Happy Holidays! We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA readers, friends, and family for all of your support in 2022. We have selected some of our favorite shots by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and we’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
When the sun hits the city’s skyline and bathes it in shades of red and gold, you are suddenly lifted a foot off the ground, almost levitating in its hypnotic trance. If you are lucky to be in a highrise gazing at the crown of the Chrysler Building at that moment, you are lifted toward someplace more heavenly.
Happy Holidays! We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA readers, friends, and family for all of your support in 2022. We have selected some of our favorite shots by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and we’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
“Women and children first” is an axiom used to infer we are chivalrous, caring, and considerate. When disaster strikes, as in a capsizing ship, we imagine men helping women and children to the available lifeboats.
When we look at the disbelief and despair depicted in this mural by Berlin’s DEVITA, we think of the fact that, with little exception, in actual terms, women and children are usually the first to suffer in man-made and natural disasters and that suffering is profound and systemic.
This spring, a series of murals made for the “Equality Jam” in a Berlin park impressed us and we think of them as we end the year. Organized by Emily Strange 202 and Graffiti Lobby Berlin, the 30 or so murals employed many styles of painting to illustrate how very far away we are in terms of human rights and gender equality in global societies.
Let’s recommit ourselves to these goals in the new year.
Happy Holidays! We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA readers, friends, and family for all of your support in 2022. We have selected some of our favorite shots by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and we’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
New York has a number of holy spots for street culture, and none of them should ever be regarded as permanent. Here the bubble tags pile up, levitating over the skaters who bring an energy of competition, camaraderie, constant movement, and shifting scales of athletic mastery.
They say that all the legends and masters eventually end up here at the Chinatown Skatepark directly under the roaring Manhattan Bridge. Whatever pipe you are hitting, there are cheap dumplings around the corner to fortify more tricks for hours.
Call it an altar, call it a hallowed hall; when you swerve into a place like this, you will be changed.
Happy Holidays! We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA readers, friends, and family for all of your support in 2022. We have selected some of our favorite shots by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and we’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
Not exactly a Christmas tree, but these agave plants were as exuberant and festive as you can imagine this May at the impressively designed former prison in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Now converted into the Centro de las Artes, the grounds and architecture of this severely geometric compound are centered around a panopticon that reminds you of its former us. Fortunately, its function today is dedicated to the preservation of Mexican history, modern art, and design – and starkly sharp external groundwork like this.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2022. We have selected some of our favorite shots by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and we’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
So we begin with a witty take on the similarities between the US depression of a hundred years ago and the startling similarities forecast for it shortly. It’s good to remember that we’ve been through this before – or at least our grandparents did.
It’s that time of the year again! Our 12th “Hot List” of books – a best-of collection that is highly personal and unscientific and sure to provide you with ideas.
Our interests and network continued to spread far afield this year, and we chose a cross-section of books that are well worth your time – whether it’s the stories they tell or the quality of the stock or the revelation of seeing images previously unseen except by a handful of people. We have political, personal, and professional takes on this beautiful street art scene, as well as a careful instruction book on how to make your own
So here is a short list from 2022 that you may enjoy as well – just in case you would like to give them as gifts to family, friends, or even to yourself.
STRAAT: Quote from the Streets. Lannoo Publishers.
From BSA:
In a space massive enough for a Dutch sea vessel, the Street Art Museum of Amsterdam (STRAAT) has one of the largest collections of today’s mural stars anywhere. During its official maiden voyage, curious street art/graffiti/contemporary art fans look to see if this ship is seaworthy. The brainchild of former graffiti writer, curator, and publisher Peter Ernst Coolen in the early 2010s, the D.N.A. of the museum is rooted in his forward vision as much as the ideal waterfront warehouse that showcases close to 200 international artists.
The human-built city has at times been called a jungle, but the concrete and steel environment flatters itself if it really thinks so. The intelligence and beauty present in the natural plant world far outstrips our modern cityscape, centuries after its origination. At least a few artists have been bringing it back to us in murals over the last few years, introducing a calm, lyrical serenity that dives way beneath the conscious, touching our roots.
The young Italian painter Fabio Petani has been reintroducing a natural agenda to cities across Europe for less than a decade – in a way that only a scientist, botanist, and naturalist with a design sensibility could. What is genuinely original is his subtle re-interpretation of the formal conventions of botany, introducing them to a modern urban audience without lecturing – and rising far beyond purely
Fabio Petani “Spagyria Urbana”. Torino, Italy. 2021. Texts by Alessandra Loale. Layout by Livio Ninni with translation by Mauro Italianodecorative presentations.
An updated version of his initial “Stay Melty” collection a half dozen years ago, street artist Buff Monster expands and shares with you more of his studio production, paintings, sculptures, murals, and ever-growing industry of collectibles in this photo book, a candy-coated volume of eccentricities that capture this moment in an artist’s evolution.
Carlo McCormick’s original text perseveres here as well, most possibly because it still captures so much of the dedicated madness that is Buff, afloat upon the detritus that demarcates our late capitalism era in dirty old New York. McCormick sagely comments on Buff’s take on “a realm of magical thinking in a contemporary visual culture where a few rare artists like Buff Monster can invoke alternate realities as palpably believable and emotionally transformative.”
Poet, urban author, photographer, and longtime NYC messenger Kurt Boone was there too, camera in hand and ready to record the action of the artists getting up on walls and meeting the public. Kurt throws himself into the scene and knows how to navigate while people are enjoying the atmosphere of creativity all around. With his knowledge of the street capturing graffiti, urban cycling, street photography, skateboarding, and busking, you know that his shots are on point.
Instead of uploading everything to a social media platform, Boone asked his friend Anthony Firetto to help lay out his photos to create a book. This is a genuine work of the heart – a self-published hefty book that captures a moment in time, the various players and styles, and a flashpoint in the development of Jersey City as it continues to change.
The political caricature is a treasured form of public discourse that still holds as much power as it did when we relied on the printing press. Able to express sentiment and opinion without uttering a syllable, the artist can sway the direction of conversation with skill, insight, and humor. Artist Robbie Conal has built a career from visually roasting the most sebaceous of our various leaders in the last few decades, often bringing his posters to the street and installing them in advertisers’ wildposting manner.
With the briefest of texts, slogans, or twisted nicknames, he reveals the underbelly as a face, dropping expectations into the sewer. If it were as simple as a political party, one might try to dismiss his work as only partisan. But Conal’s work functions more as an ex-ray, and frequently the resulting scan finds cancer.
ROBBIE CONAL / STREETWISE. 35 YEARS OF POLITICALLY CHARGED GUERRILLA ART. By G. James Daichendt. With a foreword by Shepard Fairey. Published by Schiffer Publishing LTD. Atglen, PA
Page after page of golden NYC hits from the Martha Cooper archive; this new hardcover tome expands the galaxy for fans and academics of that amber-soaked period when it seemed like New York was leading a Spray Nation of graffiti for cities across the country. Known for her ability to capture graffiti writers’ work in its original urban context, Ms. Cooper once again proves that her reputation as the documentarian of an underground/overground aesthetics scene is no joke.
With an academics’ respect for the work, the practice, and the practitioners, Cooper recorded volumes of images methodically for history – and your appreciation. With the vibrant and sometimes vicious city framing their pieces, an uncounted legion of aerosol-wielding street players raced city-wide at top speed, ducking cops and cavorting with a confident abandon in the rusted and screeching steel cityscape. By capturing these scenes without unnecessary editorializing, Cooper gives you access to the organically chaotic graffiti subculture on the move at that moment – directly through her unflinching eyes.
Martha Cooper: Spray Nation. Signed Limited Edtion Box Set is published by Beyond The Streets. With a foreword by Roger Gastman and essays by Steven P. Harrington, Miss Rosen, Jayson Edlin, and Brian Wallis.
One of the exciting book releases this fall drops today in stores across the country – which is appropriate with a name like Spray Nation.
The centerpiece of the complete boxed set released this spring, this thick brick of graffiti tricks will end up on as many shelves as Subway Art; the book of Genesis that prepared everyone for the global scene of graffiti and street art that would unveil itself for decades afterward. See our review from earlier in the year, and sample some of the stunning spreads here, along with quotes by the book’s essay writers, Roger Gastman, Steven P. Harrington, Miss Rosen, Jayson Edlin, and Brian Wallis.
Martha Cooper. SPRAY NATION 1980s Graffiti Photographs. Edited by Roger Gastman. Prestel. Germany, 2022.
Robert Proch: Sketches 2003-2018
From BSA:
“ROBERT PROCH – SKETCHES” : a collection of all the preserved drawings and sketches created by the artist in the years 2003-2018.
We had the opportunity to hang around with artist Robert Proch in 2015 at the No Limit festival in Boras, Sweden. Unassuming and bright, the artist was creating a painting on a massive wall that seemed to us to be insurmountable. He excitedly and with great ease jumped on the cherry picker and dove into the explosion he had sketched – pouring color and gesture into his futurist composition, bending and twisting the axis, capturing the flying energy and elements that appeared to jump off toward the viewer.
Later at dinner in a private home, it was a pleasure to speak with him. A warm, polite, and thoughtful guy – you would not necessarily know that his internal art view was so expansive, except to see his darting eyes perhaps, which didn’t appear to miss anything.
Robert Proch. “Sketches 2003-2018”. Robert Proch Foundation
You hope for it, but nothing is guaranteed. Transitioning from being an artist with a respected, lauded practice of graffiti/street art to a booming professional career on canvas is not a clearly defined route. Although many have tried, are trying right now.
What does it take, you ask? A potent mix of talent, luck, fortitude, applied effort, guts, and a willingness to change one’s approach if necessary, as necessary. In our experience, the last item proves to be the most challenging.
Yo, but Mad C is mad talented.
She’s made it a dedication to studying and learning the craft, fine-tuning the skills, practicing, perfecting, and persevering. All of those qualities will give you a great measure of personal satisfaction even when it doesn’t land you a big bank balance. In the case of MadC, internalizing the practices and codes of graffiti that originated with the 1960s/70s graffiti writers was core – imprinted her creative DNA forever – even though her first attempt to write was not until 1995 in Germany.
Color-blocked basketball courts appreciated from a plane, cheerful abstract murals for restaurants, hotels, and cafes, and massive wood collages comprised of assembled pieces that are each finished before joining. What do these expressions of artist Scott Albrecht have to do with one another? If you study the patterns, in time, you will see.
A handsome cloth-covered hardcopy of works by the Gowanus, Brooklyn-based public/studio artist presents a selection of works from 2017-21 that have a rational color theory, smoothly dynamic geometries, and a soothing certitude in their complexity. Spotlighting public art projects, studio processes, exhibitions in New York and LA, and his residency at Hyland Mather’s place in Portugal, the collection is refined yet human.
The Paris-based stencil artist C215 learned his skills in the street and in the studio beginning in the mid-2000s after being influenced by the burgeoning practice in the street art scene of Barcelona and recognizing the practitioners in his home in Paris. Within a few short years, he was watching the evolution of all his peers – and even curating their work into shows. You can see many styles and techniques by surveying the field, and you’ll decide whose work is a cut above.
“The book that you are holding in your hands is, therefore, a manual, an inventory of techniques to be appropriated in order to get yourself started in the art or to help you develop stenciling’s potential. Stencils have no limits and can be adapted to all styles,” says the author in his introduction.
C215 – The Stencil Graffiti Manual. Schiffer Publishing 2022
A new book here features six years of selected works from a Polish graffiti writer, muralist, and professor of art and painting at a secondary school in his hometown of Olsztyn, Poland. He reckons that his life is one of ‘Planned Freestyle,’ meaning that having structure imposed upon him is very helpful in focusing his creative mind. You may quickly appreciate this characterization if you know any artists.
The collection of selected works here by Bartek Swiatecki is as luminous and optically rewarding to the viewer as they are opaque to the mind and stirring to the heart. With prolific and gently evolving abstractions in movement, you can see an artist at work, at play, and at his personal best – topping his previous work. The grandson of another painter and professor (of philology), Miroslaw Swiatecki, and the nephew of a famous painter and animator, Marek Swiatecki, perhaps it was only a matter of time before this 90s graffiti writer moved into more formal practices on canvas and walls.
As we prepare to celebrate 15 years of daily publishing stories and insights about street artists from around the world here on BSA, you’ll know that there are some whose work has merited hours of writing and photography much more than others – perhaps because we first knew her work here in our neighborhood of Brooklyn long before we began this site. Following her through almost every iteration and project, we’ve interviewed her on many stages and in her studio as she continues to unfold, self-examine, recognize the damage, heal herself, give to others, and create on the street, in the studio, gallery, museum, and now on screen.
For her second bound monogram, Caledonia Curry, AKA Swoon, reviews her path as a collection of psychological and emotional journeys, or perhaps one all-encompassing voyage with concurrents and tributaries running alongside and underneath. Whether she is showing you her early work on the streets here or in Italy at a festival called FAME, her Konbit Shelter days, her Braddock Project with the church in Pennsylvania, her Perly’s Beauty Shop, her epic installations at Jeffrey Deitch, LA MOCA in Los Angeles, ICA in Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, or DIA in Detroit, we’ve reported to you on them all – so you have an idea where this new book The Red Skein will take you. It is great to see the memories and the people all pulled together here cohesively and to understand the skeins that all weave together loosely and tightly.
SWOON: The Red Skein. DRAGO Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2022
Infusing meaning into numbers is one way to identify benchmarks, recognizing that time takes us forward regardless of our intentions. For street artist Space Invader, the act of recording and cataloging his two-decade Space Invaders project “is very much an ongoing meta-work, constantly expanding and transforming.”
Marking that passage of time and his seemingly indefatigable dedication to it around the world, the artist releases “4000”, his new book – and accompanying exhibition – that celebrates the completion of 4,000 installed mosaics.
So committed he has been to installing his work on the street since beginning at the end of the previous century, he now says his ‘invasions’ are more than an organized string of occurrences across the urban face of our cities in multiple continents. “More than just a simple artistic practice, my Space Invaders project has been a huge part of my life for over twenty years,” he says. “Some might even call it a lifestyle.”
Invader is pleased to have his first Parisian solo show since 2011 at Over The Influence Gallery. Opening this past weekend, the show runs until January 22, 2023 – and because of the popularity of this enigmatic street artist, you’ll need to book a ticket to see it.
True fans of his art will want to find the works they are familiar with in their city, pawing through the pages to learn its corresponding number, which Invader has devotedly recorded during his two decades of invasions. 4,000 mosaics across five continents is ambitious enough, but it is astounding to think that the artist also created meticulous documentation from 1998-2021 – resulting in what is, in his own words, “a true encyclopedia.”
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. We begin with a series of shots from an outdoor exhibition on Governors Island right now. Timely, political, educational, and powerful; “Eyes on Iran” is an excellent opportunity to contemplate the values we say that we honor and are willing to fight for. It is also an opportunity for Iranians in New York to speak up regarding the ongoing protests in their home country to clarify what the issues are.
On a cold but sunny December day, it is also gratifying to see such visual eloquence in the public space. From the description: “Amplifying the critical movement of Woman, Life, Freedom, the exhibition ‘Eyes on Iran’ seeks to hold the world’s gaze on the unfolding revolution and human rights abuses in Iran, while continuing to demand effective action. With the installation facing the United Nations, the location of the installation calls for direct accountability required from the U.N and their respective global leaders.”
Artists include Sheida Soleimani, Aphrodite Désirée Navab, Z, Icy and Sot, Shirin Neshat, Mahvash Mostala, Sepideh Mehraban, Shirin Towfiq, JR, and conceptual artist and co-founder of For Freedoms Hank Willis Thomas. We share a few of them here with you.
And following those images we give you a few others from our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Faile, Glare, Short, Bumer, Randy, and Sidk.
Shirin Neshat. A stark black and white photograph of the artist’s eye inscribed with farsi calligraphy with an excerpt from the Iranian female poet Forugh Farrokhzad’s poem “I Pity the Garden”.
Icy and Sot created “Bricks of Revolution” to “represent the strength of the activists who are currently risking their lives, inside and outside prisons, to fight oppression. This installation is an homage to political prisoners and all those paving the way to revolution in Iran.”
Aphrodite Desiree Navab’s installation is appropriately timed with the Winter Solstice. On this night, Shab-e-Yalda, meaning “Night of Birth” in Farsi, Iranian girls tie colorful ribbons to trees, making wishes. As an Iranian-born, NYC-based artist and activist protesting in solidarity with Iranian women, my one wish is for women to live life in freedom. The bandanas are the colors of the Iranian flag -green, white, and red. However, they do not have symbols of either theocracy or monarchy at their center, but instead have one word in Farsi: meaning woman.
As we prepare to celebrate 15 years of daily publishing stories and insights about street artists from around the world here on BSA, you’ll know that there are some whose work has merited hours of writing and photography much more than others – perhaps because we first knew her work here in our neighborhood of Brooklyn long before we began this site. Following her through almost every iteration and project, we’ve interviewed her on many stages and in her studio as she continues to unfold, self-examine, recognize the damage, heal herself, give to others, and create on the street, in the studio, gallery, museum, and now on screen.
SWOON: The Red Skein. DRAGO Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2022
For her second bound monograph, Caledonia Curry, AKA Swoon, reviews her path as a collection of psychological and emotional journeys, perhaps one all-encompassing voyage with concurrents and tributaries running alongside and underneath. Whether she is showing you her early work on the streets here or in Italy at a festival called FAME, her Konbit Shelter days, her Braddock Project with the church in Pennsylvania, her Perly’s Beauty Shop, her epic installations at Jeffrey Deitch, LA MOCA in Los Angeles, ICA in Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, or DIA in Detroit, we’ve reported to you on them all – so you have an idea where this new book The Red Skein will take you. It is great to see the memories and the people all pulled together here cohesively and to understand the skeins that all weave as one, whether loosely or tightly.
In many ways, it is now evident that Swoon’s path has been entirely necessary for her and for the many it has touched.
The honorable Gabor Mate describes it so well here at the beginning of the book: “Sometimes people create art and don’t even know where it came from, but it came from some deep place inside themselves. And if they can do that consciously, then it is a form of therapy. Not that it is designed that way, but it can have that effect. People can also express art unconsciously, and to the extent that it stays unconscious, it will not be very healing. So it has to be artistic expression, with some degree of consciousness, which is what her art is.”
”WOON: The Red Skein. DRAGO Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2022
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. The Artist Who Paints Folks on the Street, Faces of Santa Ana 2. Meet the Artists Changing the face of New Brighton 3. Banksy – Rage, Flower Thrower NFT…but for free (2022)
BSA Special Feature: Painting People Experiencing Homelessness
You can use your talents to build walls or build bridges. It’s up to you. Brian Peterson shows through his actions that art is a force for good, for healing, and even to pay someone’s bills in the process.
The Artists Who Paints Folks on the Street
Faces of Santa Ana
Meet the Artists Changing the face of New Brighton
Doug from Fifth Wall returns to New Brighton a few years after his first video here to find how the interaction between art and public space has begun to transform the town’s image of itself. Interesting to hear the primary proponent of the public art program here to say that success is contingent on a public/private partnership here in a seaside resort in Wallasey, Merseyside, England.
“Maybe this is exactly the model that we should be looking towards,” says Doug of the highly individualized approach the businesses and residence are taking toward building a community and an economy. Set your clocks; he’s looking like he might be moving in shortly. Maybe he’ll begin Nuart New Brighton and ask Juxtapoz to run some programming for a few days?
Banksy – Rage, Flower Thrower NFT…but for free (2022)
Banksy – Rage, Flower Thrower NFT… but for free (2022) – or so goes this murky offer of an NFT posted right now on Open Sea for the next three days. More confusingly, the press release for it is over a year old. – whereupon it infers that the original image is shot by Andrew Bayles but has copyright attempted by the International Street Art Man of Mystery himself.
Regardless of the veracity of any of this storytelling – and we have not way of verifying it – the animation is attractive and well done. Good luck to all the parties!
“This is not an official Banksy NFT… read below for more information. Press Release: October 14, 2021 “Attack Attack Attack” is a non-fungible token for sale on OpenSea, the world’s first and largest digital marketplace for crypto collectibles and NFTs. This digital creation is an artwork co-signed by Unikz, a digital artist from Bristol and Andrew Bayles, a photographer from Leeds (UK). The two artists created a digital artwork that reveals a little more about the identity of the street artist Banksy. This NFT is unique because it allows you to discover part of Banksy’s creative process. Indeed, the work, which is a digital video loop of 50 seconds, begins on the world-famous image of Banksy’s “Rage, the Flower Thrower” and then a picture representing a man throwing a molotov cocktail appears in overprinting. This photo, taken in Leeds (UK) in 1987, is obviously the base image that was used to make the famous Banksy stencil in 2005. Banksy has recently tried unsuccessfully to register this artwork as his personal trademark. The photo, shot by Andrew Bayles, was published in 1987 in an anarchist newspaper, called Attack Attack Attack, produced and distributed anonymously due to the radical information it contained. According to the artwork authors, only a member of the punk / anarchist movement in the late 1980s in England could have seen and used this image to create the famous stencil. This relaunches the discussions about the past of Banksy. According to the artist’s official biography, he was only 12 years old in 1987. It’s hard to imagine him as a punk, at that age, reading anarchist newspapers. Coïncidence? in 1988, few months after the publication of the photo in “Attack, Attack, Attack” newspaper, Robert del Naja (born in 1965) created the trip hop band, Massive Attack. The non-fungible token, certified by Verisart is available for sale on OpenSea, including an original photo print signed by the artists.”
Here, for a few stolen moments, you can look at these items, most previously unseen, which floated through the lives of that nice Jewish boy band named Beastie back when Reagan was trickling down and the Dead Kennedy’s held forth. It’s called simply “Exhibit”; lending a bit of institutional weight to a curious and eclectic collection of personal items, artifacts, and ephemera— the kind of stuff you scan and absorb, inferring its weight, volume, and texture. You may imagine what the moment was like – and imagine what it was like to be a Beastie Boy.
Beastie Boys EXHIBIT. Control Gallery – Beyond The Streets. (image courtesy of Beyond The Streets)
Artists Cey Adams and Eric Haze figure strongly into the street-inspired visual aesthetic that packaged the unruly New York punk-hip-hop-abstract jazz trio during their rise in the 1980s and 90s. Just gazing across the collection, it strikes you again how our modern era gets much of its character from the legion of designers and artists who have presented it – in addition to the talent projected by the names on the marquee.
Now 40 years in and one very loved man down, the brash, uncouth manners and frankly nasty lyrics are tempered by our collective maturity, admitted to almost apologetically, and the ephemera and the work is what remains. The enthusiastic zestful energy that first busted a new identity in a chaotic sound field is here for you; in these displays, these videos, these vibes, and their intergalactic funk.
The first show of its kind about the Beastie Boys opens Saturday, December 10, at CONTROL Gallery on the US coast opposite New York – possibly more sun-drenched and skate culture inflected – but certainly bringing the “sonic irreverence of hardcore and punk, blended with the bawdy and rebellious sounds of emergent hip-hop,” they became known for.
“The story of punk rock, hip-hop, skateboarding, and graffiti wouldn’t be complete without a chapter on Beastie Boys and the inedible mark they made on a movement that harmoniously merged the worlds of music and youth culture into a soundscape and experience all of its own,” says curator and co-founder Roger Gastman in a press release.
Beastie Boys fans will see a full sweep of ephemera and priceless idiosyncratic memorabilia they collected while making and promoting their albums – from Licensed To Ill, to Paul’s Boutique, to Check Your Head & Ill Communication, Hello Nasty, The Mix-Up, and Hot Sauce Committee Part Two.
“We’re happy that someone besides us appreciates all the weird shit we’ve collected,” says Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz.
EXHIBIT is produced by CONTROL Gallery, BEYOND THE STREETS, and Goldenvoice.
For further details and information on Beastie Boys Exhibit click HERE
This time of the year, many people become nostalgic, remembering earlier times that seemed simpler, bathed in sepia tones. Walking into the Pop International Gallery a couple of weekends ago – fresh from a Swoon talk with Jeffrey Deitch and on the way to the opening of Graffiti Kings at HOWL – it was a surprise trip to the mid-2000s of New York streets when the graffiti scene was adjusting to a fleet of new street art kids on the block.
Fernando “SKI” Romero was one half of a graphic team called UR New York at the time with co-writer 2Easae, and they were making their own transition from the street to the studio. In the new show at Pop called WON FOR ALL!, Mr. Romero takes us back to see a cluster of youth who were in his orbit, and if you were walking on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, probably yours.
“I’ve known these artists for years,” he says, “Many of us came up together in the art world. They are my friends and family.”
Born and raised in New York, Romero is very familiar with the graffiti scene that made the city famous, even recently curating a show of some graffiti-writers-turned-artists who originally inspired him, like CRASH, DAZE and Tats Cru. After attending Parsons School of Design and selling his own stuff on the street in SoHo for six years, he took a decade to dedicate himself to developing his own deconstructed letter style for the gallery.
Now SKI is reflecting on a golden age for his own development as an artist with WON FOR ALL and shows solidarity with a small cluster of talents who have pursued their professional careers that were supercharged by their experiences on the street and around the culture. Here’s Dark Clouds with his patterned and swooping pockets of rain, alongside the graphic output of Matt Siren that hints at superheroes and graphic novels.
Elsewhere the bright font-centric Queen Andrea evokes 1980s teen mag optimism, while Gigi Chen’s formal painting techniques venture into fantasy and photo-realism. In the main window on the Bowery is perhaps the most recognizable top-hatted character, Optimo, another true born and bred New Yorker whose love for the culture is evidenced by a prodigious mass of street stickers incorporated into one of his canvasses. Partnered perhaps in their historical reverence for graffiti writers are SKI, with his sideways blown layers of bright letterforms and gritty graphic cityscapes, and Cerns’ omnivorous forays across realities – anchored by colorful characters that may remind some of the train writers during the 1970s.
“I chose these people because of talent, skills, and dedication,” he says. “During the pandemic, these artists were the ones who kept me sane and motivated during a time when I felt alone. This show is a way to bring them all together to say ‘Thank You”.
WON FOR ALLI FEATURED ARTISTS include Queen Andrea Dark Cloud Gigi Chen Matt Siren Optimo NYC Victor Ving Emilio Martinez Cern Chris Boss
Elfo is a graffiti writer and social commentator whose work intentionally sidesteps traditional notions of style or technical lettering. This …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
