J. Faith Almiron, Dakota DeVos, Hua Hsu, and Carlo McCormick.

“Writing The Future”: Basquiat , Broken Poetics, and the NYC Cultural Context

From BSA:

With precision and guile Sandra Chevrier has painted a female world that is sophisticated, unreachable and appealing, whether painted on canvas, street mural, or stuck to a wall in the margins of a city. The characters who are punching and pouncing and swooning across her faces are reflective of her own hearts’ adventures, seamlessly rolling and intermingling with those epic storylines and dust-ups with superheroes and villains of yesterday.

Perhaps it is because of this sense of inexactly placed nostalgia, in “Cages” we are aware of the ties that bind us, the roles that we hold – whether chosen or imposed – and we’re rooting for these Chevrierotic women to win – as they scream and cry and swing for the rafters, looking for the way out.

“A dance between triumph and defeat, freedom and captivity, the poison and the cure,” stands the ambivalent quote on the page facing her black and white photo by Jeremy Dionn.

A closeup of her face, her hand horizontally obscures the lower half, her index finger raised to allow Sandra to see, to study and assess. Without question this artists’ work is more than autobiographical – these expressions offer a stunning sense of mystery, an understanding at the precipice, an adventure-ready to occur.

Sandra Chevrier: Cages. Published by Paragon Books and designed in San Francisco, CA. by Shaun Roberts. August 2020.

“Writing The Future”: Basquiat , Broken Poetics, and the NYC Cultural Context

November 23, 2020 Art Book Review, Artists

Considering the elements of this planetary system, one that drew protagonists into layers of swirling space in overlapping concentric patterns at a time where “high” and “low” distinctions were melting and crashing into one another, a viewer is still drawn physicality of the works and artifacts, the hand and the gesture. If you are going to talk about expressionism and its reaction to stimuli, you’ll also want to appreciate the tactility of this art-making process, one that was endemic to Basquiats’ daily existence in the studio and on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Editor of the “Writing the Future” catalogue, Liz Munsell, delves directly into that physicality in her essay, an experiential process that he shares with the viewer. “In several areas of the composition, Basquiat seems to have taken his own hands directly to the painting’s thick, wet surface, dragging his fingers across it into an area where he painted the hand of his self-portrait,” says Munsell. Willfully enigmatic at times and decidedly cryptic in his textual references, one cannot argue with this, an ultimate form of mark-making.

While Munsell is addressing something tangible, she is also witness to the spirit. We take it as an apt response to the greater challenge of decoding the works; presenting “the shattered poetics of Jean Michel Basquiat lyric memory cabinets.”

Basquiat scholar Carlo McCormick, who also happens to have been a full participant and observer of the ratty and glittering decline of New York during Basquiats’ rise, opens the book. Within his lyrical prelude to the artists’ ascent is a similar effort to place the moment; a sea of creative talents from privilege and without, trying their hand at sinking or swimming on the gallery of the streets, seizing a moment that reshaped a sleepy and self-satisfied gallery system that had painted itself into a proverbial white-box (and white-skin) corner.

“It’s all a crazy quilt conversation, talking in wild style tongues from the train yards to the writer’s bench, from bewildered commuters and savvy fans to the posturing politicians with their broken-windows theories in vandal squads, from little nightclub art shows and the ad hoc outposts like Fashion Moda and the Fun Gallery to a global stage of major exhibitions from the primal voice of mark-making to the sweet sounds of the studio, where a generation of outlaws joined that historical confab of painters in the culture of canvas. It’s got a beat hard-scrabbled out like the scratching of those early playground turntablists, but it’s all about the language, transmuted beyond easy recognition, private in the most public of ways, the insider voice of the outsider externalizing the interior. It’s pure jive, freeform and freestyle, the deceptions of code carrying the truth of the heart, the lyrics to all our collective pain, anger, alienation, and hope writ large like an aerosol atom bomb.”

Talk about shattered poetics.

In fact, art in the streets was a direct respondent to trauma, inequity, dislocation, and the effects of the flight of capital– and if certain populations found it discordant, it was possibly because it functioned as a funhouse mirror – distorted and vaguely threatening. While Basquiat was self-promoting in the venues and manners he was most suited, he was placing a bet that society was ready, or would be soon, for the platform and the content and the challenge.

“Graffiti had found the speed at which it needed to be seen,” the graffiti writer, fine artist and street style branding wizard Futura says in a quote.

By chasing it and learning how to read these writings on the wall we would gain a better understanding of what was to come in the future.

BSA Images Of The Week: 10.13.19

October 13, 2019 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Welcome to BSA Images of the Week – and what a week it has been. The Jews have a new year, the daily amNewYork newspaper was closed, Brooklyn is breaking up gambling dens, and some people are still celebrating Columbus Day tomorrow. The streets have so many different voices adding to the visual dialogue, rather unlike the illusion of variety the corporate media presents us regarding geopolitics, democratic institutions, banks, oil, austerity, the world economy as casino, the war industry, the rise of fascism and autocrats generally.

Now that we think of it, all of these topics are directly and indirectly addressed through our Street Art as well.

Hope you are out strolling today in your neighborhood looking for Street Aart, in a park looking at the leaves on the trees, or outside the city in an apple orchard or pumpkin patch. Do anything you can to strike a sense of balance – we all need it!

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Alex Face, Buff Monster, Chapter 23, Dan Kitcher, Elyaz, The Pansy Project, Inside Out Project, JR, Michel Velt, N.Dergund, Mishka, Little Ricky, Nass, Rubin415, Shiro, Tar Box, and Winslow World.

Top banner Dan Kitchener (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dan Kitchner for East Village Walls. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Alex Face for East Village Walls. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Looks like Anna Wintour is having some female trouble. Little Ricky (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Mishka Says…oh my my! (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Almost Over Keep Smiling (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Michel Velt for East Village Walls. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Tar Box for East Village Walls. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

JR Inside Out Project for the Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

0907 Feels Like “The Radiant Child” in Beijing

August 21, 2019 Artists

The resonance of Brooklyn/New York Street Arist Jean Michel Basquiat continues to amaze us, in his reach, in his relevance to people who he may have never imagined that he would inspire. Today we bring you 0907 in Beijing, who is telling us that he went on many spots throughout the city with his new cardboard composite work – a stencil that captures his feeling about an artist on the other side of the world who lived and died, perhaps before he was born. As an additional cultural mashup, he employs the vocabulary of a secondary Street Art, Shepard Fairey.

And Mickey Mouse for good measure.

0907. Radiant Child. Beijing, China. (photo © 0907)

“One day I watched a movie called “Basquiat,” he tells us, “and another called is ‘Ridiculous Years’ I had some insight into the age of his life. So I made a poster which borrowed Obey’s style.and I posted these on my city. At that moment I felt I am the radiant child in my city.”

BSA Film Friday: 10.20.17

October 20, 2017 Artists

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :
1. INDECLINE: Rail Beast
2. INDICLINE: DREAMERS
3. Basquiat, Banksy & Brutalism in London
4. Restoring Banksy
5. Erik Burke: Park Blossom

BSA Special Feature: INDECLINE: Rail Beast

“This reminds why I hate vandals! All this does is create more unnecessary work for the guys at the paint shop,” says a commenter on the Vimio page where INDECLINE has posted this locomotive takeover. You see kids, this is why we can’t have nice things. I just mopped this floor and you come running in here with your muddy boots! For Pete’s sake.

Truthfully, this decidedly unpolitical piece is a surprise coming from INDECLINE. Guess they were taking the day off from railing against hypocrisy and injustice with this animated train that recalls Saturday morning cartoons like Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner.

INDECLINE: DREAMERS

Ahhh this is more like it, the acidic satire. A short punchy video that shows the creation of a satirical take on Trump’s frightening attitude toward kids brought across the border into the US. These days, they are called Dreamers and have protections and options to do radical things like go to college and get a job. But not if this clown has anything to say about it. Want a balloon?

Basquiat, Banksy & Brutalism in London. Brought to you by Fifth Wall TV

And all this time you thought it was abstract expressionism! Please people, you can throw those labels out the window. Here Doug tells you about the new Basquiat exhibit and in a fit of perfect timing, the Banksy piece that appears in support of it in London. Doug says its arguably the city’s finest hour.

Restoring Banksy. Doug Gillen of Fifth Wall TV

This is the second time London has seen a snorting copper, since this 2006 Banksy piece has resurfaced, or rather was re-surfaced, as the case may appear.

Favorite quote out of context, “just so happened to oversee the sale of ‘Slave Labor’ “.

Erik Burke: Park Blossom

“My name is Erik Burke and I am a muralist,” says the Nevadan about his new blooming temporary Mall parking lot piece. For those fans playing at home, he’s also a graffiti writer/Street Artist and there are clues embedded here in the video for you to piece together.

BSA Top Stories As Picked by You from BSA and HuffPost in 2015

December 15, 2015 Artists

You picked them!

Last week you saw the Top Murals and the Top Videos. Today here are our Top Stories of 2015.

BSA readers told us by your direct comments and online sharing – that you love our coverage of Street Art festivals: 8 of the top 15 postings in ’15 were about them.

The rest of the most popular stories can be described as being about powerful personalities and consequential work on the street that is not simply visually impactful but is backed by a story that runs deeper.

Following are your top 15 postings from the year on BSA and our articles on The Huffington Post along with an excerpt from the original posting.

NO. 15

A Mexican Mural ‘Manifesto,’ Blackened Flags And Censorship (March 04 2015)

Erica il Cane (photo © Fifty24Mex)

“Striking and massive murals by international street artists have been populating the walls of Mexico City for the last five years thanks to the emergence of a global Street Art scene, a rise in mural festivals, and the country’s tradition of institutional support for murals that further a socio-political mission. There hasn’t been much of the latter lately, however, and it is doubtful that a new politically charged mural campaign underway in certain central neighborhoods is likely to receive tax dollars for the paint and ladders.

Without sighting a specific ill to address, the new mural initiative named “Manifesto” is challenging a select group of local and international street artists to express their opinions on weighty and topical matters through murals, “using art as a social tool to propose, reflect and inform.” Among possible topics that might be addressed, the manifesto for “Manifesto” says, are increasing poverty, glorified materialism, the exhausting of natural resources, a fraying social web, and a dysfunctional justice system.”

More…

NO. 14

Malik and ‘Note’ Bring 17 Street Artists To A Swiss Prison (November 04, 2015)

(photo © Malik)

“Initiated by Aarau-based graffiti/street/fine artist Malik in May of 2012, the project eventually corralled 17 street artists, all but one from Switzerland, to enter the confines of the new high security Lenzburg Prison to paint murals on exterior walls, courtyards, hallways, and common areas.

‘I was looking for a new challenge and a new and exciting project where I could show my art,’ says Malik and while the 18 month project originated with his vision of getting a nice wall for himself, quickly the project grew far beyond his expectations to become an educational, sociological meditation on the penal system, the appropriate role of art within it, and our collective humanity.”

More…

NO. 13

The Coney Art Walls: First Three Completed and Summer Begins (May 27, 2015)

Kave (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“Instead of being hunted down for catching a tag or bubble-lettered throw-up, a couple dozen graffiti/street art painters are invited to hit up Coney Island this summer — and since we’ve just marked the unofficial first weekend of summer in New York — we’re bringing you the first three freshly completed pieces.

Part of “Coney Art Walls”, the muralists began taking the train out to this seaside paved paradise that is re-inventing itself once again, this time courtesy of art curator Jeffrey Deitch.”

More…

NO. 12

50 Years From Selma, Jetsonorama and Equality in Brooklyn (June 27, 2015)

Jetsonorama (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“From Selma to Ferguson, Birmingham to Charleston, Jimmie Lee Jackson to Michael Brown, Street Artist Jetsonorama is crossing the country from Arizona to New York and a half-century of America’s struggle with our legacy of racism and injustice.

As marches have continued across the country in cities like Ferguson, Oakland, Baltimore, New York, Dallas and Cleveland in the past year addressing issues such as police brutality and racism, the south is taking down confederate flags on state houses and the US is mourning another mass shooting.

Now as Americans everywhere are pulling out and waving the stars and stripes to celebrate freedom, this new powerful installation on a Brooklyn wall reminds us of what New York poet Emma Lazarus said, ‘Until we are all free, we are none of us free.’ ”

More…

NO. 11

Gender, Caste, And Crochet: OLEK Transforms A Shelter In Delhi (March 25, 2015)

Olek (photo © Street Art India)

” ‘It felt like I gave a birth to an oversize baby without any pain killers. I had to pull the black magic to make it happen. Physically and emotionally drained. Was it worth it? Absolutely YES,’ she types onto her Facebook page to let friends and fans know that she has finished the seven-day marathon of crocheting and directing a full team of volunteers and St+Art Delhi organizers. Triumphant, she stands atop the woman’s shelter, a one story structure of corrugated metal and concrete 40-feet long and 8-feet high, with a fist in the air, a symbol of celebration as well as a show of solidarity with the sisterhood of those who helped her make it and those will seek refuge here when other options have been exhausted.”

More…

NO. 10

A Tidal Wave of Lodz Reborn: ‘Lodz Murals’ Distinguishes a Polish City (October 28, 2015)

Alexis Diaz (photo © Maciej Stempij)

“Now I don’t want to create any new festival, any new brand — just want to keep the name as simple as possible,” he says of Lodz Murals, an ongoing program that functions year round rather than focusing specifically on a short-term festival. With all responsibilities for organizing, promoting, and working with city and private business under one roof, Michał says that his vision is to create the same sort of iconic image of Lodz with murals as Paris with the Eiffel Tower.

“I would like that people on the global scale would think of Lodz as a city with exceptional public art,” he says grandly while acknowledging that public art shines in many other cities as well. “When you are thinking about public art, one of the first places that you will see in your mind’s eye is Lodz. Of course, comparing the mural project to the one of the most important “pearls” of modern architecture is pure overstatement, but I would like to create this type of mechanism, this type of association.”

More…

NO. 9

WALL\THERAPY 2015: Surrealism and the Fantastic (July 29, 2015)

Never Crew (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“We don’t know for sure if it was our current funhouse mirror atmosphere that drove the Wall\Therapy festival in Rochester, NY to choose this years’ themes. It may simply be a way of organizing artists whose work reflects these notions back to us and to illuminate one specific growing trend in street culture and murals.

Surely Magritte, Dali and Ernst would be very pleased by the uptick of modern surrealists and practitioners of the bizarre, fantastical, and dream-like in galleries, in the public sphere, and throughout popular culture in recent years.”

More…

NO. 8

NUART 2015 Roundup: A Laboratory on the Street (September 12, 2015)

Ella & Pitr (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“As we mark the halfway point of this decade and see the institutional discussions of Street Art taking form while academics try to place it in the canon of art-making and decide upon the nature of its impact, they do it with the knowledge that gallery shows, museum exhibitions, high-profile auctions, individual collecting, lifestyle marketers, and public festivals of many configurations and aspirations are already embracing its relevance. No one can possibly gauge this story in all of its complexity but some will capture its spirit. Being on the street helps.

One way to get a pulse on the present is to attend shows like Nuart and witness the diverse stratagems that artists are using to engage their audiences and judge if they are successful at realizing their intentions. With a deliberately mixed bag of thinkers, feelers, documentors, aesthetes, and pranksters culled together for your edification, this show stokes the discussions.”

More…

NO. 7

Coney Art Walls: 30 Reasons to Go to Coney Island This Summer (June 24, 2015)

Daze (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“The gates are open to the new public/private art project called “Coney Art Walls,” and today, you can have a look at all 30 or so of the new pieces by a respectable range of artists spanning four decades and a helluva lot of New York street culture history. We’ve been lucky to see a lot of the action as it happened over the last five weeks and the range is impressive. These are not casual, incidental choices of players lacking serious resumes or street/gallery cred, but the average observer or unknowing critic may not recognize it.”

More…

NO. 6

Barcelona: “Open Walls” Mural Festival and Conference 2015 (November 11, 2015)

RocBlackBlock (photo © Fernando Alcalá Losa)

“Barcelona was known as a city at the epicenter of a bustling lively organic street art scene in the mid 2000s. Today that has greatly been cracked down upon by authorities, but the Spanish city now boasts a mural festival called Open Walls, which celebrated its third edition last month with public works spanning a great number of influences and styles. Of course there is still plenty of autonomous, non-comissioned street art to be seen as well.”

More…

NO. 5

Basquiat’s Rarely Seen Notebooks Open At The Brooklyn Museum (April 01, 2015)

Basquiat (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“In ‘Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks,’ now running at the Brooklyn Museum until August 23, the genius of his fragmenting logic is revealed as a direct relationship between his private journals and his prolific and personally published aerosol missives on the streets of Manhattan’s Soho and Lower East Side neighborhoods in the late 1970s and 1980s.

These notebooks were for capturing ideas and concepts, preparing them, transmuting them, revising them, pounding them into refrains. In the same way his text (and glyphic) pieces on the street were not necessarily finished products each time; imparted on the run and often in haste, these unpolished missives didn’t require such preciousness.”

More…

NO. 4

Borås ‘No Limit’ 2015: Graffiti Tags, Murals, Greco-Roman Antiquities (September 17, 2015)

Pichi & Avo (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“This is No Limit, the second installation of murals done primarily by street artists in Borås, a pristine and pleasant city about 45 minutes east of Gothenberg. With the leadership of artist Shai Dahan and organizers Stina Hallhagen and Anders Khil the local tourism office works year round to promote this festival and the quality of the pieces are top notch due to the careful choices of international big names and up-and-comers.

In addition to this diversity, the scale is varied with massive walls like those by the Chilean Inti and Poland’s Robert Proch, and more personal-sized installations in surprise locations around town by American illustration artist David Zinn and New Jersey’s sculptural stencilist Joe Iurato.”

More…

NO. 3

Street Art Sancocho: ArteSano Project Brings Dominican Flavor (January 08, 2015)

Mario Ramirez (photo © Tots Films)

“It could be the name influencing our perception, but in one way or another it looks like these artists are chosen for their down-to-earth hand hewn approach. Sometimes decorative, sometimes storytelling, there are familiar themes and motifs that play well to their local audience as well as the virtual gawker.

Even with two dozen artists, it isn’t bloated: no logos or product tie-ins or DJs or high flying scissor lifts scaling massive multi-story walls with abstract surrealism, hyper photo-realism or dark pop human/animal/robot hybrids here – yet. Well, we take that back on the surrealism score; Pixel Pancho is here with a brood of chickens bobbing their industrial mesh necks atop fired tile bodices, hunting and pecking their way toward the beach, and Miami artist duo 2alas & Hox created a portrait of a boy with a partial mask overlay that calls to mind cyborgs (and Sten & Lex). But here in the loungey bare-foot tropical DR coastal area, even Pixel Pancho mutes the hues toward sun-bleached pastels, more easily complimenting their surroundings.”

More…

NO. 2

Renaissance Masters, Keith Haring and Ninja Turtles in Brooklyn Streets (July 15, 2015)

Owen Dippie. (photos © Jaime Rojo)

“And so it made sense last week when Dippie skillfully merged imagery spanning five centuries, two continents, and two distinctly different art movements. Call it a measured miracle, a ratherish revelation that Dippie completed a deftly realized mashup of Raphael and Keith Haring, with the Madonna del Granduca holding Haring’s icon-symbol that is variously referred to as ‘Radiant Baby,’ ‘Radiant Child,’ and ‘Radiant Christ.’ ”

More…

NO. 1

YZ and Her ‘Amazone’ Warrior Women On Senegalese Walls (January 14, 2015)

YZ (photo © YZ Yseult)

“French Street Artist YZ Yseult has begun her own campaign to pay tribute to the fierce female fighters of the 19th Century West African country of Dahomey, who are more commonly referred to as Amazons. A startling narrative of female power not often heard today for some, but as YZ is researching her own history as a descendent from slaves, her portraits reflect a personal impetus to tell these stories with a new force. She has named this series of strong warriors on the street ‘Amazone’.”

More…

Basquiat Through The Eyes Of Fellow Artists on the Street

April 2, 2015 Artists

The response to our pieces on BSA and Huffpost yesterday has been sort of overwhelming – with people writing to us and commenting and sharing the article in large numbers on social media. Last nights pre-opening party at the museum was also enthusiastic, and although we don’t do the name-dropping thing much, we were gobsmacked to see members of his family at the dinner as well as many of the “Downtown” crowd from that era who were charming and celebratory as we listened to Director Arnold Lehman and the two curators describe the show and the process of putting it together.

If this personal and virtual traffic is any indication, the new Notebooks show is already a huge hit. Of course Jean-Michel Basquiat AKA ©SAMO AKA Basquiat continues to be an inspiration to a number of artists on the street as well. To mark the upcoming exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks officially opening tomorrow April 3rd, here we present you with a handful of images from our archives with tributes to the influential Brooklyn graffiti writer/ street artist / contemporary artist.

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Basquiat’s Notebooks Open at The Brooklyn Museum

April 1, 2015 Artists, Interview

As lines continue to blur in fields of art and technology (and everything else) it is easier to see Street Art as an online/on-street diary, a forum for speech making, a laboratory for testing ideas, a publishing platform for the dispersing of truths and lies and theories and maxims and slogans and aphorisms. A timely new exhibition of personal notebooks by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat further affirms the direct relationship between the personal and the public voice of one New York expressionist, revealing lesser-known aspects of him as artist and individual.

A teenage poet on New York streets, Basquiat used his own brand of graffiti to pursue his own brand of fame. His text was intended in part as a visual element but unlike graffiti writers who produced ever more expressive tags during that heated moment in New York graffiti history, Basquiat also sought an audience who may be hip to his cerebral wordplay of poetry that puzzled and enticed – a foxy style of William Burroughs-inspired automatic writing he adapted for his own uses.

In Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, now running at The Brooklyn Museum until August 23rd, the genius of his fragmenting logic is revealed as a direct relationship between his private journals and his prolific and personally published aerosol missives on the streets of Manhattan’s Soho and Lower East Side neighborhoods in the late 1970s and 1980s.

The art collector Larry Warsh lends these eight notebooks that span 1981-1987, 160 pages in all, for you to scan and contemplate. New to most audiences, they also feel familiar. While they do not provide a play-by-play account of his daily affairs, they do provide insight into his state of mind, interests, and creative process. Knowing his reputation for being very aware of his public perception, you may wonder how private these were in his mind – if he was at least partially writing for a greater audience here sometimes as well.

But these are definitely his voice. Even in lengthier poetry pieces, Basquiats’ reductive approach to writing produces the same clipped cadences that appeared on walls and gallery paintings, a process of addition and subtraction that he could eventually pare down to one word that would command a canvas.

“Famous”.

A two sided, free standing piece from 1982 midway through the gallery space gives a bittersweet focus to one of his aspirations, as well as to his application of photocopies of his own work in multiples on the canvas – a replication/repetition technique from commercial wildposting that was popularized on walls and lamp posts by graffiti writer/street artists like Revs and Cost in New York in the 90s.

“I think this show points out that the conceptual and poetic side of JMB’s work is central to and integrated with his more overtly visual and expressionistic paintings,” says Tricia Laughlin Bloom, who worked in collaboration with Dieter Bucchart, Guest Curator in organizing this exhibition. “He enjoyed exploring the play between text as visual sign or symbol and the layers of historical, sociological, personal meaning that words activate. Some of the very restrained word drawings and notebook entries are intensely expressionistic, for instance, without the use of gesture or color.”

The notebooks are part of a larger offering of paintings, drawings, and moving image in this well balanced show that keeps the focus on the writer and painter of text while placing it in the greater context of all his work. Included here are drawings of his fictional character Jimmy Best, for example, who appeared in early SAMO© street writings and elsewhere as an ongoing and developing narrative that hinted at his self image.

Most riveting for the new generation of writers may be the film clips shot in 1980-81 during the filming of New York Beat (released in 2000 as Downtown 81). Not true documentary footage, it nevertheless captures the artist outside mark-making in a determined, self-aware, sometimes hesitating manner across walls with letters and lines of simple black aerosol.

Moving into “the City” from his middle class Brooklyn home as a teenager in the late 70s, you have to wonder how or if his street practice with friend Al Diaz had been influenced by the students and workers who wrote slogans, epigrams, maxims, in black aerosol letters during the Paris uprisings of 1968. Quick passages on the street then like “Sous les paves, la plage” (under the paving stones, the beach) also played with text and sometimes cryptic meaning in ways similar to his on city walls and in these notebooks. Neatly penned, his was a deliberate meditation and experiment with words – a process that allowed you to see the deletions and additions, fully part of the finished product.

“We were presented with the rare opportunity to exhibit Basquiat’s notebooks, which offer fascinating access to his thoughts and process,” says Sharon Matt Atkins, Vice Director for Exhibitions and Collections Management, when talking about the decision to mount Notebooks.

Of course its not the first time Street Artists have been featured meaningfully here. Under the guidance of Director Arnold L. Lehman the Brooklyn Museum has shown a serious and committed interest in highlighting the contributions of artists whose practice comes directly from the streets of New York and its graffiti/Street Art traditions; including the huge Basquiat show a decade ago, the Graffiti show in 2006, the more recent Keith Haring show, Swoon’s Submerged Motherlands last year, Olek’s display at the annual Artist’s Ball, and the upcoming Faile exhibit this July, which will also feature their collaboration with Bäst. For Matt Atkins, this show is in perfect alignment.

“The Brooklyn Museum has had a commitment to showing artists whose work embraces contemporary culture. Basquiat seamlessly synthesized the world around him in his art, including elements culled from the streets, music, literature, history, and more,” she says.

It has been 27 years since Basquiat died at the age of 27. Somehow you can imagine that mathematical equation appearing here on one of the larger canvases; dense with symbols, sentence fragments, lists and formulas. Sifting through the tenuously connected word constellation it occurs to you that people like Basquiat and Burroughs and the Beats were forebears of the post-Gutenberg dislocation of text from its moorings – one that we all swim in – with passages and words and texts floating to us and past us from multiple screens of varying sizes throughout each day.

As this stream of messages blurs from the intensely personal to the public spheres, this show confirms how the art-making process for the street has always been rich with storytelling, even if not evident at first. A show of this moment, seeing these notebooks first hand will complete a cycle for many.

We had an opportunity to speak further with one of the curators, Tricia Laughlin Bloom, about Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks.

Brooklyn Street Art: Often we think of the work we see on the street as part of a continuum, a conversation back and forth between the artist and the passerby. How does this exhibition illustrate the continuum that extends from private neatly penned journals to public aerosol missives?
Tricia Laughlin Bloom: Going through the exhibition you find a lot of similarity between the voice he used in his street writing and in his notebooks, that also extends to his word paintings. Fragments of SAMO text recur in larger scale works that we have included, and many of his notebook passages read like they could have been SAMO texts.

Brooklyn Street Art: Can you describe the dynamic between yourself and the guest curator Dieter Buchhart and how it informed some of your joint decisions for presenting the work?
Tricia Laughlin Bloom: Dieter brought the initial checklist together as Guest Curator, and we shaped it together from there. We both felt it was important that the show be about the notebooks—that the paintings and drawings should be carefully selected to compliment the notebooks and not overwhelm, and to highlight Basquiat the poet and thinker AND visual artist. Getting the right number of works and the precise balance was a long process, and many conversations.

Brooklyn Street Art: How has preparing this exhibition changed or affected your perception of his work in the intervening ten years since the “Basquiat” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, if at all?
Tricia Laughlin Bloom: I was always a fan, and I loved the 2005 show, but I feel I understand him better and my admiration has deepened after the opportunity to work with the notebooks. It’s more intimate in scale and the whole experience feels more personal.

From left to right: Untitled (Crown) 1982. Tuxedo. 1982. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Photo taken from the video Downtown 81 Outtakes. 2001. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks is organized by Dieter Buchhart, Guest Curator, with Tricia Laughlin Bloom, former Associate Curator of Exhibitions, Brooklyn Museum and current Curator of American art at the Newark Museum.

With special thanks to Tricia Laughlin Bloom, Sharon Matt Atkins, and Sally Williams.

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks at the Brooklyn Museum opens on April 3, 2015 to the general public. Click HERE for further details.

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This article is also published on The Huffington Post

BSA Images Of The Week: 12.14.14

December 14, 2014 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

The year is winding down people, and the hits just keep on coming!

Bankers are ruling us and setting us up for their next crashing of the economy, mistletoe-carrying drones are a good idea gone wrong, and thousands continue to protest injustice toward black and brown people in Washington DC and Washington Square. In happier news: – just one photo we posted this week on Instagram – LMNOPI’s painting of a small boy protester – united the boy’s mother with the artist and us via social media, which was kind of magical. See a version of the image below. The city is also crammed with tourists (Hi Aunt Bobbie and Uncle Roy! Hi Kate and William!), drunken Santa’s are somewhat less cranky this year, and the Dyker Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn is already encrusted with Christmas lights.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring $howta, Crummy Gummy, Dhear, Don John, Eelco Virus, LMNOPI, London Kaye, Mistakoy, Mr. Oneteas, Peter Van Flores, Rocko, Tracy168, WERC, and ZIMAD.

Top Image >> A Mr. OneTeas tribute to Keith Haring appeared in Soho. Earlier in the week an “I Can’t Breath” piece by the artist appeared on the street in Williamsburg but was torn down before we could get to it. Things happen fast sometimes with this ephemeral form of speech, and some pieces (like anything too cutesy or anything with male nudity) come down fast. The artists Instagram has a version of the large wheatpaste. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Images of the Week: 04.13.14

April 13, 2014 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Street Artists have been exhibited in museums before so Swoon’s “Submerged Motherlands” doesn’t break ground because of its presence inside a grand institution, even if said institution also holds one of the largest collections of Egyptian art, and is also hosting the largest US exhibition of Ai Weiwei next week, for example.

What surprised us most this week as the Brooklyn Museum threw open its doors to a seven story installation that includes a tree, a gazebo, and two boats that sailed the Adriatic was the rapid rate that this artist has gone from running the streets under cover of night of Brooklyn plastering her linotypes to being invited inside to spray the walls of the Brooklyn Museum with a fire extinguisher. The total time elapsed between her first hand cut paper wheat paste on tattered walls and Friday’s opening was a decade and a half. That is noteworthy in itself, and worthy of someone’s exhaustive examination, but suffice to say that you have to have vision and commitment to pull this off.

Here are new images from the exhibit along with our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Cost, Elbow-Toe, London Kaye, Myth, Nick Walker, Paul Richard, Swoon, and Tava.

Top Image >> Swoon “Submerged Motherlands” exhibition now open to the public at the Brooklyn Museum. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Read our interview with the artist this week – “Swoon: Submerged Motherlands”, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Museum.

Nick Walker. Dona Isabel is a member of the undead. She is coming home after a night of blood hunting on the LES. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“Her face carried some unseen burden as she swallowed down her shot and our eyes connected from across the room,” Eduardo Jones (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Basquiat Evoked on the Street in Sassuolo, Italy

September 16, 2013 Artists

Remember when we were with French stencil pioneer Jef Aerosol on a Brooklyn roof back in January ’10 where he created a portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat? His influence has continued unabated among some Street Artists who talk with us today. When you travel around the world meeting different folks on the Street Art and graffiti scene you’ll get an idea of the impact that the New York downtown/uptown/train painting scene of the 1970s and 1980s had and continues to have on the imagination – from Millenials who were weened on MTV to Boomers who watched it evolve in real time.

Jean-Michel Basquiat stands as a composite of what the scene looked like and what it became – possibly because he straddled the pronounced demarcation between graffiti/Street Art/fine art so well, in a way that allowed them to compliment each other. It didn’t hurt that he had a great sense of personal style, an underlying defiance of anyone’s attempt to label him, and an innate political sense of who to hang with and how to garner attention.

brooklyn-street-art-collectivo-fx-Sassuolo-italy-basquiat-web-1

Brooklyn’s Basquiat happened to be in New York when the artist community hotbed of performance, experimentation and avant-garde was bubbling in lower Manhattan, coinciding with a growing celebrity culture, cheap rents, and the ever-more affordable tools of audio and video that could capture the shenanigans. A bubble on Wall Street helped provide the fuel. Without simplifying his impact personally and as an artist, a danger of repeated storytelling that reduces people’s complex lives to smooth cornered app icons to poke, let’s just say that the image of Basquiat still inspires many artists around the world.

Today we take a look at a Basquiat tribute on the streets in the northern Italian city of Sassuolo, where Basquiat made an impact just by visiting in the spring of 1981. Street Artist collective FX just completed a small series of installations around this city of about 40,000 to commemorate that visit, which FX says was big news for a lot of people in a way that would not have necessarily impressed a larger metropolis. With stickers and hand painted posters FX brings the ghost of that visit to the streets – until the rain and wind washes it away.

“In May of 1981 Basquiat went outside of New York and came to Modena for two weeks for an exhibition,” says Collettivo FX. “During that time he lived in Sassuolo and some Italian guys brought him around town to see the city and go dancing. Since he was still SAMO he always had his pocket sprays, so Basquiat did many sketches on the wall, on windows, and on garbage.”

Thanks to FX for sharing these images with BSA readers.

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BSA Special Feature: INDECLINE: Rail Beast

INDECLINE: DREAMERS

Basquiat, Banksy & Brutalism in London. Brought to you by Fifth Wall TV

Restoring Banksy. Doug Gillen of Fifth Wall TV

Erik Burke: Park Blossom

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Ella & Pitr (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Basquiat (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Pichi & Avo (photo © Jaime Rojo)

NO. 3

Mario Ramirez (photo © Tots Films)

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NO. 1

Jeff Aerosol on a rooftop in Brooklyn. January 2010 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Zimad in Bushwick, Brooklyn. December 2014. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Tomoo Gokita on the streets of Brooklyn. April 2014 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

KOBRA on the streets of Brooklyn. October 2014 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Al Diaz remembers his writing partner as SAMO© at “21st Precinct”. Manhattan. August 2014. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Collectivo FX. Sassuolo, Italy. September 2013 (photo © Collectivo FX)

TYNK. Manhattan. March 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. Circa 1987. Basquiat:The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Famous. 1982. Basquiat:The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Famous. 1982. Detail. Basquiat:The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Famous. Verso. 1982. Basquiat:The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. 1980. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. 1986. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. 1986. Detail.. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. 1986. Detail. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

All Beef. 1983. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

All Beef. 1983. Verso. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. 1982-83. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. 1982-83. Detail. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

From left to right: Untitled (Crown) 1982. Tuxedo. 1982. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Famous Negro Atheletes. 1981. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Antidote. 1981. Untitled (Ego) 1983. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Photo taken from the video Downtown 81 Outtakes. 2001. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Photo taken from the video Downtown 81 Outtakes. 2001. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Mr. OneTeas (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Zimad just finished this tribute to Basquiat for The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

A Tracey 168 re-resurgence appeared suddenly for The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Mistakoy (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Crummy Gummy in Miami. (photo © Crummy Gummy)

LMNOPI (photo © Jaime Rojo)

London Kaye getting in the spirit of the season and sharing it on the streets. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

London Kaye (photo © Jaime Rojo)

London Kaye (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Eelco Virus with Rocko for The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Eelco Virus. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Artist Unknown (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Don John at work for Urban Xchange: Crossing Over in Penang, Malaysia. (photo © Nikko Tan)

Don John. Urban Xchange: Crossing Over. Penang, Malaysia. (photo © Nikko Tan)

Peter Van Flores in Miami. (photo © Crummy Gummy)

WERC (photo © Jaime Rojo)

$howta (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dhear in Mexico City for MUJAM. (photo © Wladimir Sanchez)

Untitled (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Top Image >> Swoon “Submerged Motherlands” exhibition now open to the public at the Brooklyn Museum. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon “Submerged Motherlands” exhibition now open to the public at the Brooklyn Museum. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon “Submerged Motherlands” exhibition now open to the public at the Brooklyn Museum. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon “Submerged Motherlands” exhibition now open to the public at the Brooklyn Museum. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Artist Unknown (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Elbow Toe goes over himself and he feels a bit nostalgic. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Nick Walker. Dona Isabel is a member of the undead. She is coming home after a night of blood hunting on the LES. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Artist Unknown. A new tribute to SAMO and Andy Warhol. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

London Kaye calling it right. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Myth (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Have You Seen Me? (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Paul Richard. Discuss (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Tava (photo © Jaime Rojo)