Sorry, didn’t mean to drop a caterpillar in your Chablis darling, just wanted to make art that has meaning.
In an era of rapid change, three-card monte, and staged misinformation, satire is one useful art form that can assist you to keep the facts in focus – blowing the PR fog from the room.
It has been a little while since we checked in with Detroit-based conceptual satirists Hygenic Dress League (HDL) and we found that they have landed with a thud in Spain. The public art may appear simple, but the concepts are heavy.
You’ll recall perhaps that this street art duo is actually a corporation and their love for blurring lines between
truth/lies,
corporate personhood/personhood,
art project/social commentary, and
humorous/deadly serious
may make for dissonance in the cranial region.
Even their murals are not called such – they are “advertisements”. That is especially rich now that major brands are hi-jacking organic street art culture and wiggling around local ordinances by calling their advertisements “murals”.
HDL Corp. concepts are so developed that founders Steve and Dorota Coy cannot speak normally any more, preferring to communicate only in the non-personal “we” speak of press releases and “communications” departments. He/She/They can explain the work better than we/you can adequately comprehend so here the HDL Corporation takes the floor for the remainder of today’s Powerpoint presentation.
But first, who are all these eagle-headed figures in the work? “The animal men are basically anthropomorphic versions of our employees – the three represented here are all representing the executive employees from the corporation,” Coy tells us.
“‘Pulling Strings’ represents the idea of seeming like we are free when we are really tied down – attached – under the control of oligarchy. This piece can also be interpreted as the masses doing the work to benefit the few – the wealthy. We appreciate the double read of this piece.”
“This piece presents a new character for our corporation,” says spokesperson Coy. “Just as any corporation would hire models to build their brand, the ‘Gold Face’ characters are just that. They are part of a marketing campaign to represent the elite and make people feel inadequate in their current status,” says Coy.
“‘Gold Faces’ will appear in more advertisements in the future. The seeing eye is also present on the hands and the carnations represent the carnation revolution of 1975 in Portugal which freed them from dictatorship.”
The power of advertising and propaganda is undisputed, whether it is for toothpaste or war. We are being acted upon daily by people who would like us to do (or not do) something. Usually it is to give money for a product or service, but more than ever it is to stand by and allow bombs to fall or laws to be eroded.
Artists have been parodying the methods of advertisement and our willingness to be swayed by it almost since it began, perhaps as a way of alerting us of the deleterious effects of unthinking consumerism in general, or to give us the tools to comprehend and analyze the methods that are effectively driving our behavior. Invariably, our actions as individuals, citizens, and consumers are all folded into the critique.
Street Artist Mauro Carmelino, who writes SEBS as his moniker, recently completed an entire campaign of his own that questions many things we do and wonders if we are even aware of the lines between citizenry and consumerism we traverse these days.
Entitled “Slaves ‘R’ Us”, this series of handmade works are on the walls of Ajuda, a civil parish in the municipality of Lisbon, Portugal. Bright and simple designs that are cheerful enough, even if they belie a less pleasant series of questions for pondering.
“Democracy, the environment, freedom, security, employment and corporatism are all portrayed as products of a ‘Progress’ that seems to reach the expiration date,” he says as he describes the various elements in the campaign. In Carmelino’s view, our free will is seriously in question today. “We look back to past societies and feel we came a long way. Did we? Are we free when all our lives can be crunched into zeros and ones, somewhere on a server in California?”
The work looks welcoming and cartoonish on these aged walls and buildings, and if the artists intentions are realized, his greater messages will have an affect on the mind of the viewer. It helps that some of the locations of the walls provides a bit of context, like the silo-shaped building that has a warning about cow milk, “Some of these are inspired by the personal stories of people or are somehow related to the intervened walls,” says the artist.
Special thanks to the artist for providing these exclusive photos for BSA readers.
It’s very hard to see love as a force, as a power, but it is a reality.
For some it may be difficult to see art, much less unsanctioned public art, as a force for love and unmitigated passion. However it can be that as well.
We are not sure if those are the exact aims of Cane Morto over the course of 60 days (and nights) in Lisbon. But how else can you explain this force that drives and accompanies them? Working on something they call a secret project, this series of photos shows the sometimes grueling, sometimes langorous pace and profile of this always-experimenting troupe of Italian troubadors.
As ever it is Cane Morto’s misshapen figures, monstrous mugs, and obliquely Picassoesque references to longing and fear and God that roll themselves across surfaces in this Portuguese capital that full of museums and, increasingly, Street Artists inside as well as outside of them. The coarse work is rough-hewn and unwinding, unraveling, reforming; at times an energy hardly contained, perhaps because to do so would be a sacrilege – better to barely capture it here by camera than with a cage, this dead dog.
In her introduction to the list, editor Katherine Brooks writes:
“It turns out, 365 days is hard to summarize in anything but a laundry list of seemingly disparate phenomena, filled with the good — woman-centric street art, rising Detroit art scenes, spotlights on unseen American art– and the bad less than good — holiday butt plugs, punching bags by Monet, Koonsmania. But, as a New Year dawns, we found ourselves just wanting to focus on the things that made us beam with pride in 2014. So we made a list of those things, a list of the pieces we’re proud of.”
Describing why we thought this was an important story for us we wrote:
“We loved a lot of stories this year, but this hometown Brooklyn one about a street artist with humanity mounting her first solo major museum exhibition was a special turning point — and an astounding success. For us street art is a conversation, a continuum of expression, and Swoon is always a part of it. From following her street career to her transition to international fame to witnessing this exhibition coming to fruition in person in the months leading up to the Brooklyn Museum show, it is easy to understand why Swoon still remains a crucial part of the amazing street art scene and continues to set a standard.”
-Jaime Rojo & Steven Harrington, HuffPost Arts&Culture bloggers and co-founders of Brooklyn Street Art
In fact, we wrote 48 articles that were published on the Huffington Post in 2014, and as a collection we hope they further elucidate the vast and meaningful impact that the Street Art / graffiti / urban art movement continues to have on our culture, our public space, and our arts institutions.
Together that collection of articles published by BSA on Huffpost in ’14 spanned the globe including stories from Malaysia, Poland, Spain, France, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, New York, Arizona, The Navajo Nation, Philadelphia, Sweden, Istanbul, New Jersey, Lisbon, The Gambia, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Rome, India, Italy, Delhi (India), Montreal, San Francisco, London, Coachella, Chicago, Kabul (Afghanistan), and Kiev (Ukraine).
Here on BSA we published another 320 postings (more or less).
We thank you for allowing us to share these inspirational and educational stories with you and we are honored to be able to continue the conversation with artists, art fans, collectors, curators, academics, gallerists, museums, and arts institutions. Our passion for Street Art and related movements is only superceded by our love for the creative spirit, and we are happy whenever we encounter it.
Our published articles on HuffPost in 2014, beginning with the most recent:
Happy New Year to All! Thank you for inspiring us to do our best and to those of you who continue to support our personal art project / cultural examination, we extend our gratitude more than ever.
Begun as an enthusiastic discovery of what was happening in a few neighborhoods in New York, we continued to expand our view into more cities around the world last year and into the history and future of the scene. We also aimed to provide you with a critical platform for examination of the street art/ graffiti / public art/ contemporary art continuum with interviews with artists, curators, collectors, organizers, observers and thinkers in the street, studio, gallery, and museum – trouble makers and taste makers alike.
In the end, it’s your observations and the conversations on the street that are most important. As we begin the year with over 300K fans, friends, and followers on social media platforms and 225 articles on the Huffington Post (thanks HuffPost team!), we feel like we get a valuable good survey of current opinions heading our way daily.
With in-depth interviews, investigative articles, opinion infused examinations, plain celebratory reverie, occasionally silly non-sequitors, and public appearances where we get to meet you, we get a good analytical look at an ever-evolving movement, glittery polish and warts and all.
As the new year begins we take a look back at the top stories chosen by BSA Readers in the last 12 months. Among them are two takeover pop-up shows in soon-to-be demolished buildings, a story about commercial abuse of artist copyrights and the effort to fight back, a street art community’s response to the sudden death of an activist street artist, a Street Art tourist trip, and a few inspirational women, men, and Mexican muralists. Even though we published at least once a day for the last 365 days, these are the most popular pieces, as chosen by you, Dear BSA Reader.
PANTØNIO from Portugal has been racing with the rabbits across buildings, facades, and last week into a parking garage. The last time we published his rapid liquid rabbits was a year ago when he encircled a room at the La Tour Paris 13 installation. Today we get a look at the process for this underground work that appears to pull you quickly along up and down the ramp into the subterranean parking.
“I thought this theme would be appropriate,” he says of the aqua and blue blurring mob of burrowing bunnies, “It is a metaphor for the aggressive nature of shoppers sometimes when they are in cars and in shopping malls like this.” Yeah, you can see where PANTØNIO is headed with this hare racing scene and you can check it a little closer by clicking the image below.
Eco-tourism is so popular for vacation travelers right now. You know, treading light and your carbon footprint and all that. Then there is Plastic Surgery Tourism for those whose nose is slightly twisted or who otherwise feel your personal epidermal brand could use a “refresh”. For half the price of back home why not travel to a fashionable cosmetic surgery destination and you won’t have to worry about someone seeing you buying brie at Balducci’s with a bandaged beak.
In the wake of the global growth of interest in art in the streets, one form of tourism that may soon be blowing up could be graffiti excursions, street art sightseeing, or even mural journeying. New York has been a magnet for years for aerosol artists calling us to help them hit up walls while they are on “spraycation”, but this is just the opposite.
You may wish to plan your trip abroad hunting the elusive wheat-pastes, stencils, fill-ins, hoping to capture an exotic local throwie. And why not take a few selfies with your favorite works by Street Artists that you only previously saw on Instagram?
Street Art photographer Stephen Kelley went on his own art safari last month in Lisbon, Portugal with his fiancé and he checked out a lot of the work that has been organized during the past couple of years by the internationally known local VHILS and some of his friends in a project entitled Underdogs.
“Underdogs is an international working platform based in Lisbon, Portugal that aims at creating space within the contemporary art scene for artists connected with the new languages of urban visual culture,” say the organizers, and they have curated a program of some large-scale pieces around the city in an intelligently grand and contextual manner that makes them seem like the installations have been there for decades, not a handful of years. Urban or contemporary, it has serious fans.
Today Mr. Kelley shares with BSA some of the shots he got during a relatively short trip to Lisbon, along with some of his experiences and observations.
“In preparing for the trip we used the Underdogs project as one of the references for the map,” he says. “I was able to convince my travelling partner and fiancé to rent an apartment in the Bairro Alto area. This was a good central point for the spots I wanted to hit. We were only in town for 3 days so I had to balance your standard tourist locations with my off-the-beaten-path art spots. She appreciates the work and is incredibly patient but I can only get away with dragging her into so many back alleys and train tracks.”
“Immediately after leaving the airport the taxi unintentionally drove us by a block-long Os Gemeos, Blu, Sam3, Ericailane, and Lucy Mclauchlan mural. We told the taxi driver that I was in town to shoot art in the streets and in buildings. He mentioned I should check out this street where a group of artists painted a series of murals about the local government administration. I put that on the list,” says Kelley.
“We decided to take a taxi to the area where I had located some C215 work. The taxi driver asked why we were going to that location/area,” says Kelley. “Once we arrived at the location I brought him with us to show him the art. He was incredibly impressed with the C215 mural I showed him and said he’d bring driving in town for 25 years and had never been on that street or never seen the artwork.”
“One evening in town we took a ferry over to Almada with a great view of the 25 de Abril Bridge (the same architect who designed the Golden Gate Bridge),” says Stephen. ” You can walk up the coast toward the bridge and there are two quaint eateries that make for a perfect sunset meal or drink. The waterfront is covered with graffiti and is a good representation of the art in the area.”
As with any vacation, planning your means of transportation is key – and Kelley and his girl realized Lisbon is not quite as pedestrian friendly as other cities, mainly because of the topography. “One of the first spots we hit was the harbor area for the Pixel Pancho and Vhils collaborations. After that, with intentions to continue to explore, we had our first encounter with the hills of Portugal,” he says. “The taxi driver had reminded us that Portugal is the city of seven hills. He was not kidding, walking the streets of Lisbon is no joke and a workout and a half. We quickly realized public transit or taxi was the best way to see Lisbon.”
Like most tourists on vacation, the events that make the most impact may be the unplanned surprises, like actually seeing work in progress. Stephen explains, “One day we started to head toward the Belem Tower and a How Nosm mural. On the way we ran into Vhil’s in progress working on a water tower outside the World Photo Press exhibition at the Museu da Electricidade. I tried to wait for more action shots but he was taking a break and I couldn’t wait.”
“I also recommend taking a trip up to the castles in Sintra. It’s a 30-minute train ride from the center of Lisbon. The castles are breathtaking and shouldn’t be missed. Sintra was one of the highlights of the entire stay. The train ride also gave me an opportunity to see all the trackside graffiti that is quite common in Europe. The highway and train graffiti are very common, which was much different than what I am accustomed to in the US,” says Kelley.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Vhils x Pixel Pancho in Lisbon
2. How Nosm in Lisbon
3. NEKST FOREVER from Pose & Revok in Detroit
4. Knarf, Mafia and Fresh Max “3500” in Vienna
5. Bisser in London “Last Breath I” at Blackfriars Cafe
BSA Special Feature: Lisbon Double Feature from Underdogs
Pixel Pancho x Vhils
and How Nosm
Two beautiful videos in a row this week from the platform called Underdogs. “Underdogs is an international working platform based in Lisbon, Portugal that aims at creating space within the contemporary art scene for artists connected with the new languages of urban visual culture.” Since one of the original organizers is Street Artist Vhils, it makes sense that these two videos capture that additional essence of the experience of art making, the discipline, the dedication, the drive. The camera work, editing, and story telling are fresh and above par here.
Pixel Pancho and Vhils for Underdogs. Lisbon 2013
How & Nosm for Underdogs. Lisbon 2013
NEKST FOREVER from The Seventh Letter: Pose & Revok
With baritone narration from Pose about the impact of one guy on many, this video relates the level of respect the late graffiti artist Nekst had among his peers. Together with Revok and other members of the MSK crew you’ll see them knock out one of the biggest tributes yet in Detroit.
Knarf, Mafia and Fresh Max “3500” in Vienna
KNARF, MAFIA and FRESH MAX spent the last 3 months working on a 3500 square meter wall complex near Vienna. Here is a brief overview of their process. They will also be releasing a book on the 24th documenting the project, sketches, and images of the entire painted building.
Bisser in London “Last Breath I” at Blackfriars Cafe
A local cafe of 35 years is going to be torn down with the entire building it has been housed in Southwark (South-London). Artist Bisser did an installation, a “one-off beautification” last month to say goodbye to the place. As it turns out, an entire project has been spawned to create more work by more artists in the building before it is slated for demolition. This video is the first of the series for “The Last Breath Project”
We like to say that the world has become more global over the last twenty years, but that doesn’t necessarily apply to you. Money, jobs, and trade are increasingly free to traverse boarders in this age of globalism, yes. Getting a visa to leave and explore and learn about another culture and come back home may still prove to be impossible, depending on where you live.
Beijing based Street Artist ROBBBB recently took a small troupe of his countrymen/women to Europe and put them on the streets of Milan, Florence, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, and Lisbon. He says it is a sort of cultural exchange, even if the real people in these wheat-pastes never left home.
“I put the most real and authentic Chinese people in these pieces so that they could be in a different political, social and cultural environment in Europe,” he explains of the six-city tour. “I also wonder how the Europeans will think of these Chinese subjects and what their reaction is to seeing them in these locations.”
A visit with Street Art collective Faile in their Brooklyn studio finds the industrious duo at the center of a small cluster of assistants working on many projects simultaneously.
The air of collaboration is evident in this maze of activity – as well as an appreciation for process. The multi-level ex-industrial building has been reconfigured internally over the last decade to contain and accommodate the adventurous appetites of the childhood buddies who took their Street Art from Brooklyn to the Tate, with many stops along the way.
This doesn’t happen for everybody, so in this first visit of two before their upcoming debut solo show at Perry Rubenstein Gallery on November 4, we looked for clues about the creative and working DNA of Faile. In the ten quick long rotten beautiful years of this century they’ve plowed through many experiments methodically from simple one color small stencils on light posts to now museum quality raft-sized wooden block collages that take months to screenprint, saw, sand, and assemble.
In a pretty remarkable run through the neighborhood and the globe the two Patricks have used aerosoled stencils, screen prints, wheat pastes, roller tags, animated video games, carved wood, vinyl sculptures, spinning prayer poles, even alabaster and tile reliefs in their ever growing collection of work. Cumulatively, the forays have given depth and resilience to their nearly iconic pop imagery.
Since returning from their Lisbon temple installation mid summer, where their piece (two years in the making) became a focal point for that city’s first biennial, the Faile dudes are now making a multitude of these “wood paintings” here in their Brooklyn studio. Among the many silkscreens stacked against walls, rolled canvasses in tubes, and pieces by Banksy and Shepard Fairey adorning the walls, there are open wooden boxes, maybe 20 or 30, full of small wooden printed blocks laying open on tables and shelves.
Brooklyn Street Art: When the blocks get that small they are almost just a texture.
Patrick McNeil: Exactly, or just color palette. It’s so modular you don’t get stuck with anything, you get to explore a lot and if it doesn’t work you just put it back the way that it was or pull it apart.
Brooklyn Street Art:That’s right, you can reverse yourself pretty easily
Patrick McNeil: Yeah you just kind of build a piece and then realize it works better in something bigger – so they are very loose in a sense. It seems very precision-y and thought out but it’s much more looser than it looks.
The selective sampling of images that create the Lingua Faile has steadily grown into a library of totems, symbols, pulp art snippets, typefaces and signifiers set free from their context and recombined with a lucid dexterity, a splash of irony, and an inner voice that says, ‘go for it’. It’s an old-skool visual sampling that doesn’t need autotune for anything, just a hyped sense for combining clips and dropping it on the beat. Talking to them, one sees that it’s a loose intuitive sense that is guiding the process.
Patrick McNeil: And I like what is happening in this one, it’s still coming along. That one, the bottom needs to be worked out. It’s really top heavy. And we’ll kind of pull some colors down. That one is just kind of getting started. This one’s kind of in the middle right now; Just slowly working on blacks and switching things up.
Brooklyn Street Art:So you’ve used a lot of powdered pastels…
Patrick McNeil: Yeah…
Brooklyn Street Art: let’s see, blasting fluorescents…
Patrick McNeil: Well a little bit, yeah. There are not too many fluorescents, well, that pink is probably the only fluorescent. Well, there’s yellow on that one. But none of these have any fluorescent.
Brooklyn Street Art:I’m thinking of the DeLuxx Flux thing you did with Bast.
Patrick McNeil: Yeah Perry made the rule, “no fluorescents”.
Brooklyn Street Art:Oh okay. Well it’s good to have that guidance.
Patrick McNeil: Yeah, we might sneak one in there.
Patrick McNeil: Then we were looking more at abstractions, breaking color groups up, pushing it really far.
Brooklyn Street Art:Yes that’s an unusual combination of the violet and the grey. It looks fresh.
Patrick McNeil: Yeah, it’s kinda switchin’ it up. We kind of like tweak things and leave them up for a while and then switch it out. It’s kind of interesting.
Even though the new book, their first, is coming out to mark the first 10 years that took them from Brooklyn streets to group shows, street art exhibitions, galleries, and museums around the globe, the creative partners are focusing right now on the work at hand. A decade of work, play, and planning together has created a shorthand of cues and patterns and symbols that makes their work move quickly without much strife or discussion. In the studio it’s equal parts industry and creativity – where real world dedication to process and structure adds a loose tension to the spirit of play.
Brooklyn Street Art:Are you both the leader? Or do you take turns being the leader? Is there one who just says “THIS is where we have to go!”
Patrick McNeil: It goes back and forth really.
Patrick Miller: It’s pretty rare when it is “This is the way it has to be and there is no room for discussion”
Brooklyn Street Art:So you don’t come to loggerheads?
Patrick McNeil: No, we’ve known each other since we were 14 so we’ve got a pretty good friendship.
The new block collages, or “wood paintings” started about a year ago and the artists introduced them at Cour Carrée du Louvre for the FIAC in Paris. With a loyal fanbase that hangs on their every print release and microsite revelation, the new pieces were an instant hit and complete success. The scale of pieces at that time seemed manageable and something you might carry as part of your luggage; however some of these new wood paintings for the Rubenstein show might well be snagged by Swoon for walls in one of her Konbit shelters.
Brooklyn Street Art:How do you achieve a sense of balance? You have the professional, personal,… family is growing.. How do you guys achieve a sense of balance regularly?
Patrick Miller: For one, we treat this like a pretty regular thing in the sense of working Monday through Friday, pretty much 9:30 to 6:00.
Brooklyn Street Art:So you have a schedule and a structure.
Patrick Miller: Yeah, so we have structure in that sense. It’s a business after all on some level, and it has to be thought of in that way too. I mean it’s tough some times when we have big shows going on and we’re traveling and trying to not be away from the kids for too long. But you know, I guess I never stopped to think about it. It was nice last year because Patrick and his wife had their second child and we had our first within a few weeks of each other, and so that worked out really well, in the sense of timing-wise. We were able to slow down a bit.
Brooklyn Street Art:You know I was just thinking about the blocks and interactivity. I wonder if you could make a piece where some of the blocks were free and the person who buys it could play with the blocks.
Patrick Miller: Hey, you’re really onto something!
Patrick McNeil: Let’s go upstairs.
Brooklyn Street Art:You’ve already thought of this!
We shuffle eagerly behind our hosts like hypnotized penguins out to the darkened hallway and up some stairs to a high security print room that is pristine and plum full of stuff that might make you cry – things they’ve collected, been gifted, or just like to entertain visitors with. They could drop names but the brothers Faile are more interested to show one of their newest inventions, a wooden tray of blocks that form a puzzle – well, six actually. The lo-tech games perfectly marry our current digital longing for interactivity and the latent one to become a Luddite.
Patrick Miller: (The puzzle boxes) kind of came up in Paris, so we just developed these pieces on the side totally on their own. Then we started thinking there are some situations and combinations that we really liked. Each one is printed on all six sides and you can manipulate it and play with it.
Brooklyn Street Art:Hours of endless pleasure! How do you prevent them from getting damaged?
Patrick McNeil: That’s just part of it.
Patrick Miller: I don’t think they’re going to get too damaged. They are already sanded and their meant to be touched. We’re actually making a site, because it’s really hard to show them.
Brooklyn Street Art:Have you thought of customization on the site so people can select options and order it?
Patrick: Yes we’ve thought of that but effectively you’d have tons of combinations.
Faile wood blocks at the studio (Photo @ Jaime Rojo)
Brooklyn Street Art:Have you thought of doing an app for these so people can play with them?
Patrick: Yeah and that is something that may come out of it. The people that we work with… That would be a fun thing, as a little game. And it’s actually pretty simple because the navigation is just like ‘click’ and it turns it. It should be a fun little site. It’s been fun to do these little micro sites.
Brooklyn Street Art: Right, with a phone’s motion sensor you could roll the blocks around. Wow, you guys are on top of it.
This visit draws to an end with a promise to rejoin shortly before the show to see the progression. But before we go, the new book is placed with slight aplomb on the counter. The one and only copy they’ve received from the printer, we stare at it like cats at an aquarium. The splashy pink raging dog cover says the thing about Faile you might not notice on a casual tour; these guys are ferocious in their desire to succeed and have built a body of work to prove it.
Tentatively peeling back the pages of the book, we see that the first image is the simple stencil of a figure carrying a canvas with his back to you and the words “A Life”, their first name, across the top. Anyone stumbling home drunk through industrial Williamsburg in the late 90’s would remember what curiosity was sparked with this humblest of images scattered everywhere. Later they anagrammed it to form their current name.
Brooklyn Street Art:So “A Life” got converted to Faile, which is just the opposite of what you’ve done!
Patrick Miller: Yeah it was always kind of about growing from it and making the most of all your failures.
Brooklyn Street Art:Did you both design the book?
Patrick Miller: We worked on it with a friend of ours. It was such an undertaking. But it’s good. It’s definitely a pretty personal book in the way that it’s written, very friendly, an enjoyable read. It’s nice just to have the works on print.
Patrick McNeil: It’s nice to see the earlier work, and it’s nice to see how the process goes because it’s chronological as well.
Brooklyn Street Art:Who is going to have seen all of this stuff besides you two? Nobody.
Patrick Miller: It’s a nice way to put it together for yourself too, after 10 years of working on Faile it’s nice to have this.
Last Chance to see “Radiant Child” Movie this Weekend at Film Forum
A gem of a film, isn’t that what those old timey movie reviewers used to say? The previously unseen footage of Basquiat shot by his friend Tamra Davis in his studio is probably the most revealing about his short personal history, his meteoric rise, and wild free child within. Less illuminating is some of the self- aggrandizing by those who now lay claim to his history. Equally it is an indictment of a society dealing with it’s legacy of racism, and the misplaced value given to critics with personal agendas. Nonetheless most viewers will understand intuitively the work for what it is and focus on the Brooklyn guy who made it cool to be outside.
“Fuck Don Pablo Pedro” is the second solo show for this talented Bushwick painter tomorrow and is sure to be fun, colorful, libidinous, and nauseating. Pandemic Gallery
Brooklyn Street Art duo Faile recently took their sculptural installations to an earlier classical period of the Biennial Portugal Arte 10. The pop culture influences are re-contextualized, as they say….
Electric Windows Tomorrow in Beacon New York
Take the Metro North about an hour up the Hudson to see 30 Street Artists painting live. Is there more to say?
Elfo is a graffiti writer and social commentator whose work intentionally sidesteps traditional notions of style or technical lettering. This …Read More »
In her latest mural, Faring Purth delivers a powerful reflection on connection, continuity, and the complexity of evolving relationships—a true …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
