All posts tagged: MARKO

Jellyfish and Sharks and Octopi, Oh My! Tahiti’s ONO’U, Part Deux

October 19, 2016 Artists

Our intrepid Ms. Cooper had to island-hop to snap photos of the rest of these colorful murals in Tahiti for the ONO’U Festival. Raiatea is the name of the island and Martha was told that it was known for being a sacred island where human sacrifices once took place.

“It is also the place from where voyages set out to explore surrounding islands. Two murals are based on that idea,” she say, then adds “mercifully no one painted a human sacrifice.”

Perhaps it’s is an aversion to those tales that produced only blatantly pleasant murals that feature cute sea faring creatures and the occasional errant Jaguar. Jaguars, for the record, do not favor these islands but appear to be a favorite of the French Street Artist Marko 93. There are, however Tiger Sharks swimming around sometimes, and jellyfish.

brooklyn-street-art-kalouf-martha-cooper-onou-raiatea-10-16-web-1

Kalaouf at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Kalaouf. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Niko & Inkie at work on their murals. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

NIKO at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

NIKO & INKIE. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

SETH at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

SETH. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Seth’s Raiatea mural is of a female mermaid-octopus holding a ship. “Her tentacles represent the other islands,” says Martha.

Marko at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Marko and friends. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Paris based Marko 93 was one of the most social and generous of the artists, says Martha.

“His jaguars are colorful crowd-pleasers,” she says. “Marko had a very good rapport with the locals and cheerfully signed dozens of T-shirts for kids who took a graffiti workshop.”

Marko with fans. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Marko with a young fan. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Marko enjoying the locals, and vise versa. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

A version of this article appears on The Huffington Post

See Part 1 of this series here:

ONO’U Festival 2016 as Captured by Martha Cooper in Tahiti

October 13, 2016 Artists

Lucky Us! Our senior reporter on the ground in Tahiti for this years’ ONO’U Festival is the quick-witted eagle-eyed Martha Cooper, who shares with BSA readers her fresh shots of the action in paradise.

Personable and outgoing, Cooper covers a lot of ground quickly, introducing herself and asking questions and snapping pictures. Of course people often know her before she knows them, especially in the Street Art/ Graffiti game – but frankly she just wants to see artists work and learn about their process. So get working!

We’re thankful that Martha is taking the time to share with us all her images and some details of the surrounding action, which we elaborate on here for you.

Phat1 AKA Charles at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

“Charles is painting an Omamao bird endemic of Tahiti,” says Martha, “and it is listed as a critically endangered species.” Why do you hear this same story in whatever part of the world you are in today? More importantly, are you doing anything about it?

Phat1 AKA Charles at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Phat1 AKA Charles with help from Lady Diva AKA Jeanine Williams. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

After the mural was finished, Martha says there was a blessing of the mural. Above you can see the minister in the photo above performing the blessing.

Bordalo’s sketch for his installation. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Bordalo shows us the original sketch for his new piece made with recycled trash.

Bordalo II at work. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Bordalo II. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Adnate at work on his mural. Martha tells us that his muse for the mural was a woman whom both he and Martha had photographed in the market. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Adnate. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Adnate & Askew. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Seth at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Returning mural champion Seth made good use of “an odd shaped wall, turning it into the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship which led a flotilla of yachts protesting again French nuclear testing in French Polynesia,” Martha tells us. According to Wikipedia, “Fernando Pereira was a freelance Dutch photographer, of Portuguese origin, who drowned when French intelligence detonated a bomb and sank the Rainbow Warrior, owned by the environmental organization Greenpeace on 10 July 1985.”

Martha notes that Pereira also was a photographer and he was trying to save his equipment at the time that the ship went down. “The mural shows Polynesian girl in her fragile canoe pulling alongside the ship.”

Seth at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Seth. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

NIKO at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

“This guy says he can paint any animal he’s seen out of his head—very impressive!” says Ms. Cooper about NIKO, whose mural shows animals arriving in Tahiti from around the world from the harbor close to where the wall was. “The USA is represented by an alligator with a Miami Dolphins hat on,” she says.

Okuda taking a break. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Okuda at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

MAST at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Mast sketch for his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

MAST was channeling Brooklyn hard in Tahiti, with this shout out to the honeys back home, the subway at Franklin Avenue, and he reconfigured the train lines to reflect the letters of his crew – The Great Escape (TGE).

Mast. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Cranio. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Leon Keer. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

The anomorphic master Leon Keer is pictured here with his wife assisting. Martha says that these figures are “Painting of robots arriving from the harbor.” As usual, Mr. Keers work rather blows your mind when it is completed and you are standing in just the right location.

Leon Keer. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

“Tribal Pursuit” is the name of this wall by Tahitians Jobs and Abuzz, named so after the board game called Trivial Pursuit. “The black lines are the Maquesa’s cross,” Martha says, and “the designs are the contradictions of old and modern traditions from Polynesia such as the ‘head breaker’ a traditional weapon and tiki, the sea animal because they are surrounded by water.” The skull, of course, “represents the atomic tests.”

Charles and Askew partake on traditional dance with a local troupe of female dancers. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Tour Paris 13 : Fluorescent & Towering Show Book

December 13, 2014 Artists

Another book to tell you about today! Remember when BSA took you to Paris that time and we skipped the line and went into all the floors of this soon to be demolished building?

“The numbers are astounding; 105 artists, 9 floors, 36 apartments, 30,000 visitors.

One hour.

That is how much time Street Art enthusiast Spencer Elzey had to himself inside the largest gallery of Street Artists and graffiti artists ever assembled specifically to transform a building for a public show. As he looked out a window to see the snaking lines of Parisians and tourists restlessly waiting to get in, he couldn’t believe his luck to be able to walk through the exhibit by himself and get off some clear shots before the throng hit.”

That is how we described it in November 2013 when Spencer took us on a whirlwind tour of TOUR 13.

Published last month this towering book with the page edges sprayed neon orange was released by Mehdi Ben Cheikh in French and English to commemorate the event, and seeing the installations this way is going to make you wish the place wasn’t destroyed. 500 new photos previously unpublished allows you to see the show as you travel from the cellar to the top floors.

You may wish you had more background on the artists and the context and clearly not all of the artistry is of similar quality but you will be satiated by the images and thankful that they were recorded during their brief duration. Published by Editions Albin Michel, in partnership with the Itinerrance Gallery, this show will continue to soar long after the dust has settled.

Artists included in the Tour Paris 13 project:

108, 2MIL FAMILIA, A1ONE, ADD FUEL, AGL, AGOSTINO IACURCI, AMINE, ALEXÖNE, ARRAIANO, AWER, AZOOZ, BOM.K, BTOY, C215, CEKIS, CELESTE JAVA, CLET, COPE2, CORLEONE, DABRO, DADO, DAN23, DAVID WALKER, DEYAA, EIME, eL SEED, ENTES, ETHOS, ETNIK, FENX, FLIP, GAËL, GILBERT, GUY DENNING, HERBERT BAGLIONE, HOGRE, HOPNN, INDIE, INTI ANSA, INTI CASTRO, JAZ, JB ROCK, JÉRÔME GULON, JIMMY C, JOYS, JULIEN COLOMBIER, KAN, KATRE, KEITH HARING, KRUELLA, LEGZ, LEK, LE CYKLOP, LILIWENN, LOIOLA, LUDO, MAIS MENOS, MAR, MÁRIO BELÉM, MARKO, MARYAM, MATÉO GARCIA, MAZ, MONEYLESS, MOSKO, MP5, MYRE, NANO, NEBAY, NEMI “UHU”, NILKO, ORTICANOODLES, PANTÓNIO, PEETA, PHILIPPE BAUDELOCQUE, RAPTO, REA ONE, RODOLPHE CINTORINO, ROTI, SAILE, SAMBRE, SAMINA, SEAN HART, SÉBASTIEN PRESCHOUX, SENSO, SETH, SHAKA, SHOOF, SHUCK 2, SOWAT, SPAZM, SPETO, STeW, STINKFISH, SWOON, TELLA’S, TINHO, TORE, UNO, URIGINAL, VEXTA, VHILS, and WISIGN

Click HERE to read BSA’s coverage of this project before the building was demolished.

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Kalaouf at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Kalaouf. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Niko & Inkie at work on their murals. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

NIKO at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

NIKO & INKIE. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

SETH at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Raiatea, Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Phat1 AKA Charles at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Phat1 AKA Charles at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Phat1 AKA Charles with help from Lady Diva AKA Jeanine Williams. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Bordalo’s sketch for his installation. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Bordalo II at work. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Bordalo II. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Bordalo II. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Adnate at work on his mural. Martha tells us that his muse for the mural was a woman whom both he and Martha had photographed in the market. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Adnate. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Adnate & Askew. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Seth at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Seth at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Seth. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

NIKO at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Okuda taking a break. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Okuda at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

MAST at work on his mural. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Mast. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Cranio. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Leon Keer. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Leon Keer. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Leon Keer. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Inkie at work on his wall. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Kalouf at work on his wall. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Kalouf left with Marko on the right. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Peeta. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Hoxxoh. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Jobs & Abuzz. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Charles and Askew partake on traditional dance with a local troupe of female dancers. ONO’U Festival 2016. Tahiti. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Tour Paris 13 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Entes . Tour Paris 13 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Inti . Tour Paris 13 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ethos .Tour Paris 13 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Seth .Tour Paris 13 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Moneyless .Tour Paris 13 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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