As we prepare to celebrate 15 years of daily publishing stories and insights about street artists from around the world here on BSA, you’ll know that there are some whose work has merited hours of writing and photography much more than others – perhaps because we first knew her work here in our neighborhood of Brooklyn long before we began this site. Following her through almost every iteration and project, we’ve interviewed her on many stages and in her studio as she continues to unfold, self-examine, recognize the damage, heal herself, give to others, and create on the street, in the studio, gallery, museum, and now on screen.
SWOON: The Red Skein. DRAGO Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2022
For her second bound monograph, Caledonia Curry, AKA Swoon, reviews her path as a collection of psychological and emotional journeys, perhaps one all-encompassing voyage with concurrents and tributaries running alongside and underneath. Whether she is showing you her early work on the streets here or in Italy at a festival called FAME, her Konbit Shelter days, her Braddock Project with the church in Pennsylvania, her Perly’s Beauty Shop, her epic installations at Jeffrey Deitch, LA MOCA in Los Angeles, ICA in Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, or DIA in Detroit, we’ve reported to you on them all – so you have an idea where this new book The Red Skein will take you. It is great to see the memories and the people all pulled together here cohesively and to understand the skeins that all weave as one, whether loosely or tightly.
In many ways, it is now evident that Swoon’s path has been entirely necessary for her and for the many it has touched.
The honorable Gabor Mate describes it so well here at the beginning of the book: “Sometimes people create art and don’t even know where it came from, but it came from some deep place inside themselves. And if they can do that consciously, then it is a form of therapy. Not that it is designed that way, but it can have that effect. People can also express art unconsciously, and to the extent that it stays unconscious, it will not be very healing. So it has to be artistic expression, with some degree of consciousness, which is what her art is.”
”WOON: The Red Skein. DRAGO Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2022
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alice Pasquini “Crossroads” Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy, 2019
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
Alternating between aerosol rendering, ink sketches on
paper, and the sharpened portraiture of street stencils in hidden places,
Pasquini can distill a moment that is perhaps remarkable, perhaps everyday
noblesse.
“I have discovered that art is a universal language,” she
says. Working in the streets I have found myself in countless situations,
whether exhilarating, educational, or expected. I receive immediate feedback,
whether it be surprise, joy or curiosity of the passerby, irrespective of age
or culture.”
Alice Pasquini “Crossroads” Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy, 2019
Elsewhere in an essay addressing the still-current imbalance of representation of males and females in the Street Art scene internationally, she speaks of a social aspect to her practice, a fulfillment of her desire to engage and encourage women to be themselves and be present, fully immersed in public life.
“Maybe women are presented with a behavioral model that limits our liberty to be ourselves. They tell us how we should be. By painting the women I see, I try to show to them – like a mirror – what they could be but what they repress. It is an incitement for women to do what they wish to do.”
Alice Pasquini “Crossroads” Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy, 2019
With page after page of images in these Crossroads, the artist presents many people, not unlike herself, and undoubtedly extensions of her. Tender, confessional, timidly hiding in plain view, these figures are public expressions for introverts, observers and dreamers who must confront the harsh chaos of the metropolis, but who are happier without the tumult and able to conjure beauty without the drama.
Alice Pasquini “Crossroads” Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy, 2019
Longtime stalwart friend, advisor, and manager Jessica Stewart gives readers a warm and close view of the artist and her practice, adding a timbre needed to fully appreciate the work.
“I’ve often remarked to Alice that she’s lucky that she knew what she wanted to do since she was a child. I sometimes think that she doesn’t realize just how rare it is to not only have that calling but to be fearless enough to follow your heart. Through her example, who knows how many others will be brave enough to also take the leap.”
Prayers of supplication and longing, racing teams of stallions and master felines of fury, the exhausted figure of a dream barely still illuminated, a wistful stage in the plundered urban landscape, or a plundered life.
This is what she does to you. As Faith IXVII leaves her stolen stanza, her massive mural in washed hues, her tributes to a moment lost in a city that would leave you to die if it had its way, she makes you make poetry.
“Artists are driven to leave a mark, something that will tell their story, or the story of their time,” writes Jacqueline Flint when speaking of the South African artists installation work. Whether stories she has found, constructed, or caught in the ether as they drift by, Faith has left many tales for you to unpack in cities from Wuhan, China to Chinatown in New York City to Goa, India and Portland, Washington.
In EX ANIMO you can see where she’s been waving to you from, even as you passed by, or beneath.
Published by Drago and edited by Roger Gastman, the handsome volume captures the opus works and gallery installations and hidden gems on temporary construction walls and pillars holding the highway, all part of the modern vocabulary of Street Artists who weave themselves into the fabric of the megapolis. But there is much more if you care to see it.
“Anyone can make art in the streets but a rare few create socially impactful content, and there is no denying that Faith’s work has transformed perspectives among her global audience,” writes Kristin Farr in her essay, and it is true that the width of a mind and heart can be pushed a little further with these hard won truths.
“A language of empathy borne in a scream of rage, hurled like a Molotov cocktail but given the wings of metaphor and the grace of allegory,” writes Carlo McCormick in the introduction,”Faith’s work on the streets commands all the monumentality of public art yet whispers its deepest secrets in the hushed tones of prisoners and stowaways, travelers whose journeys demark the limits and possibilities of no where else to go.”
Whether it is the rhythm of the lunar cycle or the steady, now racing, beating of blood through hearts and lungs, its a meditative measure of Faith that appears on our streets pointing to our folly and our burning fire within. Often it is a poem that rises inside.
Faith XLVII. “EX ANIMO’ THE WORK OF FAITH FORTY SEVEN/ 2010-2018. Drago Publishing. Rome, Italy, 2018
Elfo is a graffiti writer and social commentator whose work intentionally sidesteps traditional notions of style or technical lettering. This …Read More »
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