4th of July weekend here in New York so we are headed to a barbecue and a frisbee game. Maybe to the Jersey shore for some sun. Happy 4th ya’ll! Looks like the country needs to take itself back from the corporate overlords – if we want to declare the US to be independent ever again. Right now we’re in trouble, gurl – and everyone knows it!
So here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Banksy, Clint Mario, Crash, El Sol 25, Felipe Pantone, FinDAC, Hopare, Hot Tea, Invader, John Ahearn, Logan Hicks, Mark Jenkins, Resistance is Female, SaxSix, and Sonny Sundancer.
Shepard, Findac, Stikki Peaches… and that’s before we even get into the UN exhibition space or the main museum space – both locations a combustible beehive of painting right now with perhaps twenty artists working at once.
Somehow this is the frenetic energy that we have grown to expect of a typical Urban Nation event. It is simply not enough energy unless the event you came for is compounded by three or thirteen other Urban Nation events happening simultaneously, due in large part to the omnivorous aesthetic and cultural appetite of director Yasha Young and her big-thinking and resourceful team.
In the three years of Project M exhibitions leading up to the official opening of the UN museum this September, Ms. Young has spread the curatorial wealth, mixed multiple metaphors, ignored stylistic boundaries, stirred myriad emotions and fired up a lot of talk on the street with weeks like these.
Evan Pricco’s description to us of his own curated show here helps to define this moment as well, “It’s sort of a nod to not really having to have boundaries, or a proper definition, but a feeling that something is happening. Its not street art, its not graffiti, but its this new wave that is looking out, looking in, and finding new avenues to share and make work.”
In New Orleans, they would call this savory multi-layered sensory-rich dish something like Jambalaya. In the Gambia it would be an Oyster Stew, in Spain it would be one of Valencian restaurateur Juan Galbis gargantuan paellas. Hungry yet?
At this moment there are artists and production folks preparing a new curated show by Pricco, Editor in Chief of Juxtapoz magazine in the UN auxiliary gallery called. He’s calling it “What in the World?”. Simultaneously there are preparations down the block for a huge dinner and night of live performances and temporary art installations inside the actual evolving museum space called “We Broke Night!”
And there are several outdoor installations roving throughout the neighborhood at the same time, with passersby interacting with and engaging the artists in discussions. All levels and disciplines of artists from the Street Art/Graffiti continuum are converging in this neighborhood painting, pasting, stenciling, hanging, installing, — enormous wall pieces (Shepard), smaller collaged wheatpastes (Stikki Peaches), hand-painted murals on a ladder outside walls (Findac), hand painted signage and calligraphy (Serge Lowrider), multi-layered stencil portraits (Snik), optically dizzying tape installations (Tape Over Crew), post-graffiti bucket painted organic geometries (Erosie and Daan Botlek), and yes, much more.
Variety and quality like this is unthinkable at best and un-pragmatic at worst in formal exhibition spaces and institutions. But witness the panoply unfolding before your eyes and this hybrid may strike you as a truer contemporaneous representation of this complicated generation than most organizers have the gall to attempt.
Somehow, this all works. Being in the midst of this UN kitchen feels as alive as the scenes it convenes.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) received $148 million in 2016. The war budget, also called the “Defense Budget”, was approved for $582 billion for this year.
For comparison’s sake, that means the “Defense Budget” is 3,900 times the size of the NEA.
Arts and artists get very little or no financial or institutional support from the federal, state, or local government in the United States, which is always a shock for Europeans to learn – and many won’t believe it when you tell them. This website, for example, receives no funding or grants from any organization despite publishing daily for almost nine years, and it has remained non-commercial during that entire time.
That is why it is rather astounding that two of Miami’s Wynwood schools, Eneida M. Hartner elementary school and Jose De Diego middle school, are completely covered in murals.
The Raw Project in Wynwood, Miami is the initiative of Robert De Los Rios, who partnered with private contributors, did fundraising, and asked a coalition of artists to paint the walls of the schools for the kids.
Part of its success of course is due to the status of the Wynwood neighborhood as a magnet for graffiti and Street Artists over the last decade or so. Already coming to Wynwood for Art Basel or to partake in a related art event, these artists have given of themselves and their talents to create a completely unique and dynamic environment for students to learn and grow up around.
We captured a number of these walls during successive visits over the last few years and share them with BSA readers today.
Please consider donating to the school organization to continue this program and to refresh or replace murals as they age. http://www.projectwynwood.com/raw/
An embarrassment of riches in so many ways, the Wynwood Street Art and mural scene is outrageously sexy, flashy, ugly, posey, pretty, proliferate and quizzically content-free. The annual outdoor urban art visual carnival that accompanies Art Basel in Miami is full of hi/low expectation and spectacle, and it confidently delivers on both.
Long-limbed and shimmery sleek women are often working the sidewalks like runways, the men are carefully posing/not posing/posing with open shirts and genial braggadocio, and there are thousands, more likely millions of selfies taken in front of painted walls.
International art fans are mixing with skater kids and hip hop heads and egg-headed social scientists and teenage marching bands and they are all gawking and interacting with loquacious mamacitas and bearded lumbersexuals; this is not your average clambake.
Sometimes it is just weird; flourescence mixed with plaid, shot-callers and violins, strollers and stillettos, an undertone of aggression and sexual tension, salt-of-the-earth with self-admiring clubbers, perfect skin and aerosol painted hands, a whiff of weed and a sense of wonder waiting to be discovered.
While there was a parade of 40 or so citizens and activists carrying signs and handing out flyers down the street to protest the oil pipelines taking sacred lands from native tribes and polluting natural water supplies, the thousands of art fans flooding the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami would have been hard pressed to find any Street Art talking about those topics.
Ironically the political shockwaves this year in Miami seemed to emanate from behind doors at the fair with Sam Durant’s “End White Supremacy” piece that many interpreted as a direct response to the election of a president whose followers include radical organizations that champion white supremacy. Alas, the piece was made in 2008, and although its hand-style emulates the hit and run scrawl of some graffiti on the street, it was a thoughtfully executed piece constructed as an illuminated sign.
With one very notable exception, the enormous and frightful mural featuring Donald Trump as Heath Ledger’s Joker wielding a knife at the neck of the Statue of Liberty with the screaming headline “Come On… What the Hell Do You Have to Lose?” by 12 artists for The Bushwick Collective/Mana Urban Arts Project, the professionalization of Street Artists and their murals may be steering the paintings in Wynwood away from in-your-face activism.
Granted, no one is thinking that commercially branded ventures that actually pay artists to paint will encourage the outright expression of social or political opinions – that may challenge or frighten potential customers and investors. Hotel lobbies need murals, sport cars need decorative painting, beer cans need labels. A number of liquor and lifestyle companies have invited artists here over the last few years and paid them to make their special events and products visually appealing, but little else.
The newly refurbished Hard Rock stadium a few miles north of Miami features huge mural installations by international Street Artists that are curated by Goldman Global Arts, a division of Goldman Properties, the same real estate organization that has brought artists from around the world to the Wynwood Walls compound and featured their fine art canvasses in gallery expositions since the late 2000s. The pieces are opus works in an unusual setting and now sports fans are going to be up close and personal with some of the bigger names in Street Art right now.
It would be hypocritical for anyone to expect that these artists should accept commercial work and yet disrespect guidelines about the content. Similarly, expecting artists not to seek commercial opportunities for fear of “selling out” is arrogant and unrealistic and often the convenient provenance of privileged youth who dabble in “slumming” as a rebellious lifestyle. Later they are bankers.
Even so, where’s the anger right now? Why didn’t you see a lot of furious diatribes, challenges to power, and mockery of small-minded thinking on the street in Wynwood – and what would it take for Street Art to embrace its power to affect social and political change?
Just posing the question here now, again – as the topics of impending fascism, the increasing acts of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, corruption, oligarchy, state-corporatism, and a systematic eroding of respect for our institutions – all came up in conversations at bars, art openings, panel discussions, and roof parties.
The murals you see here are often technically superb and their themes, while muted, may address some of the larger themes affecting society, but one wonders if there is an internalized censorship that we have accepted.
These images are admittedly of a modest percentage of the hundreds of legal murals and illegally dashed-off pieces we saw this week, but that’s only because we have edited for our individual aesthetics, not because of content. Also admittedly, as people in the arts, we are exhausted from the recent election and all it portends, and we were happy for some glorious eye candy to salve the psychic wounds – so maybe we were selectively seeing what we wanted to.
Probably not too much though.
For an art practice with some serious and proud roots in activism, the walls in Miami are curiously quiet. But they definitely look amazing.
The police here in Miami have taken over the Goldman family offices in the Wynwood district.
Correction: Those would be the artists named The London Police and they are painting a new wall inside the just-opened offices of Goldman Properties – which is a different situation entirely.
The real estate company has a new compound in Wynwood after years of supporting the famed Wynwood Walls compound where perhaps 100 or so international Street Art and graffiti names have brought their skillz since its inception as a living, breathing art project by family visionary Tony Goldman in the late 2000s.
In a shaded, gardened area of Wynwood we found Ken Hiratsuka pounding away with hammer and chisel Monday on the large boulders that have distinguished this part of the compound for years. It may have been only for a minute, but we’re pretty sure we saw these boulders covered with paint by Anthony Lister at one point, and perhaps one of these was washed in color at the foreground of a Ron English wall not long after. Definitely they’ve been a foundation for the crocheted pink camouflage skin created for them by OLEK only a couple of years ago during one of Jeffrey Dietch’s curations.
A close friend of Tony, who passed away in 2012, Mr. Hiratsuka has chiseled his continuous line-work into the sidewalks of Manhattan many times over the years – especially the ones made of slate and granite. Keep your eyes peeled and you’ll find his distinctive carvings where you walk in Soho right now, making him a true New York Street Artist.
Since first bringing his hand-pounded mark-making into the nearly lawless lower Manhattan after arriving from Tokyo in 1982, Hiratsuka may have done as many as 50 large pieces in the pedestrian paths of New York. He didn’t stop there but created a full career of it; with sculpted environments and chiseled streets in 21 countries. In this particular context, these new pieces may call to mind the paintings of Haring (and LA2) and Basquiat. All considered, it is remarkable to find him here for Wynwood’s wall celebrations this year – kicking off with the huge ‘artists dinner’ tonight.
Speaking of artists, we caught a few on the street, somewhat feverish in this winter warmth, protected often by clouds. Trolling around this outdoor beehive with photographer Martha Cooper in the afternoon, we found that many murals have just been finished – like Pixel Pancho’s gilded and caged paradise, Faith 47s heroic poetry and Okuda’s blended portrait. Earlier in the day while touring the nearby new Hard Rock Stadium we found new pieces in progress, like those by Spanish duo Pichi and Avo and Australia’s Fintan Magee.
Any New Yorker on the street can tell you that Donald Trump has always been this way – he hasn’t made a “secret” of it. We just called this stuff “tabloid news”, and tabloids were an exception. Now they nearly rule all public discourse.
Lowest-common-denominator “News” has produced a lowest-common-denominator candidate. He almost clinched the highest elected office. There is a trail of polarized destruction in the wake.
For over a year this profit-driven entertainment media actually created a cancerous candidate who gives them daily “clickable content” while they hold their noses and count the dollars. These people aren’t serving you, or democracy. We are all collectively debased – men and women, black and white, Mexican and Muslim, rich and poor, families, children, teachers, workers, nurses, doctors, cashiers, church people, atheists – as a result.
The GOP’s flirtation with starting and fanning racist bonfires over the past decade or so has finally swallowed it in flames, leaving it in smoking embers, their leaders completely covered with fecal matter, quieted and stunned. The reputation of the US around the world took a battering thanks to this tabloid news candidate as well. Traveling to Street Art events outside the US this year, invariably someone would shake us by the lapels and ask us what the hell was going on with this Trump guy?!.
In recognition of the woman-hating man who came dangerously close to the White House, here are a number of different women and girls by Street Artists creating in the public sphere at the moment, covering a range of styles, backgrounds, techniques and points of view.
So, here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Beast, Danielle Mastrion, Faile, finDAC, Jilly Ballistic, Kevin Lyons, Leticia Mondragora, LMNOPI, Marina Capdevila, Myth, Never Crew, Ouch, Shepard Fairey, Sipros, Slick, Spaik, Stray Ones, Taker, Who’s Dirk, and Zimer.
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.
Exactly a year ago we were in Berlin as invited guest curators by Urban Nation Museum’s Director Yasha Young to curate the 7th Edition of Project M. Our exhibition, “Persons Of Interest” was aesthetically rich and culturally relevant in the windows and on the facade of the under-renovation UN haus, and the positive feedback we received lasted a number of months. Each artist had dug deep in their research and were inspired to bring a Brooklyn-Berlin historical and contemporary story to the street in a meaningful way.
The indoor exhibition at the museum’s headquarters overflowed onto the streets on opening night as well; with artists, fans, curators, honored cultural muses, and officials from Berlin’s formal arts infrastructure all abuzz with the exchange happening in Kreuzberg.
As Ms. Young and her teams continue to build the cultural foundation of UN with a dizzying array of programs, initiatives, and artists this year leading to the official opening next spring, we remark on her singular vision as a cornerstone of the museum.
With a finger on the pulse of many movements within the current Urban/Contemporary scene Young has made some bold and sharp choices to get an institution like this underway. With a clear sense of the potential that this global scene has always shown, Young has harnessed goodwill and top talents in the urban arts community and is gradually attracting the eye of more formal institutions. Undoubtedly in many ways UN has already made history.
So to mark a year since our first show with UN we’re looking at a treasure trove of photos of works on the streets that we didn’t publish at that time. This city is singular in it’s permissiveness to graffiti and street art – a tacit but undeniable appreciation for its eclectic contribution to contemporary art, the life of the culture. Berlin also somehow understands the intrinsic value of supporting artist communities. A laboratory on the streets, Berlin continues to afford art space to take shape before your eyes.
A lot of people thought so, and the rise of commercial festivals and commissioned public/private mural programs probably brought more artists to more walls than in recent history. Judging from the In Box, 2016 is going to break more records. Enormous, polished, fully realized and presented, murals can hold a special role in a community and transform a neighborhood, even a city.
But they are not the “organic” Street Art that draws us into the dark in-between places in a city, or at its margins.
We keep our eyes open for the small, one-off, idiosyncratic, uncommissioned, weirdo work as well, as it can carry clues about the culture and reveal a sage or silly solo voice. It also just reinforces the feeling that the street is still home to an autonomous free-for-all of ideas and opinions and wandering passions. For us it is still fascinating to seek out and discover the one-of-a-kind small wheatpastes, stencils, sculptures, ad takeovers, collages, and aerosol sprayed pieces alongside the enormous and detailed paintings that take days to complete.
The main image above is from a vinyl subway advertisement that was high-jacked and we published it in February of this year on our Images of the Week posting. It’s small, personal, and very effective as you can see someone suspiciously similar to Batman is jumping out of the mouth of someone looking awfully similar to Hedwig of “Angry Inch” fame.
Of the 10,000 or so images photographer Jaime Rojo took in 2015, here are a selection 140+ of the best images from his travels through streets looking for unpermissioned and sanctioned art.
Brooklyn Street Art 2015 Images of the Year by Jaime Rojo
Brooklyn Street Art 2015 Images of the Year by Jaime Rojo includes the following artists;
365xlos43, Amanda Marie, Andreas Englund, Augustine Kofie, Bisser, Boijeot, Renauld, Bordaloli, Brittany, BunnyM, Case Maclaim, Casg, Cash4, CDRE, Clet, Cost, Curve, Dain, Dal East, Dan Budnik, Dan Witz, David Walker, DeeDee, Dennis McNett, Don Rimx, Ricardo Cabret, LNY, Alex Seel, Mata Ruda, Don’t Fret, Dot Dot Dot, ECB, El Mac, El Sol25, Ella & Pitr, Eric Simmons, Enest Zacharevic, Martha Cooper, Martin Whatson, Ever, Faile, Faith47, Findac, Futura, Gaia, Gilf!, Hanksy, Hellbent, Hot Tea, How & Nosm, Icy and Sot, Inti, Invader, Isaac Cordal, James Bullough, Janet Dickson, Jef Aerosol, Jilly Ballistic, Joe Iurato, John Fekner, Le Diamantaire, Li Hill, LMNOPI, London Kaye, Low Brow, Marina Capdevilla, Miss Van, Mr. Prvrt, Mr. Toll, Myth, Nafir, Nemos, Never Crew, Nick Walker, Nina Pandolofo, Old Broads, Oldy, Ollio, Os Gemeos, Owen Dippie, Paper Skaters, Pet Bird, Kashink, Smells, Cash4, PichiAvo, Pixel Pancho, QRST, ROA, Ron English, Rubin415, Saner, Sean 9 Lugo, Shai Dahan, Shepard Fairey, Sheryo & The Yok, Sinned, Sipros, Skewville, Slikor, Smells, Sweet Toof, Snowden, Edward Snowden, Andrew Tider, Jeff Greenspan, Specter, Stray Ones, Sweet Toof, Swil, Willow, Swoon, The Outings Project, Toney De Pew, Tristan Eaton, Various & Gould, Vermibus, Wane, Wk Interact
Chomp chomp, slurp slurp, spraaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy spray sp sp sp spraaayyyyyyyyyy. The sounds of a sidewalk barbecue and painting a new piece on a wall on a hot July day in Brooklyn. Also honking, screeching, sirens, and Action Bronson, Hot Chip, or Major Lazer pumping out the windows of a passing car. Want a cherry popsicle?
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring $howta, Barlo, BD White, Brad Robson, DAIN, Dee Dee, Denton Burrows, Faith47, Fin DAC, Jack Fox, Jorit Agoch, LOMNOPI, JPO, London Kaye, Marina Capdevila, Skirl, Sosta, and Zimer.
London is looking alive and on top of things at mid-winter, with a great variety of materials and techniques, imaginative styles and of course varying results, according to your tastes. During a quick trip on a somewhat blizzardish day, photographer Geoff Hargadon found “tough conditions: snowy, cold as f***, and a camera battery that refused to stay charged.” Tough going for the intrepid Street Art photog you see. Of course the upside of inclement weather is that no one is outside to obscure your shot. Except the falling snow, that is.
From the comfort of you warmly glowing flatscreen, this selection of pieces looks like Street Art in London is largely mural based, right now, as much of the scene continues to be. The players are more or less familiar to your eyeballs, with a few newbies on the scene.
Enjoy these exclusive shots just for BSA readers. And special thanks to Geoff for his heroism and for sharing these scenes with us.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
