He floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee.
“The government had a system where the rich man’s son went to college, and the poor man’s son went to war” Muhammad Ali opposing the draft and the Vietnam war. He took the slings and arrows, and stood his ground as very few do.
Ali inspired many portraits on the street and here is one recent mural from Street Artist Brolga.
Woo hoo! Dip your toe in the ocean and the official beginning of summer in NYC. It’s Memorial Day Weekend and it is hot outside and Coney Island is already crowded and has new works this week from John Ahearn, Nina Chanel Abney, Tristan Eaton and more to come. Also you can hear that ice cream truck jingle in some neighborhoods, a welcome sound that will cause batty-ness in the brain after hearing it the 300th time.
Prospect Park and Central Park and hundreds of smaller parks around the city have barbecues and frisbees and refreshments and naps under trees. There is even the smell of marijuana wafting through the streets again. Also there’s a new Strokes album projected on the wall above Futura’s on Houston (soon to be refreshed), there’s a Ramones exhibit at the Queens Museum, and international artists are showing up to paint at the Bushwick Collective street party next weekend. Until then, let’s go up on the roof – you may see Duke Riley’s LED lit birds over Wallabout Channel at dusk. It all kind of feels like the 1980’s, minus the hair spray.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Aiko, Jins, John Ahearn, Lapiz, Nether, Nick Walker, Nina Chanel Abney, Pose, TurtleCaps, Saone, Sipros, Stavro, Stikman, Stu, Such and Turtle Caps.
“Sigmar Gabriel (the German Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy) is riding a Leopard 2 tank. The tank is for sale (a little price tag is showing a €) and is painted in the colors of the German Flag (black, red, yellow). Gabriel is holding up a sign that reads ‘Nie wieder Krieg *’ (‘No more war *’). Running away from the tank is a family of refugees.” – Lapiz
“A woman stands in water, half submerged, holding a withering lotus flower as the sky, lit by a rising sun and a setting moon, pans from darkness to light. The lotus in this setting symbolizes strength and courage when getting through life’s hardest obstacles such as addiction. The character is trying to save the lotus, which reflects her beauty and strength, as it is losing its pedals into the darkness. Her half-hidden face is slightly turned towards the light showing that she is turning towards help to revive her inner beauty and spirit. The obscured face speaks to the recovering addict’s battle with shame, anonymity, and pride for overcoming addiction due to public stigma. The 303 stars painted into the sky pay homage to the 303 people that died from overdoses in the last recorded year in Baltimore including a friend of mine.” – Nether
“In this piece they are all figures from different currencies – like from Iran, Korea, China, England, the US, Pakistan…,” says Sot of the new one layer stencil they are preparing for Jeffrey Deitch’s Coney Art Walls, opening this Memorial Day weekend in Brooklyn to 80 degree temperatures.
We’re inside their Bushwick studio, which is about the size of a one-car garage and its walls are covered with newly stenciled book covers for their upcoming monograph launch. Icy sits at the bench with a sharply bladed knife casually pressing shapes out of the roll of white paper and flicking them aside.
“We have been two days from 11 to 11 cutting,” says Sot as he looks over the rolls of paper accumulating against the wall and begins to roll a cigarette. “And we’re still not finished,” says Icy as he crouches over his work. “I mean we have like 19 parts and we still have some more to cut.”
Fast forward a few days and the light wind is whipping the seagulls overhead in 55 degree oceanside late spring, and the brothers are carefully unrolling and taping their new stencils across a large freestanding wall that adds to a colorful Coney labyrinth and will soon be painted on the other sided by another Brooklyn Street Artist from this generation. It is the second year of this public art show that features graffiti and Street Artists and some new contemporary artists as well who haven’t been known for this scale or venue.
The huge Icy & Sot dollar sign first came about when they were preparing their show “Cutitalism” in Stavanger, Norway last year for Reed Projects Gallery, for which we wrote the exhibition text, part of which reads “a slicing condemnation of many true costs of free-range rampant capitalism using world currency, razor sharp blades and aerosol.”
By combining the heads from multiple currencies around the last supper of Christian storytelling, you may wonder which one is Judas – but typically the brother’s aren’t saying.
Mainly, they are just happy to have been invited to the second iteration of this outdoor exhibition that highlights many players over the culture of the last 50 years of graffiti and Street Art while acknowledging the older histories of community murals and sign painting in this iconic Coney Island setting. “We always wanted to bring this piece out but we never had an opportunity,” says Icy of the new huge format for a piece that originally used an actual dollar bill as its canvas.
“This is the right, perfect wall for it and this is the time to do it,” says Sot.
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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
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No time to talk, you’ve been running to the streets to see new pieces and peaches like a new D*Face in Soho, Rubin’s solo show in the Bronx, the Brooklyn-themed pop up at Doyle’s Auction house in Manhattan, Swoon and Shep and Swizz at Pearly’s in LA, the Social Sticker club collabo melee with Roycer and Buttsup at a bar in Williamsburg, and the growing collection of rocking new Coney Art Walls. Also, Post-It Wars in corporate agency-land Manhattan.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring 1Penemy, BG 183 Tats Cru, Bio, Bristol, Daze, D*Face, Eric Haze, Goms, Nicer, Nova, Pegasus, POE, Stikki Peaches, Thiago Gomez, and Word to Mother.
No Sleep Till Brooklyn
According to New York Magazine the Post-it “artists” took their craftsmanship to new heights after someone installed a simple “hi” message on the window of one of the two buildings facing each other on Canal Street. After one week the “war” is in full effect with several messages directed at each other offices ranging from “Will you marry me” to songs’ lyrics and other pleasantries and pop references. The two buildings are known for housing several ad agencies, Getty images and New York Magazine.
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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
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Coney Art Walls is back for 2016 and the artists have already begun painting, Duke Riley is on week two of performance with pigeons in The Brooklyn Navy Yard , the #notacrimecampaign is happening in Harlem to support a free press in Iran, Newark has started a huge public mural program called “Gateways to Newark: Portraits”, Urban Nation in Berlin promises a huge announcement this week, and Vladimir Putin is in a lip-lock with Donald Trump on the street in Lithuania. There is also a lot of new free-range, unsanctioned art on the streets.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring bunny M, Cdre, Crash, Dain, Dee Dee, Etnik, finDAC, Futura, Icy & Sot, Mister Cartoon, Myth, Pegasus, and Rone.
Pigeons have been a vital feature of New York’s skyline for decades, even centuries, particularly in neighborhoods like those in Brooklyn where thousands live in coops on the roofs of tall buildings, carefully overseen by their trainers, called pigeon fanciers.
Loosed from their kit to fly as a flock, tracing the sky in manifold circular patterns high above, the birds are graceful, athletic, and organically self organized. Neighborhood onlookers know that these winged performers won’t dance in unison like so many Esther Williams synchronized swimmers, but their rhythms and morphing geometry are mesmerizing, open, even thrilling.
The assembled flock of 500 New Yorkers piled onto stadium bleachers in the Brooklyn Navy Yard will undoubtedly re-think the much maligned city pigeon when they see performance artist Duke Riley and his cast of 2,000 being loosed and directed in this latest production by Creative Time. Confidently striding high atop his floating coop co-op in Wallabout Bay, Riley’s Fly By Night employs Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Williamsburg Bridge as backdrop to these glittering dancers.
You may breed them for beauty or speed, or even personality, as there are discernable differences among these Homers, Rollers, Fantails, and Russian high flyers – just a handful of the 100 or so species that most fanciers work with. Flying up the East Rivers’ great broad way in all their glory, none of these birds needs a boa; they’re simply covered in feathers.
Uncontrived and with a stage craft, set design and costumery bowing to the Navy Yard’s industrial ship-building past, Fly By Night collapses a time continuum. Certain audience members are not quite sure how it will play out as the sun is setting gently behind Manhattan and neighbors slide into their posts, smiling and waving to familiar faces, taking a quick nip from a deftly procured flask, cheeks pink in the spring chill.
As the darkness draws nearer questions remain: Will these chuckling pigeons return once they are released? Will these LED lights attached to their legs actually be visible when they are flying? Will the crowd be easily hushed by the whistles and birdcalls and long poled flags drawing generous arcs in silhouette across the sky?
Yes to all three, and as the birds flood forward into the dusk sky this audience of chatty, catty New Yorkers keep their tongues docked and their murmuring on mute to respect this natural aviary array. Presently cell phones are hoisted aloft.
One tries not to use the word “enchanting” too often, but this performance piece pairing man and nature seamlessly pierces veils between theater, anthropology, history, lore, nature, spectacle and dreamy reverie.
Witnessing this public performance of an age-old choreographed dance in the newly night sky with an international gaggle of sudden pigeon fanciers, you may wonder what else you have overlooked in the mundanity of walking to the subway.
These are the famously dissed New York pigeons of your daily life after all. But here they are center stage and such splendid and appealing dancers. Somewhere in the silently rythmic fluttering, the staccato and swooping baritone bird-calling, and the swimming of orbital troupes through the blueness, these illuminated pigeons transform into multiple schools of fish that you gaze upward to see.
Having made that break with reality the mind can wander to nautical fables and long-distance cables and whirling dervishes and the regal pageantry and circular sweeps of Balanchine, who ironically was working on a ballet called “The Birds of America” at the time of his death.
It is another New York story delivered for free in the public sphere. The movements of the birds in their self-selected formations – many are Rileys’ personally but others are borrowed or purchased from other fanciers – easily command your attention and create a momentary communal appreciation in the stands.
The gentle lapping of water in the bay is punctured by sea-faring whooping and wrastlin’ whistles of the trainer-in-chief, augmented by the low blasting horn of a distant ship in the bay, or your head. This is perfectly public space and Mr. Riley’s deft imaginings and knowledge of maritime traditions guide you calmly to your own grounded reality while launching you gently aflight through space, and time.
Duke Riley’s Fly By Night performance for Creative Time at the Brooklyn Navy Yard takes place on weekends, Friday through Sunday. May 7th through June 12th. Click HERE for full schedule and to get your FREE tickets.
Our very special thanks to RJ Rushmore for his help and expertise.
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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
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This article is also published on The Huffington Post
“Hooray! Hooray! The first of May. Outdoor f***ing begins today!”
– Or at least that’s what we learned in school. Brooklyn’s hawthorn trees and lilacs are in bloom, as are the cherry trees in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. High school girls are wearing short skirts and long hair and boys are well, boys; strutting around like peacocks trying to get attention with fun and foolish behavior, and Duke Riley is setting pigeons free after dark till June 12.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring BAT, Billi Kid, Binho, D7606, Damien Mitchell, Enzo Sarto, Freddy Sam, JMZ Walls, Kafka, Maya Hayuk, Modus, Mr. Toll, Otto “Osch” Schade, Pyramid Oracle, Ricky Lee Gordon, Seb Gorey, Weed Dude, and Zeso.
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Strøk is in Brooklyn briefly and he had time to spray out a brand new 8 layer stencil on a doorway here before traveling a bit to see more of the Eastern Seaboard with his girlfriend. We found him this perfect fire engine red metal door in Williamsburg this week with the always gracious and at-the-ready “Mayor of Williamsburg” Mr. Joe Franquinha of Crest Arts-Hardware fame.
The figure appears to be mid-action, fully engaged in an activity and unaware of you. It is a relationship with the subject that the Norwegian-now-Berlinian likes for you to have. When you see one of his figures, or many of them spread across an expansive wall, he likes you to imagine your own storyline about what a figure is doing, what they may be engaged in.
In this case, he is experimenting with a more formal collaboration, shooting photos of fellow Street Artist, the Lithuania artist Ernest Zacharevic while he was playing a game dexterously with rudimentary tools of sticks and a rubber ball during a time when they were both in Hawaii for a mural festival.
Ernest’s in-motion action seems as if he is dancing – a combination of gusty winds that day and him trying to manipulate whatever he was holding from his hands. They set up the session and shot it from a little distance. “I asked him if he wanted to do it on the roof that was opposite of my hotel balcony,” he says of the session of play and photo shoot.
“It’s the second time that I asked someone specifically to do something. Otherwise it’s just snapshots of strangers in the street. I like it kind of better that way. I like hunting for the perfect shot or the perfect moment to take a picture. If you have model and you are telling them what to do it kind of turns into a different thing. “
When describing the formal versus the documentary style of capture, you can see that it’s a process choice that he is ambivalent about – whether to capture images purely by chance or to have a more direct relationship with the model and the creation of the image.
By removing the background context – a flying ball for example – and placing his figures that cavort with perspective, attaching them to a walls’ surface with a distinct shadow, Strøk has developed a recognizable style that makes viewers contemplate if they are the ones on the wall and Strøk’s people are the ones on the ground.
“I like the way they are connected to the surface,” he tells us and he discusses the shadows, how they are formed by the light and the figure touching the ground, and the resulting perspective that can be created.
“I like it when they are almost standing on their toes, or caught mid-air. I like it a lot when they are running after a ball or chasing something.” In the artistic tradition of experimentation, he says that he is beginning to turn the figures ninety degrees to see what the effect is. “I’m doing a wall in Paris where it looks like the figures are falling but if you tilt your head then it looks like they standing.”
He explains that the idea came from someone else’s mistake. He shipped paintings to be displayed and the installer hung them at the incorrect orientation, turning the canvas 90 or 180 degrees – without realizing that Strøks’ signature on the back was meant to guide the proper angle to hang. When Strøk arrived to see the canvasses he was surprised. “In one of the paintings it looked more interesting. I didn’t intend it to be like that – obviously the composition changes a lot. It was just fun to see.”
When looking for a surface to paint, he doesn’t want it to be perfect and prefers to let its characteristics become part of the painting, filling in additional details that contribute to the emerging storyline. “I like the wall, and these textures. If there is a crack in the wall it becomes like it is a crack in the ground. I like all of these things. It kind of messes with you.”
In developing his style as a young stencilist in the early-mid 2000s, Strøk was inspired by the work of artists like Banksy and Blek le Rat. “I heard of Banksy before I heard of Blek actually,” he says, which is a common recollection of artists and Street Art followers. Without playing favorites, he says that he has also followed the work of another Norwegian named Dolk, the Germans EVOL and Pisa 73, and the American Chris Stain among many others he mentions with admiration.
As realistic and full of kinetic life as his static stencils can be, it’s not photo realism. “No it’s like a level between painting and realism,” he says. “If you wanted realism you could just paste photographs and then it would be a photo exhibit.”
A true hands-on artist, Strøk personally cuts his stencils – and here you can see a frame-by-frame story of how a multi layer stencil gets on a door.
Our very special thanks to Joe from Crest Hardware for offering this excellent spot.
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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
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Hillary Clinton announced in Brooklyn this week that she supports raising the minimum wage to $250,000 a speech while Bernie Sanders scoped around the showroom of a Danish furniture designer in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to order a new blond wood desk and chair for the Oval Office. The two sparred live on national TV from Brooklyn Thursday but you couldn’t tell they were in the BK because the CNN logos engulfed the screen and candidates and the actual citizens were reduced to a babbling rabble who hooted and hollered like sports fans somewhere in the dark. Wonder how long CNN intends to have their brand new warehouse-sized logo beaming across the river at Manhattan.
Meanwhile, on the streets here it is pretty evident who many New Yorkers favor and the majority of new Street Art pieces and graffiti pieces are feeling the Bern. It’s true, we tend to hang out with artists, creatives, punks, hippies, and assorted wild-eyed weirdos – so its not exactly a true cross-section, but Clinton fans are not making much art on the streets. Possibly that is because level-headed reasonable people don’t feel the need to express their support for her so loudly and visibly. It will be interesting to see if Big Media predictions of a 17% Clinton lead are true by Wednesday morning. The Wall Street Journal seems to be banking on it.
Trump is #1 in NYC for the Republicans, presumably because of “New York values”.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Caratoes, Elle, Ever Siempre, Faust, Flood, Icy & Sot, Lola Jiblazee, Lora Zombie, Nafir, Shantell Martin, Stuart Ringholt, Thiago Goms, Thievin’ Stephen, Thomas Allen, TriHumph, Vandal Expressionism, Vanesa Longchamp, Vexta, You Go Girl!, and Zabou.
“Homage to the Past and Future”
The city of Oostende began its great reforms in 1883. King Leopold II earned the nickname the “constructor” for his contribution to public works. These reforms were possible thanks to the large profits that were made from the king’s colony, an area sixty times larger than Belguim: the Congo. In the Congo, rubber was a resource that became precious because of its use in the automotive and bicycle industries. The king imposed high quotas on rubber production in the Congo and forced the indigenous population to comply using coercive methods and extreme violence. It is estimated that during Leopold’s years of domination about ten million natives were killed in the Congo.
“Homage to the Past and Future” is a work that talks about the heavy legacy of the past, about how societies live with the consequences of those that came before and how they build their current reality to be better. The mural is located at the urban entrance to the city, a work that perhaps Leopoldo II had not imagined at the gates of the resort town. Today, the reality is different; diversity flourishes in the city and the image is of a resident of Oostende. Humans learn from their mistakes and the future will always be better if our present remembers and pays homage to the real heroes.”
-Ever
A ROA update today – with many exclusive photos here for BSA readers with personal pictures taken and selected by the artist himself.
The Belgian Street Artist, whom we long ago christened as an “Urban Naturalist”, has quite defined the category. He’s well traveled and well regarded. He can’t seem to stand still; Borders for him are an imaginary nuisance – or at least he would love them to be. By his own admission he is most at ease while up high on a boom lift battling a wall, or making friends with it.
From highly commercial and corporate sponsored events to respected grassroots driven or socio-politically rooted organizations with whom he works, ROA brings the animal world into the conversation, sometimes tragically and other times comically. In an inter-connected view of the world and its various natural systems we somehow blind ourselves to our neighbors in the animal category. ROA makes sure that their voices are being considered in enormous and more subtle ways, giving them center stage and first billing.
Here are new pieces from Hawaii, New Jersey, Tahiti, Copenhagen, Italy, Denmark, Coney Island, Australia, Puerto Rico, Arkansas, Harlem (NYC), Bangkok, Dubai, and Belgium. Our sincere thanks to ROA for bringing us on this massive and glorious tour with him so far.
“Thanks Tegen for dancing in front of the Crocodile and Turtle”
Our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring 3rd World Pirate, A Pill NYC, Anglo, Augustine Kofie, Balu, CB23, City Kitty, Icy & Sot, Jerk Face, Jetski, LX One, Solus, Swiz, and WK Interact
Saturday! Time to go out for a walk around the neighborhood to stretch your legs, say hello to old friends, and to look for some new ones.
Along with the blooming Magnolia, Dogwood and Wisteria in the cold/hot/windy/rainy/sunny spring we have in Brooklyn, some new Stikman pieces have been popping up through the aerosol tags and stickers in doorways and elsewhere. Here’s a handful for you to regard as you marvel at the promise of spring.
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BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
