Welcome to BSA Images of the Week – this week from Wynwood Walls in Miami, which each year Goldman Global Arts invites a slate of artists to artistically collaborate by providing them with the opportunity to paint on the walls of the compound. The artists created new pieces in the weeks leading up to Miami Art Basel and debuted them this week. Many of the artists were in attendance during the events and attended the celebration dinner given by the Goldman family as well. Martha Cooper and Nika Kramer were invited to provide the documentation of the process and the completed works.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Add Fuel, Aiko, Bordalo II, David Flores, Ernesto Maranje, Farid Rueda, Greg Mike, Hiero Veiga, Joe Iurato, Kai, Kayla Mahaffey, Mantra, Quake, and Scott Froschauer.
It’s definitely quieter here in Wynwood when there are no art fairs. But there is still so much activity. The daytime neighborhood is pounding with construction and new buildings and restaurants/bars have a steady flow of guests every night, Monday through Sunday. Thump, thump, thump. The daily foot traffic is diminished, perhaps because the sun and heat have chased everyone inside during the day, but this week we saw hundreds of people whizzing by on scooters, and some large interest with a fleet of workers was preparing for a large music event in an empty lot – with tents, food trucks, stages, lights. Now that Art Basel 2021 is officially kicking off at the end of November, no doubt there will be big things happening in Wynwood again.
So of course we went to the beach to see the never-ending blue waves. The storm on the horizon was dark and funnel-like for an hour before it disappeared and the sun coaxed a half rainbow to glimmer and shimmer brightly. The seagulls gathering near your chaise lounge are clearly there with an air of expectation, however – miserly looking over your ziplock bags with sandwiches and potato chips as you carefully peel back the paper towel to steal a bite. They are cute, true, but ever focused on your moves.
Otherwise, the Wynwood district is just chock-a-block with art – permissioned and otherwise. The faces that watch as you walk are entreating, entertaining, flaunting, peering, taunting, speaking their own impenetrable speeches and poems. The neighborhood is still in movement, still liquid, still poised for revelation. The local names are liberally sprinkled with ones you recognized, many international. If the impulse to walk one more block in search of a jewel captures you, follow it because you are invariably rewarded.
Our interview with the street today includes Anthony Lister, Bird Seed Anthony, Dan Kitchener, Disem305, Greg Mike, Gregg Rivero, Hiero Veiga, Melski, MSG Crew, Narco, NM Salgar, RACE, Sipros, and Tabue.
Over the holidays we made a quick stop in West Palm Beach, Florida to take a look at the murals from the CANVAS program, adjacent to the neighborhood of the Trump resort where he spent New Year’s Eve where he charged guests a minimum of $525 per person to attend his party. Scrubbed clean of any actual graffiti or organic Street Art, the downtown West Palm Beach shopping neighborhood adds these murals to a sleepy commercial area to pick up the glitter of a current fascination with Street Art.
With the highly contentious and disputed Trump right next door at his Mar-a-Lago estate, one wonders if any political messaging will be visible in the future, or will the neighborhood expressions of art in the streets be comprised of these decidedly apolitical and attractive murals created in advance of his presidency.
So here’s our first weekly interview with the streets for the year, this week featuring Anthony Hernandez, Astro, Bikismo, Case Ma’Claim, EMC, Grafftoyz, Greg Mike, Herakut, Hoxxoh, Kobra, Lonac, Michael Dweck, Pastel, PHD Graphitti, Pichi & Avo, Pipsqueakwashere, Sipros, Tristan Eaton, and WRDSMTH.
This week BSA is in Detroit with our hosts 1XRun for the Murals in the Market festival they are hosting with 50+ artists from various countries and disciplines and creative trajectories. In a city trying to rise from the economic and post-industrial ashes it is often the dynamic grassroots energy and vision of artists that sets the tone for how the community evolves.
Every city, every neighborhood it seems, has its own beat on the street. It is a rhythm of movement and sound and light comprised of different elements that meter the activity, determine its pacing, its lilt, its cadence.
Cars figure heavily into the beat of this wide-spread city of Detroit of course, an inherited trait central to the story of this factory town that gives certain deference to cars and trucks careening around corners and flying up battered blocks. Riding bicycles, as we do to quickly cover ground and see murals and artists, is a curiosity and not always respected by drivers.
But the rhythm of the human-powered bike is not entirely foreign here either, as the city boasts some of the most tricked out custom rides you are likely to see and posses of show-biking clubs like Detroit’s East Side Riders, who can shut down a few blocks at a time with flashy illuminated music thumping parades of stylish riders parading through.
The Slow Roll, which is a now a seasonal weekly biking event run by the non-profit Detroit Bike City, Inc. brings as many as 3- 4,000 bicyclists at a time to the city streets, a communal event that reintroduces people to each other and to their city.
There is cacophony in the market, with deliver trucks, sixteen wheelers, and construction and forklifts and all the hallmarks of light industry. Right now there are colorful and oddly dressed artists weaving like mangy cats through the sidewalks and streets with cans in their backpacks and visions in their heads.
Add to the mix the golf-cart driving 1XRun folks who are bringing bottled water, ladders, electrical generators flying around corners and rumbling up and down The Dequindre Cut, a below-grade pathway that used to carry the Grand Trunk Western Railroad line here on the east side – suitably covered with graffiti along its sidewalls.
Toss in a few art gallerists, dreadlocked organic farmers, meat cutters and conduit benders in their respective aprons, graphic design shops, lifestyle brands, waitresses, drug dealers posing as fans, intrepid looky-loos with white-sneakers and cameras and maps of murals, watermelons, gladiolas, bags of string beans, the occasional pop-up DJ tent, camera grip, skateboarder, wide-eyed sophist, tattooed Romeo, army-booted art-school woman, and a random chicken who is pecking among the grass between street bricks by a dumpster and you’ll get an idea of this particular menagerie of sights and sounds.
It’s a beat on the street that is full of rumbling, beeping, clicking, thumping – sometimes placid, sometimes crashing. All full of life and possibility, and one that is only contained in this very moment.
Jenna Duffy and Jayne McGinn have been chasing Street Art in Atlanta and taking in the whole carnival of art that is The Living Walls Conference. Jenna is an experienced fashion photographer and she has been capturing the amazing vibe with her camera while Jayne tell us in her own words what’s the mood for Saturday nights’ Eyedrum Opening. Here is their first dispatch exclusively for BSA:
Currently, Eyedrum, home of the Living Wall’s Gallery Show, and the adjacent loft where the artists are staying, has transformed into what one artist called “a summer camp meets a wedding, meets a reality show”. Street artists from around the world blew up air mattresses and slept slumber party style, painting, working, and hanging out into dawn with a collective of volunteers.
The long white hallway in Eyedrum became the artists’ free-for-all, each given pick and creative freedom to stake claim on any spot not taken. The enormity of Living Walls is evident here; once an eyesore, it is now almost completely covered with pieces large and small. Gaia, Greg Mike, Chris Bakay, Marcos Sueno, Never, Nasdaq, Hugh Leeman and other artists have thrown up murals and wheat pastes. The ultimate goal to cover the hallway is awe-inducing, but when executed the collage of local and international street artists will be an ocular feast.
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