All posts tagged: Brooklyn

9 Year Old Interviews Faile in the Deluxx Fluxx Arcade

July 16, 2015 Artists

Summer interns are younger than ever this year in NYC!

Thought you would like to see this video that Huffpost made last week as the FAILE show was about to open. Literally it was the day before the opening and behind the scenes people were running around like cats at a rocking chair convention. But you wouldn’t know it by the calm and friendly demeanor of Patrick and Patrick as they show 9 year old interviewer Ada Donnelly how to play the games and make sure she gets the inside story on the Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. The concept is genius! Read the full story HERE:

And here’s a pretty complete run-down of the show we did for the opening o f ‘Savage/Sacred Young Minds’

Owen Dippie “Radiant Madonna” Unites Raphael and Haring in Brooklyn

July 11, 2015 Artists

“Soooooo incredible!” says Owen Dippie about his chance to do some sight-seeing yesterday finally at the Brooklyn Museum, where they are showing the work of people he calls his heroes, including Jean-Michel Basquiat as well as the brand new Faile show that opened Friday and the newly installed KAWS sculpture in the entry hall.

Owen Dippie. Radiant Madonna. The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Not too bad for a New Zealand child of the 1980s who grew up idolizing artists like Biggie Smalls, Tupac Shakur, Michael Jackson, Andy Warhol, Basquiat and Keith Haring. As he became a teenage painter himself Dippie also discovered the painters of the High Renaissance of the 14^th century and pushed himself to emulate with aerosol cans the brush technique and style of those Italian masters.

When you speak with Mr. Dippie and the topic turns to Brooklyn, he is nearly reverential because of its history as part of the graffiti and Street Art movements that inspired one, perhaps two generations of artists on the street. Of course, this being dirty Brooklyn, Dippie also had to confront a scallywag who was stealing his paint this week; a chatty dude who had befriended him with conversation and whom Owen discovered was walking away and getting on his bicycle with a bag of cans while the artist was up on a ladder. Yes Holy Brooklyn can turn into “Holy Shit!” in a New York minute.

Owen Dippie. Radiant Madonna. The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

So it is a measured miracle, a ratherish revelation this week that as a parting tribute to the city Dippie completed a deftly realized mashup of Raphael and Haring, with the Madonna dell Granduca holding Haring’s icon-symbol that is variously referred to as “Radiant Baby”, “Radiant Child”, and “Radiant Christ”. A self-professed Jesus Freak during his adolescence and a member of the Born-Again Christian movement from its halcyon days of the 1970s-80s, Haring would very likely have loved to see his work appropriated in this manner, the newborn messiah supported in the stately embrace of the virgin mother.

“If art is a religion then Keith Haring is a god,” Owen likes to say. He tells us that it is not exactly hyperbole when he makes a statement like that while creating this new mural entitled “The Radiant Madonna”.

Owen Dippie. Radiant Madonna. The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“When I was 13 my teacher introduced me to Keith Haring – and it changed my life,” he explains. “I was young – a troublemaker – and already I was majorly into art. But from that point on I decided to dedicate my life to art and I have been on this crazy journey ever since.” When said in that way we are reminded of the words often used by the Born-Again Christians like Haring when describing the moment of their religious conversion.

Perhaps a Renaissance man in his own way of valuing the humanist, the religious, the classical and the modern, Dippie freely combines images that cross half-millenia to help represent this moment.

Owen Dippie. Radiant Madonna. The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Like his recent merging of the cartoon characters of the Teenage Mutant Turtles with the four painters of the Renaissance whom they are named after (Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello ), here in the “The Radiant Madonna” Owen feels that it is a natural marriage of imagery and influences and one he feels impassioned about.

“I am a child of popular culture and am inspired by my heroes,” he says. “By involving them in my art I pay my upmost respect to them in the best way I know how.”

Owen Dippie. Radiant Madonna. The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Raphael, Madonna dell Granduca, 1505 (public domain)

“Radiantbaby”. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia

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Holy Faile ! “Savage/Sacred Young Minds” at Brooklyn Museum

July 8, 2015 Artists, Interview

FAILE may be a religious experience this summer at the Brooklyn Museum, but only one of the hallowed installations is called Temple. The seedier, more dimly lit venue will surely have the larger number of congregants by far, bless their sacred hearts.

Celebrating the duality and appropriation of words, slogans, and images has been the baliwick of the duo since they first began hitting Brooklyn streets at the turn of the century with their stencils and wheat-pastes on illegal spots and neglected spaces. In FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds, their new attention commanding/refracting exhibit organized by Sharon Matt Atkins at the Brooklyn Museum, these guys pour it on, compelling you into a complex panoply of possible re-imaginings of meaning that reference pop, pulp, myth, art history, 50s sci-fi, 60s advertising, comics, punk zines, consumer culture and their own pure artistic and branded fiction.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

For fans of this collaboration between artists Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, Savage/Sacred is a joyride swerving through the visual vocabulary and terminology they’ve been emblazoning across walls, doorways, canvasses, stickers, sculptures, prayer wheels, wood blocks, paintings, prints, toys, and a museum façade in their steady ascendance from anonymous art school students and Street Artists to a highly collected top tier name in contemporary art.

Offering you a full immersion and opportunity for titillating interaction, this show provides an unambiguous sense of the industry that is backing the Faile fantasy. Throughout their work and your imagination and assumed role, you may be villain, distressed damsel, wolfman, fairey, vandal, wrestler, hot-rodder, madonna, whore, supplicant, avenger, surfing horse or simply an arcade hero who is whiling away windowless hours punching buttons, popping flippers and pumping Faile tokens into tantalizing art machines.

FAILE. FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Central to the formative Faile story is an image of the teenage Patricks piecing together clues about the world in these dark dens of possibility and teenage angst, awash in fantasy, aggression, testosterone and communal alienation.

Miller talks about the arcade atmosphere with a certain reverence, “All through Middle School, especially on the weekends, you’d just get dropped off at the mall and be there all day. There is something about the idea of this being a somewhat sacred space as a teenager in arcades. They are sort of a “Candyland” – a magical space mixed with a little seediness. You had kind of a large age range in there. You could get in trouble if you wanted but through the video games you could live out these crazy fantasy experiences. Historically arcades have been like that – very much with the Times Square notion. They’ve always had that connection to an underbelly of things.”

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: Do you think New York is still seedy?
Patrick Miller: It seems like it is getting harder to find, in a way.
BSA: So really you might say that this is a public service, this installation.
Patrick Miller: There are so many young people who have never had this experience today. Not only are we trying to share what that was like, it is something that shaped the way we are inspired as artists and the way we make imagery, the way we make icons. The roots of video-game culture are there and now that has sort of bled out today – but also we’re interested in the shared experience because so much of the video game experience is now mobile or is just had on your couch, I think people have forgotten that there used to be these places were you congregated to do this.

For the 5^th public offering of FAILE BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade and the first in a museum setting, Faile extends the scope and adds a handful of new NYC-centric scenarios to the mix and again partners with fellow Brooklyn street artist and spin-cycle collage mutator-in-chief BÄST, whose stylistic counterplay alerts undercurrents of tension with a punk-naïve primal hand painting and humoristic Dada collaging.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: Can you describe the working dynamic with Faile and BÄST?
Patrick Miller: We’ve always been really inspired by BÄSTs work because we start from a similar place but we end up totally differently.
BSA: Yeah the end result is very different
Patrick Miller: Ours are probably more structured and narrative.
Patrick McNeil: I think over time we have tried not to step on each others’ toes. He generally controls the half-tone territory and we control the line-drawing territory.
BSA: So his are more photography-based and yours tend more toward the illustration.
Patrick McNeil: Yep
Patrick Miller: I think the work comes from the same place but his is just turned up to “11”.
Patrick McNeil: Yeah his is more put into a blender.
Patrick Miller: But that has always been what makes us work well together, the styles mix and marry really well and they kind of bring the best out of both.
BSA: And he has become even more abstract recently – more lo-fi outsider artish…., although you guys have delved into children’s coloring books for inspiration as well
McNeil: I think BÄST would like to call it more “outsider art”.
BSA: Why has it been important to keep Deluxx Fluxx a Faile-BÄST collaboration over the last five years thoughout its various iterations?
McNeil: We started this project as a collaboration and we’ve been collaborating with BÄST for fifteen years. We’ve always enjoyed working with him because we just love the friendship and we love the product of our collaborations. I think having the opportunity to be at the Brooklyn Museum and to do it together with him is really special.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Twenty-two in all, the custom designed variations on arcade video and pinball games from the 1970s and 80s alert competitive urges and quests for domination alongside more mundane tasks like alternate side of the street parking and completing atypical digital art-making sessions where “winning” is defined entirely differently.

Social, sexual, comical, criminal, and environmental concerns all pop and parry while you nearly mindlessly and repetitively punch buttons and fire guns at herky-jerky 2-D motion graphics that transport you to the hi-charged arcade experience rumbling in malls and sketchier parts of town before the Internet. Get a taste for those darkened caves where you racked up points while quarters were sucked from your pockets; you are the favored hero at home in this seductive lair, surrounded by an ear pounding audio-musical triumphalist barrage of hypnotic hormonal victory and id-shattering explosions.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The adjoining cavernous black-light illuminated fluorescent foosball room is papered with mind-popping illustrations derived and sutured from comics, pulp and smarmy back-pages advertising that once stirred secret desires. Walking in on this teen temple you may feel like looking for dirty magazines sandwiched between mattresses; surely a hyped up juvenile would choose these alternating graphic “floor tiles” in radiation yellow, sugar coated pink and neon orange, giving your footsteps a spongey depth perception test on your way to a round of table football.

The floor-to-ceiling hand painted posters took four people six months to complete, both Patricks tell us, and they all compete for your attention, each a narrative re-configured and augmenting secret storylines, myths, and plenty of white lies.

FAILE’s Patrick Miller demonstrates an art experience where you rip posters off the wall to reveal yet more Faile posters underneath, which you can rip further. FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Somehow it is here in the day-glo madness that we see the closest approximation to the original Street Art experience passersby had in the early 2000s with Faile’s work when they were still a trio that included artist AIKO and in those years just after her departure. These are the bold, familiar graphic punches thrown in a direction you weren’t expecting and can make you laugh.

FAILE’s Patrick McNeil demonstrates how to tag subway walls before the “Bast Ghosts” come after you. FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In a media- and advertising-saturated society our tools of discernment and reason are compromised, deliberately so. Faile is recognizing some symptoms of this compromise and is examining the stories and the narratives that are told, crafting their own dramatic nomenclature from the pile. You might say that their stories are melding with an idealized simplification of North American white dude history, a heroic paranoid absolutism that lays bare the prejudices behind it.

A simple survey of words illustrates the perspective: prayer, bitch, horse, rainbow, sinful, Jesus, warriors, forbidden, Indian, hero, poison, brave, strong, boy, guilty, pleasure, bedtime, cowboys, hotrods, savage, gun, trust, stiletto, tender, hotel, confessions, fight, wolf, saved, girls, lies, vanity, inexperience, restless virgin, innocent, willing, heartbreak, torment, stories.

These are Faile stories, reconfigured with a slicing knife down the middle of the belly, an idiosyncratic collaged pop/pulp style that owes as much to the Dadaist Hannah Höch and pop collage originator Richard Hamilton as it does to Lichtenstein’s sense of storybook romance and Warhol’s repetitive emotional distance.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In the book accompanying the exhibit, Sharon Matt Atkins, Vice Director for Exhibitions and Collections Management, who organized the exhibition, says the presentation of the arcade in a museum setting “highlights how the present work relates to the art of the past and expands our expectations of the use of public spaces dedicated to art.” Here, she says, “Deluxx Fluxx’s arcade machines, which are simultaneously sculptures and functioning games, may call to mind Surrealism, Dada, and Fluxus, as well as the enigmatic boxed assemblages of Joseph Cornell.”

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Similarly, the signature Temple project has not been presented in its entirety in museum settings previously, and it feels like it is a bit of inspired genius when you are standing in its shadow beneath the soaring sky light at the Brooklyn Museum. The full scale church in ruins was presented out of doors in Praça dos Restauradores Square in Lisbon in conjunction with Portugal Arte in 2010. Echoing its surroundings in Lisbon, the Temple here is also a willful remix of the epic and the rather lesser so.

Culture-jamming at its height, it’s a punk subversion in ceramic, marble and iron that simultaneously genuflects and gives the finger to antiquity and to our soulless consumer culture. By casting reliefs of stylized font-work, romance novelette themes, and ads for call girls in puzzling non-sequitors, the Temple ridicules vapidity while honoring connections to age-old themes, sort of humbling all involved. Here again Faile is questioning the received wisdom of art history, religious customs, and tales of great societies we’ve learned to be reverent of, or maybe just questioning our true knowledge of history altogether.

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

During the last months while it was being unpacked and assembled we heard the Temple also called a tomb, a mausoleum, a chapel – the differences shared by their ties to the architecture and sculpture and tiled mosaics and ceramic under one roof. The roof in this case is destroyed – possibly because it caved in or because it was ripped off by an angry god who said, “You have missed my point entirely!”

In any case it is a formidable structure allowing meditation, reflection, confusion. In an act of ultimate bait and switch, Faile has deliberately played with what you are supposed to be paying attention to, substituting the associated original intended and inferred meanings of a religious institution and its power. You approach with reverence, looking perhaps for an allegorical means to access the transcendental, but expected symbols have been supplanted by the shallow relics of a culture you may have intended to escape.

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ultimately Faile is not unlike a lot of the world’s great religions; Comforting, reassuring, challenging, mysterious, inpenetrable. Sometimes you have the feeling that there are other people who understand it much better than you. Oh, ye of little Faile. Lean not upon your own understanding. Failes ways are not necessarily our ways. Whether these words and narratives are written by man or handed down from a higher power, why sweat it? It’s a holy good show.

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

With FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds the Brooklyn museum is once again meaningfully invested in the present and jumped ahead in the examination of what clearly is the first global grassroots art movement, giving the stage to the current century’s voices of the street – perhaps because it has engaged with the city’s artists and communities.

With an enormous new Kaws sculpture in the lobby, Basquiat’s notebooks and Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition in the same year, Faile adds an important voice to the local/global narrative and to the dialogue about the appropriate role of art in the public sphere and major institutions in the cultural life of the community they a part of.

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Fantasy Island. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Wolf Within. Detail. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Ripped canvases. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” at the Brooklyn Museum will open Friday, July 10th. Click HERE for further information.

This article is also published on The Huffington Post

BSA Images Of The Week: 07.05.15

July 5, 2015 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

This 4th of July holiday weekend in New York is alive with art on the streets, on roofs, on stoops, in parks, on piers. And run down back lots, tunnels, abandoned spots. Check your local listings.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring ARC, BAST, Bibbito, Bifido, Cash4, Clint Mario, Don John, Entes y Pesimo, Faith47, JR, Keely, Smells, The Yok, and WK Interact.

Top image above >>> Faith47 for The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Faith47 for The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Artist Unknown (photo © Jaime Rojo)

JR (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Bifido in Sicily, Italy. (photo © Bifido)

Bast and his outsider art (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Don John in Copenhagen. (photo © John Don)

WK Interact (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The Yok (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Arc (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Smells (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Clint Mario (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Cash4 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Bibbito. Reggio Emilia, Italy. (photo © Bibbito)

Bibbito. Detail. (photo © Bibbito)

Entes y Pesimo for Inoperable Gallery. Linz, Austria. (photo © Philipp Greindl)

Keely (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello Spotted in BKLN : Owen Dippie Lies in Wait

July 2, 2015 Artists

Owen Dippie has been restless lately in Brooklyn, cooling his heels and trying to stay invisible like a ninja while he waits for his big opportunity to slaughter a wall. He’ll need 5 days of good weather but New York is only doing 3 at a time, so he’s slicing between rain drops, sharpening his aerosol blades on this masked quartet by the railroad tracks.

Owen Dippie (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Not quite legendary yet, you can tell that it is well within his future province. Here we see that shinobi Dippie has just scaled these walls with Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello – not the turtles, but the Renaissance painters. A child of the 1980s and 90s in New Zealand, Owen loves the teenage mutants as well, so why not combine the Renaissance with modern cartoon crime fighters?

Owen Dippie (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The only crime he has had to fight so far has been to rise above the stench of Bushwick trash ; a box of chicken carcasses rotting nearby is just one example of stuff that individuals and industry have dumped here. It’s of little consequence to him as he climbs the ladder because Owen is painting in the city of some of his other heroes – Tupac, Biggie, Basquiat, Haring. Today he met another hero – Charlie Ahearn stopped by. Last week he caught the Coney Island art walls that are going up by contemporary urban artists from the last four decades, many of whose work he has long admired.

His own work here is not finished but he’s keeping a tight lid on his plans. An original all his own, he is determined, dedicated, contemplative. This modern renaissance will be continued in a large way before Owen Dippie races from NYC for further adventure on the US west coast. Like a ninja. Keep your eyes open.

Owen Dippie (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA Film Friday: 06.26.15

June 26, 2015 Artists

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

Now screening :

1. THIS IS NOW – Endangered Species
2. David Walker in Nancy, France
3. Phnom Penh Murals with Cambodian Urban Art Institute
4. A Primer – The FAILE BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade
5. Drunken Collaboration with Sr. X and Zabou

BSA Special Feature: THIS IS NOW – Endangered Species

Endangered species have been called attention to by Street Artists in recent years, most notably ROA and his large murals around the world, but even Brooklyn local QRST has pasted his paintings of endangered frogs on streets as commentary of our negative effects on entire species, continuously messing with ecosystems and now possibly threatening our own existence.

This short film focuses on a campaign by artist Louis Masai Michel working on the streets of London as part of a funded campaign with Synchronicity Earth, who “support on-the-ground conservation action and creates spaces for cognitive dissidence, working alongside artists, young people, conservationists, activists, film-makers, scientists and enlightened business-leaders to co-create a world in which all life is valued, regardless of economic ‘worth.’”

David Walker in Nancy, France

David Walker just created this mural in Nancy, France to support his current show with Galerie Mathgoth. Not a strict adherent to the École de Nancy , Walker has a craft of his own with aerosol cans that actually bring features and expressions to a life-like quality, all the while eschewing traditional tools of the painting trade. Shout out to Karl’s beard.

Phnom Penh Murals with Cambodian Urban Art Institute

French artists Théo Vallier and Chifumi were invited to gather Cambodian and International graffiti artists to create murals on Phnom Penh’s walls this April and this video gives a good summary of the events. On the streets were new works and collaborations by Chifumi et Théo Vallier, Peap Tarr & Lisa Mam, Tones, David Myers, Koy, Venk, Eltono, and Alias 2.0.

More information of this event sponsored in part by the Institute Francais HERE

The FAILE BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade – A Primer from Miami Beach 2013

If you are wondering what you will see opening July 10^th at the The FAILE BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade and throughout the summer at The Brooklyn Museum, here is a good primer from an installation of it they did in Miami Beach in 2013. We’ve seen the new installation that Faile and BÄST are currently preparing for you, and we can tell you that it is like this, but MUCH MORE.

Video Directed By: Priest Fontaine
Shot By: Noah Carlson & Priest Fontaine
Edited By: Priest Fontaine
Music By: Seth Jabour

Drunken Collaboration with Sr. X and Zabou

They say that this is based on a true story, and one you may have heard of before. We’re not sure if they are advocating alcohol abuse or against it , but it’s always a cheery surprise to hear The Dead Kennedys, isn’t it?

Coney Art Walls : 30 Reasons To Go To Coney Island This Summer

June 24, 2015 Artists

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.

How & Nosm (photo © Jaime Rojo)

By way of defining terms, none of this is street art. These are murals completed by artists who are street artists, graffiti writers, fine artists, and contemporary artists. In the middle of an amusement park, these are commissioned works that respond in some way to their environment by thirty or so local and international heavy hitters and a few new kids on the block comprising a 40+ year span of expertise.

Open to many strata of the public and fun-seekers who dig Brooklyn’s rich cultural landscape, this outdoor show will surely end up as backgrounds for selfies — while perhaps simultaneously elevating a discourse about the rightful place of graffiti/street art/urban art within the context of contemporary art. Okay, maybe not such loftiness will result, but let’s not rule it out entirely.

How & Nosm (photo © Jaime Rojo)

It should come as no surprise that it is the dealer, curator, perennially risk-taking showman Jeffrey Deitch who is the ringmaster of this circus, or that the genesis of this cultural adventure is perplexing to some who have greeted his newest vision with perplexity and derision. His Deitch Projects and related activities in the 2000s regularly presented and promoted the street-inspired D.I.Y. cultural landscape, having done his due diligence and recognizing that new life springs from the various youth movements always afoot. The Jeffrey-conceived “Art Parade” itself was a street-based all-inclusive annual panoply of eye candy and absurdity; inflicting humor, sex, gore, fire, glitter and possibility into the minds of Manhattan sidewalk observers.

As MOCA Los Angeles director Deitch also flipped the script with his “Art In The Streets,” organizing a vast survey of a half-century of the modern grassroots genres including graffiti/street art/urban art/tattoo/punk/hip-hop/skater culture that far surpassed anyone’s predictions for audience attendance and public engagement. Aside from tripping wires and a public misstep here and there, the show earned critical praise, pinched art-school noses, and pushed skeptical institutions and patrons to question their prejudices. It also gave voice to a lot of people.

Daze (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Notably, that MOCA exhibit drew a little over 200,000 attendees in four months. Coney Island beach and boardwalk gets about 14 million annually. Even if the Smorgasbord pop-up village food trucks feed a fraction of that number, there will be more folks viewing art and interacting with it here than, say, the Four Seasons dining rooms, which also display street artists and contemporary artists in the restaurants’ artistic programming. Side by side comparisons of Smorgasbord/Four Seasons diners ethnic diversity, income, age, education level, museum board membership or real estate investments were not available at press time. But neither can be fairly described as exploitative to artists or audience without sounding patronizing.

Daze (photo © Jaime Rojo)

These multicolored and monochromatic murals illustrate a wide and balanced smorgasborg of their own; examples of myriad styles are at play with some engaging in activism and local politics and Coney Island history. From original train writer Lady Pink to aerosol drone sprayer Katsu, from eL Seed’s lyrical Arabic calligraffiti to Retna’s secret text language to graffitist-now-collagist Greg Lamarche, from Shepard Fairey’s elegant Brooklyn salute to polluters and blasé consumerism to Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s spotlight on current Coney Island neighbors, from urban naturalist ROA’s monochrome marginalized city animals to How & Nosm’s eye-punching and precise graphic metaphors, you are getting a dizzying example of the deep command Deitch has of this multi-headed contemporary category that is yet to settle on a moniker to call itself.

Crash (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Coney Art Walls assembles world travelers from NYC and LA and Miami and internationally; Belgium, Barcelona, Brazil, Paris, Tunisia, London. Some are 80s Downtown NYC alumni, others were train writers in the 70s or big crew graff heads and taggers from the decades after. Some are considered historical originators of a form and cross-genre risk takers pushing beyond their comfort zone. Take a close look and you’ll find names that are in major collections (private, institutional, corporate) and that go to auction.

Crash (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Some are regularly showing in galleries and are invited to street art festivals, exhibited in museums and discussed in academia and print. Others have studio practices spanning three decades, are lecturers, panelists, authors, teachers, community advocates, art stars, reality TV personalities, film actors, product endorsers and art product makers working with global brands. One or two may be considered global brands themselves. A handful have been painting on the streets for 40 years. Monolithic they are not.

One more notable aspect occurred to us as we watched this parade making its peregrination to these summer walls – either because of Deitch or the romance or history of Coney or both; When you are looking at the range of ages and ethnicities and family configurations and listening to the variety of accents and opinions expressed and seeing the friendly but tough-stuff attitudes on display — you might guess you were in Brooklyn. You are.

Futura (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Shepard Fairey (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Jesse Edwards (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Irak (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Lady Pink (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ben Eine (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Maya Hayuk (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Lady Aiko (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Buff Monster (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Miss Van (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Jason Woodside (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ron English (photo © Jaime Rojo)

AVAF (photo © Jaime Rojo)

eL Seed (photo © Jaime Rojo)

eL Seed with Martha Cooper (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Kenny Scharf (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Mister Cartoon (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Jane Dickson (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Skewville (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Marie Roberts (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Greg Lamarche (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Gregg Lamarche (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Katsu (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Retna (photo © Jaime Rojo)

ROA (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Kashink (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Kaves (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Lauren Halsey (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Our previous weekly updates track the installation period of Coney Art Walls:

Coney Art Walls: First 3 Completed and Summer Begins

DEITCH Masters, Coney Art Walls Part 2 : Coney With a Twist

Eine, Hayuk: A Riot of Color at Coney (Update III)

Coney Art Walls: Gypsies, Stallions, Mermaids, and Pop Optics! Update IV

Coney Art Walls Opens for the Mermaids! Update V

This article is also published on The Huffington Post

BSA Images Of The Week: 06.21.15

June 21, 2015 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Summertiiiiiiiiiiimmme, and the living is eaaaaassssssyyyyy. Yessir, today is the first day of Summer here in New York and the longest day of the year – which means you can take a nap under a tree in the park or on your towel at the beach and still have plenty of time to play when you wake up. There are abandoned buildings to explore, murals to paint, wheat-pastes to stick, interventions to engineer, stencils to cut, selfies to snapchat, potato chips to eat, beer to swig. That couch by the window is calling me even now, the big temptress, as she does so often on these languorous days, induced by the heat. But I will not heed her siren song.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Bezt, Buff Monster, Dain, Dee Dee, Faile, Fra. Biancoshock, Free Humanity, Gold Loxe, Li-Hill, Natalia Rak, Okuda, Old Broads, Phoebe, Sophia Hirsch and Johannes Mundinger, and Simon Vazquez and Sebastien Waknine.

Top image above >>> Okuda (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Li-Hill for The Bushwick Collective. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Bezt (from Etam Cru) in Providence, Rhode Island for Avenue Concept/Inoperable Gallery (photo © Bezt)

Dee Dee and Dain are BFF’s on the streets. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Gold Loxe (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Faile (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Faile with a remnant of El Sol 25. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Faile. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Phoebe New York (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Natalia Rak in Providence, Rhode Island for Avenue Concept/Inoperable Gallery (photo © Natalia Rak)

Fra Biancoshock’s new installation in Vilnius, Lithuania features a speed checking camera refashioned in the fashion of an Instagram camera. He calls it #picoftheday (photo © Fra Biancoshock)

Old Broads (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Buff Monster for The Bushwick Collective (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Sophia Hirsch and Johannes Mundinger installation at the former prison ‘JVA Magdeburg’ in Magdeburg, Germany. (photo © Johannes Mundinger)

Simon Vazquez and Sebastien Waknine interventions in an abandoned hotel someplace in Northern Spain. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

Simon Vazquez and Sebastien Waknine interventions in an abandoned hotel somewhere in Northern Spain. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

Coney Art Walls Opens for the Mermaids! Update V

June 20, 2015 Artists

Dude/Dudette, it’s Mermaid Parade Day – part of Coney’s modern pop-carney cultural heritage. Rolling up Surf Avenue, turning right and coming back down the boardwalk, the three decade old event is both a well organized and entirely rag-tag D.I.Y. affair simultaneously. It’s the enthusiasm of the participants and their street performances and costumery that pull in the equally enthusiastic fans, but it is the bedazzled breasts and free-flowing beer that make them seek that illusive and effervescent feeling of abandon.

Meanwhile more walls were being painted at Coney Art Walls this week by another impressive cross section of talents from points local and international. The Skewville twins completed their free-standing monster boom box, El Seed brought his lyrical Arabic inspired calligraffiti, fine artist Jane Dickson applies her eye to the symbols of the carnival footprint and turns amusements into colorful cakes, Katsu spreads wider with his investigations into drone painting that are looking impressionistic, Mr. Cartoon enlivens a Vandal/Copper chase with a grim reaper and a selfie-snapping angel, former graffiti outlaw Gregg LaMarche slams his collaged font explosion with color, Coney-Island artist icon Marie Roberts invokes ghosts and her own family’s deep roots in this place’s history, Miami’s Rage Johnson of Inkheads Crew brings crisp psychadeliac forms with AVAF (Assume Vivid Astro Focus), Sheryo and The Yok use a new palette to depict a beach inspired hotdog caper, and Tatiana Fazlalizadeh creates warm black and white portraits of local current neighbors who live in these environs here year round.

Briefly, a snafu in the proceedings popped up when Cope2 suddenly did one of his eponymous bubble tags smack on the center of a freshly finished Retna wall Friday. Shortly thereafter Retna’s assistant was seen buffing the tag. Sources tell us that Cope’s participation in the project wasn’t originally scheduled and while some permissions had been secured, not all parties were in agreement before work commenced. The affair spurred speculation about who gave permission and who denied it in a flurry of social media postings, but the matter has been resolved. No doubt rumors on the street and online will be profligate – it is the nature of these aerosol Olympic games. Let’s see how the buffed section of Retna’s wall is addressed now that fin-fested visitors are schooling through the concrete complex chomping on cotton candy and sausages.

But don’t let this petit drama overshadow the talent and effort and storied history of the two dozen other artists whose work is on display. A more diverse collection of artists from the past four decades from across this spectrum is rarely assembled in one location – a mini reprise of Mr. Deitch’s Art in the Streets, minus the ceiling. It’s not street art, urban art, or graffiti so none of those labels rightly apply to this amusement park exhibit. To the visiting crowds this is primarily background for selfies but fans of these artists will attach a much greater significance to some of these brand new works, as they should. Stay tuned for our final roundup of all the walls next Wednesday on a screen near you.

Rage Johnson of Inkheads Crew working on the piece designed by Brazilian AVAF (Assume Vivid Astro Focus). (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Tatiana Fazlalizadeh…”The Day Before Easter And The Day After Labor Day – People Still Live Here. People Die Here. People Love Here” (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA Images Of The Week: 06.14.15

June 14, 2015 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Hillary Clinton was on Roosevelt Island yesterday formally announcing her candidacy under blue skies with an enthusiastic crowd speaking about income inequality and the poor and sounding more populist than ever. Let’s see if she can stretch the 2 Billion Dollars in donations she is reported to have raised all the way to next November. It all adds up quickly bro, and before you know it, you just blew a billion!

Wonder if she saw the Hot Tea pool while she was there on the island.

This weekend is the annual Welling Court community mural party in Queens. Don’t miss it. Run on almost no budget it features over a hundred muralists who always dig the friendly neighborhood vibe thanks to organizers Alison and Garrison Buxton.

And of course we are seeing a lot of new dope stuff on the streets…

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Brolga, Chris RWK, Dasic, Esteban Del Valle, James Bullough, Joe Iurato, Logan Hicks, Owen Dippie, Paper Skaters, QRST, Ramiro Davaro-Comas, Rubin415, SheWolf, Sonni, Tats Cru, Wing, and WK Interact.

New Zealander Owen Dippie has a small show at Low Brow Artique Gallery and though we don’t feature gallery images too often, this painting seems like something you would like. His marriage of Raphael and Haring is a bit of mashup genius; a Renaissance Madonna and Radiant Baby. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Esteban Del Valle does a piece named “real estate” for Sugarlift Studios, presumably in reference to the value his work is adding to the building and the neighborhood. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

QRST has a few new endangered (extinct?) anthropocenes on the street, along with some burnt real estate. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Joe Iurato updates his son’s portrait with Logan Hicks providing patterned background for The Bushwick Collective. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Coney Art Walls: Gypsies, Stallions, Mermaids, and Pop Optics! Update IV

June 13, 2015 Artists

Coney Art Walls continues to take shape before your lying eyes, ladies and gentlemen, snake oil salesmen, and painted ladies in fishnet stockings. Watch now as our intrepid camera wielding high wire walker slithers upward into the sky for his shot!

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making.

~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

In this amazing expanding collection you can see that the history and legacy of the location is clearly inspiring many of the artists who painted this week. From Miss Van’s “Gypsy With Stallions” to Aiko’s multi-ethnic mermaids to Jason Woodside’s clown-car of pop-optic patterning to Kenny Scharf’s amorphous fun-house characters, Buff Monster’s melty ice cream, and Ron English’s mutated funny/frightening grinning cartoon characters…this weeks additions are giving the place a cheerfully happy and vaguely creepy magic vibe.

One more week of this painting madness and many surprises are just behind this velvet curtain, Ladies and Germs.

Eine, Hayuk: A Riot of Color at Coney (Update III)

June 6, 2015 Artists

Street Artists continue to bang up walls in the industrial play land by the sea in Brooklyn this week – minus a few days for full-on rain and flash flooding. Suddenly the wind is kicking up and everyone is cold and working as hard at being positive as they are at painting. Anyway, it all about the riotous color right now and here we have two boldly flourescent contributors to Coney Art Walls; London based textual talent Ben Eine style-checking the 70s and Brooklyn hometown gal Maya Hayuk sloshing knee deep through eye popping bands of plaid.

As press and photographers are starting to make the trip since the buzz is building, its becoming a bit of a mini-scene – and that’s just to see Martha Cooper! Newly arrived also are Miss Van and Lady Aiko – and there are more on the roster for the next two weeks so keep watching this space – or better yet come have a hotdog and soda and then throw it up on the Cyclone! Look out beloooooooooooooow.

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