Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. It’s been snowing and snowing and snowing this month in New York – providing perfect framing for graffiti and street art.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Adrian Wilson, Beer, Claudia Ravaschiere, Dasu, Dos Wallnuts, Eron, Goog, Guild234, Hellbent, Magda Love, Michael Moss, No Sleep, Note, Par, Seo, Serve, Swoon, The Postman Art, and Treeze.
You picked them!
Last week you saw the Top Murals and the Top Videos. Today here are our Top Stories of 2015.
BSA readers told us by your direct comments and online sharing – that you love our coverage of Street Art festivals: 8 of the top 15 postings in ’15 were about them.
The rest of the most popular stories can be described as being about powerful personalities and consequential work on the street that is not simply visually impactful but is backed by a story that runs deeper.
Following are your top 15 postings from the year on BSA and our articles on The Huffington Post along with an excerpt from the original posting.
A Mexican Mural ‘Manifesto,’ Blackened Flags And Censorship (March 04 2015)
Erica il Cane (photo © Fifty24Mex)
“Striking and massive murals by international street artists have been populating the walls of Mexico City for the last five years thanks to the emergence of a global Street Art scene, a rise in mural festivals, and the country’s tradition of institutional support for murals that further a socio-political mission. There hasn’t been much of the latter lately, however, and it is doubtful that a new politically charged mural campaign underway in certain central neighborhoods is likely to receive tax dollars for the paint and ladders.
Without sighting a specific ill to address, the new mural initiative named “Manifesto” is challenging a select group of local and international street artists to express their opinions on weighty and topical matters through murals, “using art as a social tool to propose, reflect and inform.” Among possible topics that might be addressed, the manifesto for “Manifesto” says, are increasing poverty, glorified materialism, the exhausting of natural resources, a fraying social web, and a dysfunctional justice system.”
Malik and ‘Note’ Bring 17 Street Artists To A Swiss Prison (November 04, 2015)
(photo © Malik)
“Initiated by Aarau-based graffiti/street/fine artist Malik in May of 2012, the project eventually corralled 17 street artists, all but one from Switzerland, to enter the confines of the new high security Lenzburg Prison to paint murals on exterior walls, courtyards, hallways, and common areas.
‘I was looking for a new challenge and a new and exciting project where I could show my art,’ says Malik and while the 18 month project originated with his vision of getting a nice wall for himself, quickly the project grew far beyond his expectations to become an educational, sociological meditation on the penal system, the appropriate role of art within it, and our collective humanity.”
The Coney Art Walls: First Three Completed and Summer Begins (May 27, 2015)
Kave (photo © Jaime Rojo)
“Instead of being hunted down for catching a tag or bubble-lettered throw-up, a couple dozen graffiti/street art painters are invited to hit up Coney Island this summer — and since we’ve just marked the unofficial first weekend of summer in New York — we’re bringing you the first three freshly completed pieces.
Part of “Coney Art Walls”, the muralists began taking the train out to this seaside paved paradise that is re-inventing itself once again, this time courtesy of art curator Jeffrey Deitch.”
50 Years From Selma, Jetsonorama and Equality in Brooklyn (June 27, 2015)
Jetsonorama (photo © Jaime Rojo)
“From Selma to Ferguson, Birmingham to Charleston, Jimmie Lee Jackson to Michael Brown, Street Artist Jetsonorama is crossing the country from Arizona to New York and a half-century of America’s struggle with our legacy of racism and injustice.
As marches have continued across the country in cities like Ferguson, Oakland, Baltimore, New York, Dallas and Cleveland in the past year addressing issues such as police brutality and racism, the south is taking down confederate flags on state houses and the US is mourning another mass shooting.
Now as Americans everywhere are pulling out and waving the stars and stripes to celebrate freedom, this new powerful installation on a Brooklyn wall reminds us of what New York poet Emma Lazarus said, ‘Until we are all free, we are none of us free.’ ”
Gender, Caste, And Crochet: OLEK Transforms A Shelter In Delhi (March 25, 2015)
Olek (photo © Street Art India)
” ‘It felt like I gave a birth to an oversize baby without any pain killers. I had to pull the black magic to make it happen. Physically and emotionally drained. Was it worth it? Absolutely YES,’ she types onto her Facebook page to let friends and fans know that she has finished the seven-day marathon of crocheting and directing a full team of volunteers and St+Art Delhi organizers. Triumphant, she stands atop the woman’s shelter, a one story structure of corrugated metal and concrete 40-feet long and 8-feet high, with a fist in the air, a symbol of celebration as well as a show of solidarity with the sisterhood of those who helped her make it and those will seek refuge here when other options have been exhausted.”
A Tidal Wave of Lodz Reborn: ‘Lodz Murals’ Distinguishes a Polish City (October 28, 2015)
Alexis Diaz (photo © Maciej Stempij)
“Now I don’t want to create any new festival, any new brand — just want to keep the name as simple as possible,” he says of Lodz Murals, an ongoing program that functions year round rather than focusing specifically on a short-term festival. With all responsibilities for organizing, promoting, and working with city and private business under one roof, Michał says that his vision is to create the same sort of iconic image of Lodz with murals as Paris with the Eiffel Tower.
“I would like that people on the global scale would think of Lodz as a city with exceptional public art,” he says grandly while acknowledging that public art shines in many other cities as well. “When you are thinking about public art, one of the first places that you will see in your mind’s eye is Lodz. Of course, comparing the mural project to the one of the most important “pearls” of modern architecture is pure overstatement, but I would like to create this type of mechanism, this type of association.”
WALL\THERAPY 2015: Surrealism and the Fantastic (July 29, 2015)
Never Crew (photo © Jaime Rojo)
“We don’t know for sure if it was our current funhouse mirror atmosphere that drove the Wall\Therapy festival in Rochester, NY to choose this years’ themes. It may simply be a way of organizing artists whose work reflects these notions back to us and to illuminate one specific growing trend in street culture and murals.
Surely Magritte, Dali and Ernst would be very pleased by the uptick of modern surrealists and practitioners of the bizarre, fantastical, and dream-like in galleries, in the public sphere, and throughout popular culture in recent years.”
NUART 2015 Roundup: A Laboratory on the Street (September 12, 2015)
“As we mark the halfway point of this decade and see the institutional discussions of Street Art taking form while academics try to place it in the canon of art-making and decide upon the nature of its impact, they do it with the knowledge that gallery shows, museum exhibitions, high-profile auctions, individual collecting, lifestyle marketers, and public festivals of many configurations and aspirations are already embracing its relevance. No one can possibly gauge this story in all of its complexity but some will capture its spirit. Being on the street helps.
One way to get a pulse on the present is to attend shows like Nuart and witness the diverse stratagems that artists are using to engage their audiences and judge if they are successful at realizing their intentions. With a deliberately mixed bag of thinkers, feelers, documentors, aesthetes, and pranksters culled together for your edification, this show stokes the discussions.”
Coney Art Walls: 30 Reasons to Go to Coney Island This Summer (June 24, 2015)
Daze (photo © Jaime Rojo)
“The gates are open to the new public/private art project called “Coney Art Walls,” and today, you can have a look at all 30 or so of the new pieces by a respectable range of artists spanning four decades and a helluva lot of New York street culture history. We’ve been lucky to see a lot of the action as it happened over the last five weeks and the range is impressive. These are not casual, incidental choices of players lacking serious resumes or street/gallery cred, but the average observer or unknowing critic may not recognize it.”
Barcelona: “Open Walls” Mural Festival and Conference 2015 (November 11, 2015)
RocBlackBlock (photo © Fernando Alcalá Losa)
“Barcelona was known as a city at the epicenter of a bustling lively organic street art scene in the mid 2000s. Today that has greatly been cracked down upon by authorities, but the Spanish city now boasts a mural festival called Open Walls, which celebrated its third edition last month with public works spanning a great number of influences and styles. Of course there is still plenty of autonomous, non-comissioned street art to be seen as well.”
Basquiat’s Rarely Seen Notebooks Open At The Brooklyn Museum (April 01, 2015)
“In ‘Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks,’ now running at the Brooklyn Museum until August 23, the genius of his fragmenting logic is revealed as a direct relationship between his private journals and his prolific and personally published aerosol missives on the streets of Manhattan’s Soho and Lower East Side neighborhoods in the late 1970s and 1980s.
These notebooks were for capturing ideas and concepts, preparing them, transmuting them, revising them, pounding them into refrains. In the same way his text (and glyphic) pieces on the street were not necessarily finished products each time; imparted on the run and often in haste, these unpolished missives didn’t require such preciousness.”
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Borås ‘No Limit’ 2015: Graffiti Tags, Murals, Greco-Roman Antiquities (September 17, 2015)
“This is No Limit, the second installation of murals done primarily by street artists in Borås, a pristine and pleasant city about 45 minutes east of Gothenberg. With the leadership of artist Shai Dahan and organizers Stina Hallhagen and Anders Khil the local tourism office works year round to promote this festival and the quality of the pieces are top notch due to the careful choices of international big names and up-and-comers.
In addition to this diversity, the scale is varied with massive walls like those by the Chilean Inti and Poland’s Robert Proch, and more personal-sized installations in surprise locations around town by American illustration artist David Zinn and New Jersey’s sculptural stencilist Joe Iurato.”
Street Art Sancocho: ArteSano Project Brings Dominican Flavor (January 08, 2015)
“It could be the name influencing our perception, but in one way or another it looks like these artists are chosen for their down-to-earth hand hewn approach. Sometimes decorative, sometimes storytelling, there are familiar themes and motifs that play well to their local audience as well as the virtual gawker.
Even with two dozen artists, it isn’t bloated: no logos or product tie-ins or DJs or high flying scissor lifts scaling massive multi-story walls with abstract surrealism, hyper photo-realism or dark pop human/animal/robot hybrids here – yet. Well, we take that back on the surrealism score; Pixel Pancho is here with a brood of chickens bobbing their industrial mesh necks atop fired tile bodices, hunting and pecking their way toward the beach, and Miami artist duo 2alas & Hox created a portrait of a boy with a partial mask overlay that calls to mind cyborgs (and Sten & Lex). But here in the loungey bare-foot tropical DR coastal area, even Pixel Pancho mutes the hues toward sun-bleached pastels, more easily complimenting their surroundings.”
Renaissance Masters, Keith Haring and Ninja Turtles in Brooklyn Streets (July 15, 2015)
Owen Dippie. (photos © Jaime Rojo)
“And so it made sense last week when Dippie skillfully merged imagery spanning five centuries, two continents, and two distinctly different art movements. Call it a measured miracle, a ratherish revelation that Dippie completed a deftly realized mashup of Raphael and Keith Haring, with the Madonna del Granduca holding Haring’s icon-symbol that is variously referred to as ‘Radiant Baby,’ ‘Radiant Child,’ and ‘Radiant Christ.’ ”
YZ and Her ‘Amazone’ Warrior Women On Senegalese Walls (January 14, 2015)
YZ (photo © YZ Yseult)
“French Street Artist YZ Yseult has begun her own campaign to pay tribute to the fierce female fighters of the 19th Century West African country of Dahomey, who are more commonly referred to as Amazons. A startling narrative of female power not often heard today for some, but as YZ is researching her own history as a descendent from slaves, her portraits reflect a personal impetus to tell these stories with a new force. She has named this series of strong warriors on the street ‘Amazone’.”
It’s the ultimate captive audience for your artwork. That wasn’t the original intention for this Swiss prison mural project called 4661m² but it is one of the outcomes – and one of its myriad ironies.
Initiated by Aarau-based graffiti/street/fine artist Malik in May of 2012, the project eventually corralled 17 Street Artists, all but one from Switzerland, to enter the confines of the new high security Lenzburg Prison to paint murals on exterior walls, courtyards, hallways, and common areas.
“I was looking for a new challenge and a new and exciting project where I could show my art,” says Malik and while the 18 month project originated with his vision of getting a nice wall for himself, quickly the project grew far beyond his expectations to become an educational, sociological meditation on the penal system, the appropriate role of art within it, and our collective humanity.
With help from partner artist Claude “Note” Luethi and funding from the “Lenzburg Prison Christmas Fund,” the successful mural program has also led to a short documentary this spring and the brand new release of a handsome tome by the two documenting a cross section of the images and the human experience as told by artists, prisoners, prison employees and even the director.
“The exterior wall is always also an interior wall. How we view it depends on our relative position,” says author and cultural scientist Johannes Binotto, in the forward to 4661m² – Art in Prison. The number is both the name of the project and the the quantity of concrete that the paintings eventually covered. In his examination of crime and punishment and our relationship to it, Binotto brilliantly uses the wall as metaphor from multiple perspectives by way of illuminating the ramifications of being inside or outside of any given wall throughout one’s life.
For graffiti writers and Street Artists, the wall has been destination, a vessel of communication, but the historical examples Binotto examines fairly mutate the wall as obstruction, unifier, protector, divider. The theme continues throughout the well-photographed and documented book with artists and organizers reflecting on, reacting to, their experience and their art practice. One every present irony is that many of these street artists undoubtedly risked arrest for painting on various city walls in their earlier days.
Opening the many doors of the prison to an unsolicited offer by Malik, the Director of the prison, Marcel Ruf, says his knowledge of Street Art and artists was admittedly limited, but he knew the place needed some color. “The corridors and work spaces were judged rather negatively by the majority of the over 7,000 visitors that came to the prison open day in May,” he says in an interview, “with most finding the premises dreary and colorless.”
The book gives ample space to opinions and experiences of the artists in stunning before/after shots of spaces and pieces that you can only see now if are a prisoner or employee. Even here the experiences express a range of perspectives. Most found the atmosphere constricted, oppressive, depressing. Each artist say that they felt a certain responsibility to the audience that they wouldn’t normally have and adjusted their work accordingly because these pieces will be looked upon, in some cases, for years, or the remainder of life.
Artist Daniel Zeltner says, “I thought long and hard about the mark I would like to leave on a prison, and about who would see it, how they would react and interpret it, how they would feel. It is difficult, because the painting would not only be seen by the prison guards, but also by the prisoners – I also wanted to create something I could be proud of. Therefore, it was important to me that I paint something that’s open and leaves room for interpretation.”
Ranging from abstract, figurative, and representational, to collage, illustration, and photo-realistic, the entire collection has something for many tastes, but we learn that the most critical audience was the staff of 180 who not only live with the art but the manage the daily affairs of the people who live in the facility. We learn that staff opinions on certain works are not unanimous but in general the replacement of monotonous grey is regarded as an improvement for the employees – and the new works provide visual signposts for navigating in a sometimes confusing maze of concrete.
One two page spread features the quotes from prisoners who have answered a survey about the project, the art, and the artists. Responses range from dismissive and critical, to suspicious, grateful, and laudatory.
The act of even considering the opinion of convicted criminals is offensive to the more penalizing among us, and this resistance to an art program of any sort is present throughout topics addressed and perhaps those avoided in the contributions here. These prisoners are likely serious offenders given their 23 hour restriction to their cells and opinions about their living conditions are surely contested.
Artist Benjamin Solt talks about briefly getting to know some of the prisoners and then questioning the wisdom of that decision. “I often chatted with them and we discussed the paintings. One of them was very open and approachable, and at some point I asked him why he was there. Just a few moments later I regretted asking.”
The austere modern brutalism of the new prison is heightened by its minimalist technological details of sensors, cameras, phone signal blocking, and iris scanning. Often participants reference disembodied voices within the compound comingling with bird songs and cow bells just outside the perimeter of the compound.
With varying degrees of discomfort and a respect for a sense of mission, the artists describe their art and their emotional and psychological responses to working in the compound. Daniel Zeltner, who worked with David Lucco on a collaborative mural in an exercise yard, describes redoing his piece nearly entirely because he was unsatisfied with the somewhat chaotic energy that he had infused it with.
Onur contemplates his expected audience of primarily seniors when creating his mountain range and remarks that he felt troubled by the continuous surveillance, “I often felt watched. The knowledge that there were cameras everywhere was always at the back of my mind and as I usually work by myself in the studio this situation was quite confusing.”
Chromeo was reminded of his own previous stint in jail for doing illegal graffiti. “I found being locked in extremely difficult. Even though I wasn’t locked in this time, I struggled with the same oppressive feelings.”
For one recreation room, Malik and Note combined their painting efforts to create one continuous visual story that ignored the four planes and gives a view from the rooftops of an imaginary city at night that flows into day and subsequently spans a vast valley and stream. But bucolic scenes and sensibilities notwithstanding, their painting experience met one common description; “Intense.”
“We were surrounded by four solid concrete walls and were working in extreme heat, with continuous yakking and jeering from the inmates locked in the cells above us and all of that for four weeks, eight hours a day locked in the same room,” say the pair.
Among the descriptions of the exigencies of the prison and project, there are occasional sparks of institutional levity. Bruno Graber, Chief Director, shares his observations of the project and working with the artists and he inadvertently stumbles on a truism. “Seeing the artists at work was exciting. They seem to be night owls, early mornings were not really their thing.”
Ultimately this is a group show new works by 17 artists, but you will not be free to see them, even though you are free. The many ironies are summed up in one of Binotto’s recollections.
“The knowledge that the locked spaces within the prison are blocked from our collective gaze challenges our typical differentiation between captivity and freedom. This is like the joke where the mathematician solves the task of fencing in a herd of sheep not by herding the animals together but rather by putting up the small fence around himself and then declaring ‘I define myself to be on the outside.’”
In fact 4661m² plays with the definitions of internal and external space so well that it throws both into question. You may reassess the role of artists, particularly street artists, in the dialogue they bring to public space as we rush from from one task to another, sometimes just keeping our heads above water.
“I always took a deep breath as I exited through the revolving door,” says Note, “I was free again – at least until what felt like five seconds later, when my iPhone began informing me of all the obligations I’d failed to meet.”
The project 4661m² – Art in Prison was curated by Malik and Claude “Note” Luethi, and involved artists including: Malik, Note, Onur, Chromeo, Shark, Ata Bozaci, Robert Proch, Nevercrew, Mizzo, Daniel Zeltner, David Monllor, Benjamin Solt, Lain, Ti, and Sarah Parsons.
© 2016 Niggli, imprint of bnb media gmbh, Zurich
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This article is also published in The Huffington Post
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