A constant and influential voice on the contemporary urban art scene for one decade VNA (Very Nearly Almost) has been charting the magnificently murky waters of graffiti and Street Art and many of its most notable discontents. London based with global reach, their story-driven editing and writing has an evergreen quality with a keen eye toward touchstone detail.
VNA Magazine. Issue 34. Cover: Martha Cooper’s photo of Keith Haring painting on the Houston Wall.
Together with carefully selected photography, probing interviews and pithy witticism, VNA imparts an insight about this fluid global phenomenon that few know how to adequately represent. Freights, train writers, tattoo, skater culture, photography, tagging, even the muralists – the wingspan is there. Knowing what kind of work, imagination and expertise goes into producing a serialized print publication, especially in this age of digital, we have always appreciated the magazine and the folks who care enough to create it.
VNA Magazine. Issue 34. Martha Cooper profile.
That’s why we’re especially proud that the BSA Instagram account is spread across two pages of the current issue #34 of VNA. A daily-curated collection, all our photos on BKStreetArt are from Jaime Rojo, not appropriated from other sources and all our followers are organically grown, so the roots are deep and strong. An artist behind the camera, Rojo doesn’t just document the artwork of others, but has his eye on the environment that engenders, cavorts with, frames the so-called “scene”. With 100K photos now under his belt, we think Rojo is starting to get the hang of this thing.
And really, if there was ever a VNA issue to be included in, this is the one! With three of the defining people who have shaped and will shape your experience of graffiti and Street Art – Martha Cooper, Yasha Young, and Selina Miles – all featured, these combined self-made talents pack a punch that spans the last 50 and the next 50 years with no problem at all.
VNA Magazine. Issue 34. Martha Cooper’s shot of Dondi painting trains on the yards.
Cooper’s early photographic documentation of a nascent graffiti scene in NYC is unquestioned (check the cover photo of Keith Haring) and her globe-trotting capturing of Street Art and artistic process is in effect to this very minute when she is in Tahiti for the O’nou Festival.
Once private gallery owner and art dealer and now the founding director of Urban Nation, Yasha Young is an expansive visionary who is daring to jumpstart an audacious project that creates a Berlin museum housing a definitive collection of Urban Contemporary Art intended to exist long after doors open in 2017.
VNA Magazine. Issue 34. BSA Instagram Spotlight with all photos taken by Jaime Rojo around the world.
The 20-something Australian film maker Selina Miles has already re-defined visual storytelling of the graffiti and Street Art scene in only five short years of work in a way that has made her a rising star. We have every confidence that her core strengths and vision are yet to be fully explored and that she will blast open new pathways ahead, so be prepared!
To be included in the mix with these folks and Invader, Seen, Fafi, James Jean, Kai & Sunny, Ghostpatrol, Dave White, Todd Francis, Usugrow, and a series of London photographers in VNA is totally an honor and we sincerely thank Roland Henry for inviting us.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. “Street Food” from Mathieu Roquigny
2. Moses & Taps™ in Moscow 3. Panmela Castro in NYC “Women’s Rights are Human Rights”
4. Detroit: Murals In The Market. By Selina Miles
5. Murals In The Market 2016 Brings 40+ New Murals To Detroit. By Selina Miles
BSA Special Feature: “Street Food” from Mathieu Roquigny
Some simple stencil activism well placed can be very effective. Vulgar, absurd, playful. Call it what you want, but Mathieu Roquigny is the first one we have seen do it. Do not view during your morning donut and coffee.
Moses & Taps™ in Moscow
Famed train writers and fine artists in the gallery, Moses & Taps got a gig with a paint manufacturer and made a short 50 second overview of three walls they recently did in Moscow.
Panmela Castro in NYC “Women’s Rights are Human Rights”
With her lyrical touch and the softest of soundtracks, Panmaela Castro makes New York look like a welcoming tropical oasis. Also we thank her for the reminder that women’s rights are human rights, because it is evident that not everyone knows this.
Detroit: Murals In The Market. By Selina Miles
We had the pleasure of meeting the spectacular video storyteller Selina Miles in Detroit. She only confirmed to us that the spirit and intellect and talent are all there and so much more is in store from this fine person. Here are a couple of the short videos she made with the 1xRun team while in the Motor City.
Dozens Of Murals Take Shape In Eastern Market For Murals In The Market 2016. By Selina Miles
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.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Portrait of an Artist Guido Van Helten
2. Who’s Your Daddy?
3. Shida Bombing – Hong Kong . Seoul . Tokyo
4. Moses & Taps™ EUROPA™ From The Grifters
BSA Special Feature: Portrait of an Artist Guido Van Helten
“First when you say ‘Can I do a Street Art piece?’, the answer is no,” says Guido van Helten, known, among other things, as an Australian Street Artist.
“I see it as some sort of a finale for me,” he says as he describes the years of experience as a preparation to paint this ship in only two days – a restriction placed on him by nature of the ship being an active courier during the week and he is only granted access to it during the weekend.
“I’m trying to create a sense of identity that relates to all of the people who live in a place,” he says while the camera shows him painting on a dock in near darkness. People always gravitate to capturing well known people but I’m not trying to capture that. It’s got to be a painting where people are relating in their own way. They make their own story up.”
Director Selina Miles does the capturing here in a town named Akureyri on the north coast of Iceland, and as usual she captures something more than what the eye sees.
Kolly Gallery / Who’s Your Daddy?
“In September 2015 the Kolly Gallery initiated a series of exhibitions, held in temporary locations, that are intended to bring attention to urban art movement. Temptingly entitled “Who’s Your Daddy?” each of these shows presents new works from a selection of cutting-edge international artists coming from a graffiti background. For its first edition in New York City, the gallery is pleased to exhibit the new paintings and sculptures of Crash, SupaKitch, Grotesk and Flying Förtress.”
Shida Bombing – Hong Kong . Seoul . Tokyo
Berlin-based Mik Shida is not your typical bomber, especially when using a very wide brush in a calligraphic manner to create figurative and patterned abstract works. Here you travel with him to dingy spots in a guerilla fashion with a sharply skipping glitch soundtrack and murky lighting, which rather adds to the atmospheric primitivism effect of his work as he skips through Hong Kong, Seoul, and Tokyo.
Moses & Taps™ EUROPA™ From The Grifters
Opening tonight Kolly Gallery in Zurich, graffiti writers turning conceptual artists MOSES & TAPS™ re-work the typical nomenclature of illegal/legal while asserting their right to command the elements. If successful, they will have caused you to ask “who owns public space” and to question how many inroads into your consciousness you have allowed advertising, media and branding to go. Also, art.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. The Restoration of Blu / Street Art Banksy & Co
2. Fintan Magee in Puerto Rico for Santurce Es Ley by Tost Films
3. HK Walls 2016
4. ONO’U 2015 by Selina Miles
5. DAN WITZ: “BREATHING ROOM” Kickstarter
BSA Special Feature: The Restoration of Blu for “Street Art Banksy & Co”
Part II of a behind the scenes look by Good Guy Boris at the controversial show in Bologna that features art works by BLU and others that were originally not intended to appear in a museum, like most things in museums.
Here we learn about less sexy topics like copyright law and one lawyers interpretation of the realistic expectations of artists when painting illegally and legally as it applies to copyright in Italy and France. We also receive a quick education about traditional and modern techniques for the restoration of works for archival purposes, which is why people will be looking at these things long after you and we are gone.
Fintan Magee in Puerto Rico for Santurce Es Ley by Tost Films
You may recall our article on this piece in February with Mr. Magee:
A quick wrap of Hong Kong Walls 2016, which included a rather diverse group of artists including Above, Alana Tsui, Caratoes, Clogtwo, Colasa, DILK, Dmojo, Egg Fiasco, Essahqinoirs, Exld, Faust, Gas, Gan, Gr1, Keflione, Kenji Chai, KristopherH, Mooncasket, Mysterious Al, Okudart, Paola Delfin, Parent’s Parents, Peeta, Phron, Roids, Ryck, Satr, Sars, Senk, Stern Rockwell, Suiko, Vhils, Volre, Whyyy, and Zids.
ONO’U 2015 by Selina Miles
A round up of last years’ ONO’U festival that combines murals by Street Artists and graffiti writers – and injects an element of competition judged by people with credible familiarity and knowledge. More importantly, the artists are well cared for, there is a sense of cultural exchange, and the public is left with artworks that are significant or meaningful to them. ONO’U has the stage at the moment when it comes to public/commercial festivals in the Street Art realm.
DAN WITZ: “BREATHING ROOM”
“After the terror attacks in Europe this past year, it became necessary to abandon the dark imagery of my past work and take a new approach,” says veteran Street Artist Dan Witz as he describes the dozen or so pieces he plans to install in London this summer. Please consider supporting his Kickstarter!
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Carlos Cruz-Diez & Spectra by Selina Miles
2. Djalouz – Petites Chroniques Urbaine
3. Between The Lines With RISK
4. Nychos x Traktor Wien
BSA Special Feature: Carlos Cruz-Diaz & Spectra by Selina Miles
Optical art, public experimentation, scientific research, kinetic engineering have all contributed to the half century of study by artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. He’s “been doing street art longer than most people have been alive,” says the narrator.
Now 92, based in Panama, he continues to work in-studio with geometric abstraction putting to the test color and its measuring its effects on us and our built environment. A current generation of street artists are invited in studio to work with their hands, to conceptualize visually and oversee production of their work in material and form. The initial contemplation evolves into a way of thinking and a way of imagining the work and the artists place in relation to public space that transcends image making and creates a different dialogue.
Hearing Mr. Diez compare this moment of convergence in technology, communications, and creativity to the 1960s is undoubtedly an inspiring spark to the generation that will continue forward. Now that the artists have grasped the material world, they delve into the virtual. Like many artists and creators who are working with the newest tools of virtual reality, this collection of street artists are still experimenting – all the time realizing how appreciation is rooted in the perceptual abilities rather than the materiality. One of the speakers talks about being at the starting line, but in many ways it is clear that race already has already begun.
Djalouz – Petites Chroniques Urbaine
Parisian graphic designer turned graffiti artist Djalouz has a unique volumetric approach to his wildstyle shards that envelope the city’s remaining phonebooths. He explains how he fell in love with a medium of expression that he is committed to while he’s sketching out a Winnie the Pooh character. Stay a little longer and see the wildness of his expressive 3D forms that crawl across every surface, including the ground.
Between The Lines With RISK
Risk talks about his evolution from a kid in New Orleans sketching in his notebook at school to getting up with a crew in LA, painting all over public space and property to gain a higher profile and retain the thrill of hit-and-run, and some highlights of his professional career. In route from illegal to legal he developed a reverence for color, form, and technical experimentation and aspirations for museum quality work and large scale public sculpture. Just don’t tag his stuff please.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. BSA Special Feature: Sofles / Wayfarer by Selina Miles 2. Loving Vincent: Trailer 3.“The Coward – Adieu” from the Julien Brothers
BSA Special Feature: Sofles / Wayfarer by Selina Miles
Selina Miles has just directed an epic excursion through the pleasant looking Collingwood and Fitroy areas of Melbourne and the graffiti culture there. The prolific and talented writer Sofles rides and runs center screen on this guided tour of his aerosol stomping ground and this (nearly) one continuous shot drone film is a revelation. Again Miles pushes the documentation category forward, going beyond merely recording toward capturing, creating a sense of drama, certainly poetry.
Omar Musa grabs you with his words before you even know where you are and holds your heart tethered to a string and pulling you along these streets and alleys and back lots. Many times this piece is soaring in its singularity and its sense of collaboration.
Loving Vincent: Trailer
Can you imagine your favorite Van Gogh’s coming to life? They are calling this the first fully painted feature film in the world. (and the producers are still looking for talent: http://join.lovingvincent.com/)
Nicolas Jullien and his brother Jean animation for International Women’s Day.
A simple captivating animation counting through the clock of life that wordlessly communicates greater truths than you are expecting.
Every Friday you can stop by here to see a handful of videos that are directly/tangentially related to Street Art. The criterion for selection is admittedly loose so we’ll just say that BSA Film Friday is a platform for inspiration, expression, examination. Some people use video to write an exhaustive treatise, a thorough examination bolstering Street Arts’ rightful place in the canon of public arts. Others write a few verses of a poem with video. We give extra points for telling a story in a new way.
Here we collect 15 that resonated with BSA readers in 2015, along with some quotes from the original posting to show you what we were thinking. Our sincere thanks to the hundreds of videographers who work so hard and with so much passion to tell their story with this medium. We have such admiration for you and your talent.
“Narcelio Grud and “Chaupixo” brings us back into the inventive mind of this experimenter – now hand pumping a slurry of colored concrete over a stencil pattern. The results are solid!”
Gladys Hulot, AKA Hyrtis Animates David Bowie “Life in Mars”
“BSA readers will dig this animation of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” Gladys Hulot, also known as Hyrtis, brings Bowie to slink through the cracks and around the concrete underground, dripping with piercing drama, and plenty of distinctive style. The voice here is stunningly replaced with a musical saw, giving the chameleon just one more layer to his multiple identities. Not precisely street art, but Bowie’s ties to the street are undisputed.”
“This is almost a year old but it is also sort of timeless when you see how Shepard Fairey’s continous re-evolving of his philosophies about art and its place in our lives has come to such cogent arguments. It’s a short film, a genuine distillation of the larger themes that we have seen at work in the life and the career and public person.
Shot by a guy whose primary focus up until this point was nearly exclusively about skaters and skate culture, Brett Novak says he was pleasantly surprised to learn that Fairey was likeable and had a lot of good information to impart. “I was not aware at how incredibly inspiring Shepard would turn out to be.”
“Slab City is sometimes billed as an isolated desolated off-the-grid sort of place in California so it was an adventure for Christina Angelina and Ease One discovered the remains of this abandoned water tank and transformed it into a circular mural. They call it The Kinetoscope.”
“It’s all about Joe! While you were looking for a brunch spot or a beard wax or simply at your navel, Joe took an opportunity to connect artists with walls and did more for the “scene” in Bushwick than an L Train full of pilgrims ever could. He cleared the way for a slew of local and international artists and writers looking for an opportunity to exercise their creative speech and courted the press with his local native personal story so often that you can imagine a Netflix series will be next.”
Roma Street Art Tribes as Captured by Dioniso Punk
“Disorderly, discordant, and richly chaotic, these two videos are centered around the Italian street art paintings and artists whom you will recognize from our earlier postings on community/gallery organized urban art programming – but within the context of historical art publicly displayed, peoples movements, patronage, fascism, the classics.
Dioniso Punk allows everyone to talk – neighbors, artists, organizers, curators, public philosophers, elected officials, psychologists, sociologists, entrepreneurs, posers, professors, historians, students, an opera singer, the petite bourgeoisie, international visitors and hapless puzzled opinionated locals.”
“The ship Mara Hope, stranded for 30 years on Iracema Beach alongside the Brazilian city of Fortaleza, received a benediction of more color in July thanks to Street Art interventionist and experimenter Narcelio Grud. A mistake in 1985, the ship has become a monument over time, a symbol of the history of the fishing industry, and after so many years a symbol of personal history for people who have grown up with it.”
“A nice homemade video this week by New Zealand painter Owen Dippie’s talented wife Erin, who documented his trip to New York and LA. Without the hype this gives you an idea what it is like to be a tourist here, and it is good to see the experience through the eyes of a loving partner.”
“We debuted this video by Priest Fontaine live for the Brooklyn Museum audience with Faile and actual chills went up people’s spines. No lie. Now you can see it too here online Capturing the current Times Square as county fair with mountains of screens flashing images around the Selfie Stick Forest, all corporate creepy and still sleezey – Fontaine evokes the magic that Faile is, as well as the pure industry that it takes to make their art work. Also good to remember that it was a hot and humid overnight installation that started at 8pm and ended around 10 the following morning.”
Your Tour Through Dismaland with Butterfly and Lars Pederson
“The views are sadly hilarious, pure sarcasm and commentary on issues and behaviors. If Street Art is meant sometimes to hold a mirror to us as we pass by, this is a genuine funhouse of mirrors at every turn. Of course, this isn’t Street Art – its site-specific contemporary art – and many of the artists are street artists, but not all. Butterfly and Pederson discuss the installations as they encounter them and the viewer feels at though they have gotten a true sense of the wonderful world of Dismal.”
Ugangprosjektet 2015 in Drammen, Norway. A Film by Selina Miles
“UGANG2015 in Drammen, Norway had two weeks of murals from Street Artists and graffiti writers in late August. A relatively new event curated by local graffiti artist Eric Ness Christiansen (Eazy), the program is already slamming. A small town of 70,000 about 40 minutes from Oslo, they know how to take care of details, including inviting the inimitable Selina Miles to come and shoot it. Any questions?”
Brandalism Takes Over Bus Stops to Counter Cop21 Misinformation
“Here is a brief intro video about Brandalism’s answer to UN COP21 – and the first of what will surely be more videos about this massive effort by 82 Artists from 19 different countries to take back public space and the public dialogue about climate change from those who are skillfully employing misinformation and bending laws to enable them to continue making money at all costs.”
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
