With giant murals at the forefront of the message, a recent Manhattan campaign of select walls is intended to make us talk and keep our eyes on an ugly social justice issue that organizers hope we can collectively address: child labor and forced labor.
Even in downtown NYC on Wall Street people will admit
that capitalism isn’t cool if we are doing it on the backs of children
somewhere. Nobody celebrates that. Do they?
With murals that advocate for “decent work”, asking us to create a better “future of work”, a small inspired group of international artists created impressive new works on Midtown’s East Side – roughly in the area of the United Nations.
Included in the group are Clandestinos (Shalak Attack and Bruno Smoky), Faith 47, Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada, Mr Cenz and Victor Ash. The collection is quite striking on city streets, as are the individual pieces. In fact each artist did their own interpretation of the overall theme by concentrating on direct and ancillary topics: green jobs, youth employment, gender equality at work, child labor and forced labor and the future of work.
Perhaps with some irony, the professionally rendered and emotionally stirring mural by Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada (at end of posting) was completed in the face of multiple obstacles that plague Street Artists sometimes, just not usually all at once. Regardless, the piece has an overwhelming impact.
A former culture-jamming urban installation artist who garners serious respect on the street as well as in professional art-world circles, he soldiered on for an installation that included lift equipment failures and a series of uncommon logistical challenges that come with mounting one of New largest mural works on the side of a soaring building that has a relatively narrow city alley. Only Rodriguez-Gerada’s determined vision allowed him to endure through a seemingly relentless torrent of bitter cold rainy spring weather for weeks.
Nonetheless, the results of his work, and of all of these artists, are as remarkable as they are sweet. In the service of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and a philanthropic group called Street Art for Mankind (SAM) these works can hopefully help raise our consciousness and protect children from enslavement and harsh work globally. Remarkably, SAM is going to directly to the heart of the matter, funding efforts to “help fund raid & rescue programs to free children from slavery,” says their press release.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Evan Roth “Since You Were Born” 2. “Island” Hamburg Max Mortal and Robert Lobel 3. Isaac Cordal In-Studio Visit. Bilbao, Spain. 4. ARTRIUM in Moscow
BSA Special Feature: Evan Roth “Since You Were Born”
Graffiti Research Lab
co-founder Evan Roth has been hacking his way through life and art practice for
the mid-2000s when he was a student at Brooklyn’s Parsons, where he was
valedictorian. Now an older wiser daddy of two, he turns his attention to the
saturated everyday data pileup generated from Internet browsing. The
accumulated images, logos, maps, banner ads in the cache is like so much DNA of
the person behind the mouse, and when it is printed to display, one becomes
engulfed.
Our favorite term from his new exhibit?
“An alternate form of art-making,
memory-making, and storytelling”.
Project Atrium: Evan Roth
“Island” Hamburg Max Mortal and Robert Lobel
From Hamburg an animated short video by Max Mörtl & Robert Löbel explores the irresistible desire to communicate with this stop motion & 2D animation piece. Adorable exotic creatures come alive during the day to explore and seek kindred spirits.
Isaac Cordal In-Studio Visit. Bilbao, Spain.
From our visit to his studio comes this silent overview of how to turn a pig into a pig-man. “Here is where you see the craftsman at work; carefully attentive, problem-solving industry in play, possibly more at peace while he is creating than when he is left to think too much. He picks up a pink pig figurine and begins the plastic surgery, the fine reconstruction; a gentle whirring, a whittling away of snout and a defining of chin-line.”
When we were in Moscow last summer as
curators at Artmossphere, we had the opportunity to meet the director of the
new program to bring international Street Artists to paint a shopping
mall. The magnetizing force that drew
artists to hit these walls is pretty strong; just ask Shepard Fairey, Felipe
Pantone, Tristan Eaton, Ben Eine, PichiAvo, Okuda San Miguel, Pokras Lampas,
Faith47, WK Interact, Faust, and Haculla.
First things first – Full disclosure; we are featured in the movie and we are close friends with both the subject of the doc and the director and we first suggested to the director that she was the perfect candidate to make a film about Martha Cooper. Now that we have that out of the way here are a number of shots from the premiere and our review of the movie:
Martha: A Picture Story had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this Thursday to an enthusiastic crowd that included big graffiti, Street Art, international press and film industry names, to see the highly anticipated documentary about the venerable photographer Martha Cooper by the Sydney director Selina Miles.
Included in the crowd were old-skool New Yorkers and a large international contingent of folks like Henry Chalfant, Doze Green, Skeme, Lee Quinones, Soten1, Carlos Mare 139, Terror 161, Kane, Dink (Baltimore), Okuda San Miguel (Spain), Faith47 (Los Angeles), Mantra (France), 1UP Crew (Germany), Nika Kramer (Germany), Roger Gastman, Lars Pederson (Denmark), Ian Cox (UK), Dean Moses… and many more. Those who didn’t attend this screening are having the opportunity to see it at three more sold-out evenings over the course of the festival.
The electricity was in the air as Director Miles and producer Daniel Joyce along with the just-arrived Australian members of the “Martha” crew looked for their seats in the Village East Cinema. After a brief introduction by Miles, who told the audience that the film had been a great pleasure to make, the curtain went up to reveal the mother of the superstar art twins Os Gemeos on the big screen. She is sitting at her kitchen table in São Paulo remarking how her boys used to draw on everything, including fruit, and how Cooper and Chalfant’s 1984 book “Subway Art” changed their lives forever. With their story as a backbone for the film, the theme of personal transformation is repeated in a hundred large and small ways for the next hour and twenty minutes.
Spanning nearly all of Ms. Cooper’s 75 years, including a photo at age 3 with a camera in hand from her father Ben and uncle Harry’s Baltimore camera store, “Martha” successfully identifies the underlying driving forces, the unique personality and intellectual traits, and the milestones that propelled the photographer across scenes, subcultures, cities, and continents.
While Cooper is most often identified as a crucial documentarian of the 1970s and early 1980s graffiti-writing scene in New York, with “Subway Art” considered a global holy book of preservation that inspired thousands of artists worldwide, the film is judiciously clear that the photographer has had an anthropologists’ zeal for documenting much more over her multi-decade career.
During and after the film you don’t know who you are most impressed with – the director, Martha, the communities touched, the history and stories that are preserved with such care and respect.
“Martha” captures important and character-molding biographical events – like her work in the Peace Corps in Thailand, a subsequent motorcycle trip from there to the UK, her investigations of tattoo techniques in Tokyo, and her work as the first “girl” photographer at the New York Post. During the film’s nearly magical depiction of Cooper’s first meeting with New York graffiti king Dondi, those in the audience who knew this story broke out into spontaneous applause.
The film isn’t shy about the low points and struggles of Cooper, like her repeated attempts to work at National Geographic, the continuous rejections of “Subway Art” by publishers, her loss of money by its initial disappointing sales, and the high-sniffing artworld classism of a clueless gallerist who unsuccessfully tries to dash her hopes of being recognized for her truest and most human work.
You are gently led to take that journey with great interest as well, finally arriving at the mid-2000s European promotional tour for her book Hip Hop Files where Cooper suddenly realizes the impact that “Subway Art” has had on graffiti artists worldwide. Building on that enthusiastic response from new-found fans of her work she jumps back into street photography just as the Street Art scene is exploding.
Despite such a complex story Miles is able to coax out many significant truths in character development along with their infinite shadings, facts and nuances of the story.
With interviews, testimonials, unseen home footage from Cooper’s ex-husband and excerpts from soft-news TV stories of the 1980s, viewers may gain a greater understanding of the sacrifice, dogged determination, and her sixth sense for capturing images that the subject exhibits. Keeping a quick pace aided by a smart soundtrack, pertinent graphic elements, and sharp editing, Miles finds ingenious ways to educate us about the various milieu Cooper worked with and the vicissitudes she had to overcome.
The additional layers of visual language infuse so many aspects of the story – a collaging of words, music, precise editing, intuitive pairings and lyrical, witty storytelling that lands in a pitch-perfect way.
In the end you realize Coopers’ underlying credo of taking pictures is about shedding light on people, their lives, their amazing ingenuity in the face of difficulty, their ability to rise above their environment as well as the artists techniques of art-making.
Careful observers will also be struck by the scenes of quiet moments that remain still for a few seconds to reveal deeper feeling – a remarkable glimpse of the filmmaker’s intuitive grasp of the life path and its trials. It’s those in-between places of luminosity that are revelatory, and the human gestures she lets the camera linger upon allow the viewer to write small essays inside their head, bearing witness.
With gratitude and respect to Director Miles and her whole film crew whom have worked thousands of hours over the past 2 and half years, we know that the graffiti/Street Art/photography scenes have been given a huge gift; almost as big a gift as Martha herself.
A steel-wheeled graffiti train with Roger Gastman at the controls roars into LA’s Chinatown for a two-month stay at this station, a 40,000 square foot warehouse that houses “Beyond the Streets.” Originating at the streets and train yards of the 1960s and 70s, this express survey carries with it 100 or so artists and writers from across the last five decades as practitioners of graffiti, Street Art, and mural painting. Somehow, everyone gets represented.
Opening night featured many of the names associated with its earliest beginnings of the New York /Philadelphia graffiti scene like Cornbread, Taki183, Futura, Lady Pink, filmmaker Charlie Ahearn, among many others, including photographer Martha Cooper, who in addition to being an artist in the show, shares these photos with BSA readers. She also extensively shares her photos for the accompanying show catalog, providing documentation from the scene that exist nowhere else.
A diverse and almost overwhelming series of displays present the works in a way that can only hint at the thousands of artists who built this story, necessarily viewed through a wide lens: sculpture, photography, installations, and multi-media all join the canvasses and ephemera and Gastman’s collection of vintage paint cans. Smartly planned for the selfie generation, large pieces are presented almost as backdrop ready to be Instagrammed; a direction coming from the “Photos Encouraged” sign that is next to the wall covered with Retna’s original alphabet near the entrance.
Somewhat of a rejoinder to Art in the Streets, the eponymous graffiti and Street Art exhibition in 2011 at LA MoCA, Beyond the Streets takes a focused look at the multitudinous peoples’ art movement from the perspective of one of that first shows’ original curators, Roger Gastman. When arranging the two month exhibition that closes July 6th, Gastman says that his focus was to celebrate those with street cred, in terms of individual practice, and to combine that requirement with a respectable semblance of a studio practice.
Ultimately he looked for artists who have used their particular approach to expand the definition of art in the streets in some way. That definition by now has become quite wide and it’s also a tall order for any curator to find the common themes here and present them in a cohesive manner.
Beyond The Streets, compiled by Roger Gastman.
Both the accompanying catalog and exhibition take a welcome stance toward educating the audience in many ways, helping the viewer to decode this freewheeling graffiti and mark-making history with basic vocabulary terms, historical events, pop culture inflexion points and examination of tools of the trade all adding context. Catalog essays and interviews are incisive and enlightening, including wit, sarcasm and even the occasional admonishment – notably in the essay by author, filmmaker, and curator Sacha Jenkins, who has been documenting the graffiti scene for a least a couple of decades.
Studying the move of some artists from street practice to commercial gallery that began in earnest with early NYC train writers transitioning to canvasses in the early 1980s, Jenkins upbraids a disgruntled faction among old-school graffiti writers who he characterizes as perhaps intransigent in their stylistic evolution and unwilling to adapt with the game. Later in his essay he lambasts the overtly pleasant and narcissistic cultural newcomers who he sees as milk-toasting the scene with their adoration of pretty murals and shallow sentiments, obtusely ushering in gentrification and “leading up to hearing about how my mother’s building is going to get bulldozed for a hip residential building that has a hot tub in every apartment.” He also may be the only writer here so openly addressing race and class distinctions present during the evolution of the scene and now.
The selection of artists and writers in the book and exhibition, many of them friends and colleagues with whom Gastman has worked with in the past, offers a rewarding and accessible panoply of styles and views. With some study the visitor understands connections in a widely dispersed multi-player subculture that coalesced and continuously changed its shape and character. But even if they don’t, they still get an amazing amount of eye candy.
The catalog offers extensive sections like those devoted to The History of Spraypaint and Graffiti in Galleries, and offers petite exegesis on influencing factors and benchmarks that shaped the art form’s route like Mobile DJs, The ’77 NYC Blackout, the European graffiti scene and graffiti’s role in gang culture, hip-hop and hardcore music. The compilation aids and supports the fullness of a story that frankly requires many voices to tell it. Gastman even gives forum and exhibition space to activist and defiant guerilla gardener Ron Finley and the holistic urban horticultural oases that he creates in South Central LA, calling it his form of graffiti in empty lots of the city.
Martha Cooper with Taki 183. Beyond The Streets. (photo courtesy of Martha Cooper)
With insightful interviews of artists in the exhibition from talented writers like Caleb Neelon, Caroline Ryder, John Lewis, Alec Banks, Evan Pricco, John Albert, Shelly Leopold, and Gastman himself, there are enough colorful anecdotes and decisive signposts en route to help tell the stories of the artists and their individual approaches to the street.
“The artists do not share a singular style, since they are primarily united by a common element of their personal biographies – the fact that they once made their art in the streets,” says self-described novice to the Street Art / graffiti world, Adam Lerner, the Director and Chief Animator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. “There are, however some threads that run through the works.”
Beyond the Streets will help visitors find some of those threads for themselves and undoubtedly they will forge their own interpretation of art in the streets.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Street Vendors in Abidjan with YZ Yseult Digan
2. The Yok & Sheryo: Public Silo Trail. Albany, Australia
3. “Chile Estyle.” Trailer
4. Faith XLVII Talks About Her Installation for “Beyond The Streets”
BSA Special Feature: Street Vendors in Abidjan. YZ Yseult Digan
“I pay attention to the intensity of the gaze and the posture, so the passerby is challenged and seeks to question the project.”
A sociological experiment and intervention on the streets by the French Street Artist YZ takes place in Abidjan and camera work in the crowds allows you to appreciate the action on the street. A city of 4.7 million people and the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire, the city has a lively culture of street vending that is unregulated and often populated by children.
YZ speaks with the folks she meets who are vending, who she refers to as “girls” although many are women. Her goal is to better understand them, she says, and to create a Street Art campaign of their portraits.
“I realized that their situation was very different from the men. So I wanted to know more about them. So I started the project ‘Street Vendors’,” she says.
The Yok & Sheryo: Public Silo Trail. Albany, Australia
The Yok & Sheryo brought a clever creature across an enormous four tower wall in Albany, Australia as part of a public art program funded by private interests like BHP, the Anglo-Australian multinational mining, metals and petroleum company. The Public Silo Trail is bringing artists like HENSE from the US and Phlegm from the UK to paint Artworks on grain silos, transformer boxes and all sorts of unexpected infrastructure to connect a series of regional towns.
“Chile Estyle.” Trailer
“Every social movement creates a cultural response,” says an organizer from the late 1960s who helps us trace the origins of Chilean Street Art and graffiti to the murals that became a crucial part of public discourse here. “We painted all of Chile for the Allende election campaign.” The trailer for the upcoming movie now in post production features a highlight of INTI and many open discussions of the evolution of graffiti and muralism simultaneously, eventually leading to the fascination for murals that currently reigns.
Faith XLVII Talks About Her Installation for “Beyond The Streets”
Faith leads you to the abandoned spaces and investigations of lives and stories that she often conducts when looking for the ideal places to make her art. “There is almost a holy, sacred feeling in that silence,” she says as she traverses places and stories and brings them together for an alter of sorts in the new exhibition now in Los Angeles called “Beyond the Streets.”
We made it! But it was a rough few days just finished with storms and rain and snow and high winds and flooding and downed trees around New York and its environs. Similarly, as one surveys the chaos reigning in Washington, one must not be blinded by the sound and fury and has to measure what foundations are being broken and what soil is being eroded during this deliberate and man-made storm. Also Tax Payers, You’ve Been Scammed.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Below Key, Bond TruLuv, Bunny M, Combo, Crash, Eleonora Arosio, Faith XVVII, Free the Bunny, Imraan Christian, Jaeraymie, Lamkat, Little Ricky, Manyoly, Olek, Ollio, PAM, Paper Skaters, RAD, SK, Specter, and UFO907.
As we draw closer to the new year we’ve asked a very special guest every day to take a moment to reflect on 2017 and to tell us about one photograph that best captures the year for them. It’s an assortment of treats to surprise you with every day – to enjoy and contemplate as we all reflect on the year that has passed and conjure our hopes and wishes for 2018. This is our way of sharing the sweetness of the season and of saying ‘Thank You’ to each of you for inspiring us throughout the year.
*******
South African graffiti writer-turned-international-Street Artist Faith XVLII continues to evolve her mural and fine art practices as she grapples with global politics and personal emotion. This year her directorial role in a pop-up multi-media and live performance in Berlin with Inka Kendzia and Manthe Ribane exposed viewers to a full immersion of her deeper convictions about hedonism, race, militarism, and the war industry. As we witness the evolution of an artist born in the urban art scene, Faith XVII reminds us to keep expectations hopeful and wide open – especially if society is going to be able to meet our coming challenges. Today she shares with us her observations on the state of things right now and offers insight about how we might a gain greater understanding of it.
FAITH XLVII
Recent events in world politics have been very disheartening, setting us back on much important work that has been done in the past to secure woman’s rights, workers rights and movement towards a more equal society.
The human condition seems to perpetually damage itself. The more I meditate on it the more I realize how its the simplest and most fundamental wisdoms that are out of sync. Our alienation is a root cause of our dis-ease. I believe rebuilding our connection to nature, to animals, to other cultures and ultimately to the eco-systems on this planet are an essential part of the healing process.
There is a dire need for new perspectives and new sustainable methods of living on the planet.
This installation with Lyall Sprong in Sweden was a part of this search, an ode to the timekeeper, the ancient Lunar force that silently watches over us.
The image is ultimately a call to a greater connection. A wish and intention of sorts, for a deeper understanding of the unseen forces that effect us.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Various & Gould: City Skins – Marx und Engels.
2. The Brutalism Appreciation Society/Gesellschaft zur Wertschätzung des Brutalismus 3. ESPO at Bien Urbain 2017
4. Faith47 in Johannesburg 5. Creative collaborators AXE in Barcelona for 12 + 1
BSA Special Feature: Various & Gould: City Skins – Marx und Engels.
Conceptual Street Artists often perform interventions without explanation, satisfied with their own observations of the outcome. For Berlians Various & Gould the process has more often included the participation of the public – a way for more to take ownership and inspire dialogue. Sometimes many dialogues.
The Brutalism Appreciation Society/Gesellschaft zur Wertschätzung des Brutalismus
“21 artists whose works all deal with the post-war architectural style of Brutalism,” says Dr. Inke Arns, curator and director for “The Brutalism Appreciation Society” in the HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein) in Dortmund U. Metal, stone, brick, exposed concrete – all a heavy shell against the rigorous torment of the world. Now steel and glass is slowly pushing out the blunt force of this mountainous movement, so it is a relief to see that architecture historians and, hopefully, city planners, are rallying to preserve these monuments.
2 Notes: Graffiti has had a meaningful dialogue with this evolution. Also, make sure you hang out till the end of this video for full effect.
Bien Urbain 2017 – ESPO
Stephen Powers aka ESPO participated in the 7th Bien Urbain festival in Besançon this spring and brought his wordplay and affinity for the language of advertising signage to a wall there.
Faith47 in Johannesburg
The inimitable Faith47 powerhouse has been creating some massive murals of late and while they capture the natural world epically, these pieces also manage to feel personal, intimate.
Creative collaborators AXE in Barcelona for 12 + 1
Of the thousands of images he took this year in places like New York, Berlin, Dresden, Moscow, Marrakesh, Detroit and Miami, photographer Jaime Rojo found that the figurative image still stands prominently in the Street Art scene – along with text-based, abstract and animal world themes.
Surprisingly the scene does not appear to be addressing the troubled and contentious matters of the political and social realms in a large way, but the D.I.Y. scene keeps alive and defies the forces of homogeneity with one-of-a-kind small wheat-pastes, stencils, sculptures, and aerosol sprayed pieces alongside the enormous and detailed paintings that take days to complete.
Every Sunday on BrooklynStreetArt.com, we present “Images Of The Week”, our regular interview with the street. Primarily New York based, BSA interviewed, shot, and displayed images from Street Artists from more than 100 cities over the last year, making the site a truly global resource for artists, fans, collectors, gallerists, museums, curators, academics, and others in the creative ecosystem. We are proud of the help we have given and thankful to the community for what you give back to us and we hope you enjoy this collection – some of the best from 2016.
Brooklyn Street Art 2016 Images of the Year by Jaime Rojo includes the following artists;
1Up, Above, Adele Renault, Alaniz, Amy Smalls, George Vidas, GEN2, Apexer, BordaloII, Buff Monster, C215, Collin Van Der Sluijs, Super A, David Choe, D*Face, Duke Riley, El Sol 25, Sean 9 Lugo, EQC, Faile, Faith47, Faust, Shantell Martin, Felipe Pantone, Hueman, Droid907, Icy & Sot, InDecline, Invader, JJ Veronis, Jilly Ballistic, John Ahearn, JR, London Kaye, Louis Masai, MadC, Marshal Arts, Mongolz, MSK, Rime, Myth, Nina Chanel, Optic Ninja, Otto Osch Schade, Panmela Castro, Plastic Jesus, QRST, Reed b More, Remi Rough, REVS, Self Made, Sharon Dela Cruz, Maripussy, Specter, Stikman, Strok, Swoon, Ted Pim, Thievin’ Stephen, Farin Purth, Thomas Allen, Tobo, Uriginal, Vermibus, Vhils, Wing, Yes Two, Zola.
The artist featured on the main graphic is D*Face as shot by Jaime Rojo in New York.
We will be hitting SCOPE shortly but in the interim we’ve been scoping for action or trouble; trolling around the streets of Wynwood and other selected odd locations to find Street Artists actively brush-painting, aerosol painting, markering, stenciling, wheat-pasting, even tying some wires and ribbons around fences. The walls and murals and the scene are all transforming in front of your eyes here, with photographers, videographers, and drones all flying around to capture the action as it progresses.
This neighborhood is an art fair, without the attitude. Well, maybe there is attitude occasionally on display as well.
Also, political speech was pushing through the carousing beer swilling, late-sipping, burrito chomping streets yesterday with a 50 person troop of protesters with home made signs addressing the massive oil pipeline that is routed through sacred land of Native Americans in North Dakota and a pipeline planned to go through Florida.
We followed them for a few blocks, listening to chants about water and hegemony and found that for many art/party fans it was a curiosity to see citizens demonstrating, and a few bystanders took the fluorescent green flyers offered and said thanks, while others took photos and naturally, selfies with the marchers.
Just one more element to add to your sense of cognitive dissonance.
Night time in the Wynwood District is a chaotic grimy glittery mix of high and low and middle in the neighborhood as well – where you are as likely to catch a whiff of a models’ perfume as she sashays past you in a backless silver mini dress with her 3 leggy friends flipping their long hair over their shoulders as you are to catch a whiff of sweet ganga smoke from the joint of an open-shirted, low-waisted Romeo in dreadlocks or one the acrid whiff of the rumpled grayish clothing worn by the guy who is sitting on a chair against a mural and is ready to spend another night laying on the sidewalk after you stumble back to your hotel.
An ongoing slothful and bloated and thumping network of car-minivan-limo-Escalade-motorcycle traffic is rolling into a mechanical Ambian lethargy, at times looking more like a parking lot or tailgating party, grid-locking and popping and actively cruising the options parading down the sidewalks, with windows open and music pumping.
With no police at intersections to ease the flow of this jamtastic scene, low-bubbling rage mixes with cologne and produces slick insults hurled at the guy whose car is blocking the traffic flow, or more importantly, your flow. The song of the night wafting through the air on one corner, perhaps because a bicycle would be a perfect solution here, is called Bicycleta.
Luckily for us, we are usually on foot and not afraid to walk to find the good stuff. That is the best way to experience the street and the various events and to catch artists at work. Enjoy a few scenes from the day and one from the evening in Wynwood in Miami.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. M-City at WL4
2. Faith47 – Who Will Guard The Guards Themselves 3. Henk and Louise Schiffmacher by Rust and Mako Deuza
4. Narcelio Grud: Mattress
5. Nether in Baltimore Philadelphia, Chicago and New York
BSA Special Feature: M-City at WL4
Polish Street Art stencillist, professor, and man-machine, M-City shows us with great dispatch the mechanics of production, with the occasional break for a snort of paint aroma to keep him going.
Also, are those pirates going by on a pirate ship?
Arrrrrr
Faith47 – Who Will Guard The Guards Themselves Film by Zane Meyer. Los Angeles 2016
Zane Meyer is killing it with his videos of artists in situ on the the street fighting and dancing with the wall. Faith47 is in her full stride with this herd of galloping wild horses, symbols perhaps of the runaway power we have allowed to take over our banks, military, companies – freed from regulation or governmental (citizen) interference. It is perhaps thrilling to watch, and then the herd turns toward you.
“This quotation is the embodiment of the philosophical question of how power can be held to account. It refers to the impossibility of enforcing moral behaviour when the enforcers are corruptible, as seen in timeless cases of tyrannical governments, uncontrollably oppressive dictatorships, and police or judicial corruption and overreach. How can we trust authoritative guardians of power when only they are left to guard themselves against themselves? It’s an age-old challenge; the phrase, as it is normally quoted in Latin, comes from the Satires of Juvenal, the 1st/2nd century Roman satirist,” says the text accompanying the video.
Only problem is the video is too short, too brief, not enough. But maybe that’s how Faith wants it.
Henk and Louise Schiffmacher by Rust and Mako Deuza
You don’t see stop action videos too much today in the Street Art realm but its nice to have this minute by minute account of the building of the image, complete with artists, friends, passerby, photographers, kids, butchers, bakers, shoemakers. The subjects here are the famed dutch tattoo artist Henk Schiffmacher and his wife Louise, or as the grandiose 90s rock star Anthony Kiedis is reported to have called him, “an absolute rapscallion of Dutch proportions.”
Made in Corsica in the City of Ajaccio, the artists say that the mural “is about a life dedicated to tattoo, art, lovers, inspiration and many things word can’t describe.” Rust made the portrait of Henk schiffmacher and Mako Deuza the portrait of Louise – all with cans.
Narcelio Grud: Mattress
Mr. Grud recycles foam mattresses and creates new public artworks from dreams. His inventiveness never ceases to amaze, his resourcefulness without end.
Nether in Baltimore Philadelphia, Chicago and New York
A lot has happened in our lives over the last couple of years and muralist Nether from Baltimore captures his street work from ’15 and ’16 here in his reel. A messenger to the streets as much as a reflection of it, Nether calls out the strife and the violence that people are marching in the streets about in cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Faith47’s New LGBT Themed Mural in Manchester for “Cities of Hope”
2. NYCHOS: Making of Vienna Therapy. “Dissection of Sigmund Freud”
3. LIVE Webcam of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Floating Piers”
BSA Special Feature: Faith47’s New LGBT Themed Mural in Manchester for “Cities of Hope”
Cities of Hope Mural Project creates more than a selection of eye popping visuals for Manchester, it creates community. Pairing artists with local grassroots organizations, the content and themes are related to the neighborhood and the local issues in many ways.
South African Street Artist Faith47 brought her socially conscious practice to combine the Triangle Project back home with the Partisan Collective in Manchester to create this new kissing couple for a slice of wall. Here her focus is to support LGBT peoples’ rights to access a safe environment away from the commercial venues in other parts of the city.
“Relationships rise and fall, societies blossom and crumble,” says faith47. “The profound connectedness between us creates and destroys life. We are sensitive and caring, yet at the same time vulnerable and cruel.”
NYCHOS: Making of Vienna Therapy. “Dissection of Sigmund Freud”
An unusual tour through some of the cultural institutions and locations in Vienna associated with Sigmund Freud, as seen through one of the cities newer inhabitants, the dissectionist Nychos. A dual promotion of tourism in the city as well as the artist himself and his new show opening at Jonathan Levine this Saturday in New York, the artist gives you a backstage view of how that crazy Freud brain sculpture was conceived and made this spring to ready it for last weeks’ debut on 23rd street in front of the Flat Iron Building.
LIVE Webcam of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Floating Piers”
First it was Christ walking on water, now it’s Christo. At 80, and without his dear love at his side, their project is now something they can share with thousand of others with “Floating Piers”
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
