All posts tagged: KAWS

Character Witness

March 1, 2022 Artists

Sometimes it is a talisman who is having adventures on the behalf of an artist, a part of him/herself who stays behind and watches the area.

At other times it is a character seen through a mirror, an alter-ego who represents a fictional part of their inner world who has been set free onto the street to interact. It may be a branding element, a logo, or signature that lays claim to the artwork it is attached to. By itself it is often a form of marking territory; a practice begun by graffiti writers decades ago.

Whether it is a symbol or a figure, it is undoubtedly a personification of some part of the artists id, one that is so individual that you can spot it from a distance and if you are a fan, you’ll smile in recognition.

Many street artists have a discernable style, that is true; a hand-style, a recurrent motif, color palette, a topic that reappears, a technique of application, even a likely location in the urban landscape where they are most likely to appear.

Of that number, fewer have developed a character or a motif so well defined in our minds that it can stand alone, but we have found a few over the decades. Each is imbued with memory, with place, with personality, with character.

And, as ever, we are witness.

Stik in collaboration with LA2 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“KAWS: What Party”. Need a Companion?

May 15, 2021 Artists

Highbrow art institutions have coalesced behind a small recurring collection of well-known graffiti/street artists in recent years, granting them a lot of space and a powerful entrée to blue-check media parties, blue-chip platforms, and blue blood collectors. The bigger (and frequently well-funded) names are often the easiest to explain to an unfamiliar general audience of art viewers and, of course, will appeal to that younger demographic everyone is after. It shouldn’t surprise anyone when even the New York City Ballet spawned a series of collaborations with street artists in the last five years to bolster flagging attendance due to aging and, well, dying fans.

Kaws. *“Kaws: What Party”.* Brooklyn Museum. Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Graffiti and street art have long since become bywords of edgy culture that can be commodified and proudly owned by all strata of incomes and stations, and our interest in all things street abides still. Brands have ironically manipulated pop icons and sprinkle paint splashes, drips, and bubble tags across everything from ladies’ clutches to watches to vapes. Fashion continues to dip into this well of light anarchy as a signal of cool rebellion, as sold across a gamut – from couture Saint Laurent to off-the-rack Walmart. Sometimes the imagery or lettering is easily recognizable as a particular artist’s style on the products for sale. Other times a staff graphic designer has skillfully approximated the stencils, wheat-pastes, and drippy tags without steering into copyright infringement territory.

In an increasingly dire economic landscape where retail giants like J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus, and J. Crew are falling like redwoods, opportunities for in-person branding experiences and sales are popping up in previously unexpected places. Are you at a store or an art exhibition? Does there need to be a stark delineation between the two? It’s not just Volkswagen sponsoring Kraftwerk at MOMA. You are also finding brands like Adidas setting up a pop-up shop inside Roger Gastman’s Beyond The Streets traveling exhibition and selling in the well-stock and beautifully curated store. In the era of experiential retail like the NIKE and Dick’s Sporting Goods stores, the lines between an art gallery and sales floor have become completely blurred. Think of the dance between art and commerce in multiple partnerships, including UNIQLO and MOMA, VANS and the Van Gogh Museum, and LEVI’s at LA MoCA.

An early meta phone booth ad takeover – incorporating his Companion character into an ad for a Keith Haring show, featuring Haring illegally writing in the subway on an ad space. Kaws. *“Kaws: What Party”.* Brooklyn Museum. Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Street Artist Shepard Fairey is probably best known for making art and commerce symbiotic with the interplay of his screenprints, stickers, vandalism, street art, and the Obey brand, and Keith Haring literally opened his own Pop Shop store in Soho way back in the 1980s; his illegal vandalism in the subway being de facto advertisements for products you could purchase above ground. Banksy’s movie title Exit Through The Gift shop may have been intended as a sarcastic critique, but everyone now considers it a command. Curatorial considerations may not be explicitly tied to the development of product lines, but the discussions of both may happen in the same marketing meeting.

Today, the real power players in the cultural currency game are the artists who can market their own products, sometimes commanding licensing fees simply for being featured on retail platforms and venues. In the case of KAWS: What Party at the Brooklyn Museum, the sales of the Brooklyn artists’ “Companion” toy collectibles exhausted supply within hours of the opening, and the mania of buying multiples in multi-visit daily shopping trips created lines so long that they backed up into the exhibition. The museum store began posting strict buying limits and regulations of items sold.

On a recent weekday, eager groupings of friends and family arrive into the Brooklyn Museum lobby with palpable excitement, and nearly all pose in front of the towering 18-foot high wooden KAWS sculpture, “Along the Way.” Our guide, Sharon Matt Atkins, Deputy Director for Art, tells us that the response to the show in terms of attendance has been robust. As we wend through the galleries, we see guests in their teens and twenties often posing before sculptures and paintings, imitating the forward bending head, cradling their face in hands with a mocked portrayal of being overwhelmed. The striking of poses in front of artworks is possibly as much a part of the museum experience as excitedly identifying which pop culture character or famous painting had been appropriated for an X-eyed portrait. Those images are spread across social media, and the KAWS character is seen by many more.

After the show, guests queue in line to the store to pick up a catalog, tote bag, lapel pin, or other KAWS product. Artists names like Matt Groenig, Charles Schultz, and Hugh Harman may not trip off the tongue, but their repurposed characters like the Simpsons, Snoopy, and Mickey have all been burned into western mass culture history. Those nostalgic and reassuring associations are captured by KAWS repeatedly and altered with modest modification.

Matt Atkins observes that KAWS discovered the power of pop references to manga and anime in the subculture Otaku were crucial to forming bonds with Japanese people in ways that language would not allow during his trips to Tokyo in the late 1990s. The power of that kind of cross-cultural communication stayed with him and is offered as an explanation for referencing commonly known images. Indeed, this method of reinterpretation of pre-established icons and personalities has been employed on the street for many years, including right now with street artists like The Postman who reworks famous images of celebrities and characters like Syd Vicious, Elton John, Willy Wonka, Boy George, Grace Jones, and Elvis Presley. The contemporary acid-pop treatment he pours on the photographs is eye-catching in doorways or alleys. If you like what you see on the street, you can go to his website store to purchase them as prints or customized aerosol spray cans. Before ‘always on’ connectivity, these bridges between art and collecting were never so seamless.

A new addition to the show is meant to reflect the feelings of isolation and being afloat in an unknown world created by Covid-19. Kaws. *“Kaws: What Party”.* Brooklyn Museum. Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

As new rules in street art and commerce come online daily, perhaps we’ll be developing new terminology to describe and novel ways to define the roles of museums, exhibitions, and stores. Similarly, norms about patronage, fandom, art history, civic engagement, and cultural literacy, no doubt, are evolving at a rapid pace in ways previously unconsidered.

As in the ‘woke’ culture that the art world is trying to enter, we’re having difficult but necessary conversations revolving around identity politics and systemic, historical inequities. Maybe we should also discuss the role of commerce in mediating decisions about which rebellious graffiti or street artists we are heralding or overlooking.

A reference to *Pietà* (Michelangelo) by Kaws. *“Kaws: What Party”.* Brooklyn Museum. Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

What clinches the final decision when granting a gallery or exhibition replete with all the trimmings? In an art practice born from typically marginalized sectors of the dominant culture originally, who is currently getting the brunt of the attention, and why? What role does consumer culture, pop sensibility, and commodification of our creative commons play when selecting which artists from the graffiti and street art fields are elevated – and which ones are not. As always, there are few obviously correct answers. But the questions may lead us in new directions.

KAWS: WHAT PARTY

February 26–September 5, 2021

Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, 5th Floor

For museum’s hours of operation and tickets click HERE

“Kaws: What Party” Coming to Brooklyn Museum

February 20, 2021 Artists

From graffiti writing on the street to art products to massive sculptures in public spaces, the career evolution of Brooklyn’s KAWS embodies graffiti-street-art-urban-art’s commercial moves into the mainstream in an unrivaled way. Now the Brooklyn Museum hosts KAWS: WHAT PARTY, where you may not be able to determine the fine line between exhibition and store display.

The press release says, “Adapting the rules of cultural production and consumption in the twenty-first century, his practice both critiques and participates in consumer culture,” so you are forgiven if you want to put some of these ‘Companion’ items in your cart and head for the register. Also look forward to seeing graffiti drawings and notebooks, paintings, collectibles, furniture, and those bus-stop posters that he high-jacked advertising spots with.

Also, “Teaming up with Acute Art, a digital art platform directed by acclaimed Swedish curator Daniel Birnbaum, KAWS presents new augmented reality works, allowing visitors to interact virtually with his sculptures using their smartphones to create their own experience.”

KAWS: WHAT PARTY
February 26–September 5, 2021
Curated by Eugenie Tsai

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, New York 11238-6052 Subway: Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum information@brooklynmuseum.org

718.638.5000

BSA Images Of The Week: 06.21.20

June 21, 2020 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Welcome to BSA Images of the Week and welcome to summer in NYC here on its 2nd day. Also Happy Father’s Day in the US.

Juneteenth. White Fragility. Defund the Police. How to Be an Antiracist. All of these new terms and phrases erupting on the main stage of the public lexicon today speak to a fundamental disgust with the system that’s been in effect. As uncomfortable as it may be, our better selves know that the conversations and changes that have started are vitally necessary to have if we ever want to move forward as a society.

Right now in New York people are marching, protesting, drinking on the street, setting off fireworks, and holding doors open for one another with a new sensitivity thanks to internal bruising. We also see people disregarding safety precautions in the spread of Covid-19, and honking their car horns more often.

All of this is against a backdrop of Americans being unceremoniously slid into poverty and unheard of unemployment, with nary a mention in the national media and near silence from both national parties. It’s good to know that the LGBTQ can’t get fired for being LGBTQ, and children of undocumented immigrants born here will be protected under DACA. Unfortunately there are no jobs!

But on the streets, the messages and the energy and the defiance and determination and the comedy are all there, running on the hot pavement.

Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Almost Over Keep Smiling, Cash4, Chris Tuorto, C0rn Queen, Crisp, KAWS, Menacersa, Nico, Skewville, Smells, and Tag Street Art.

Chris Tuorto #blacklivesmatter (photo © Jaime Rojo)

#TAG in Tel-Aviv. #blacklivesmatter (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Mena-Ceresa. #blacklivesmatter (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Almost Over Keep Smiling (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Unidentified artist (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. June 2020. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

What’s on the Street in Madrid? A Quick Survey

March 20, 2018 Artists

Today we have an opportunity to see some of the Street Art and gallery-related works on show in Madrid. Our sincere thanks to photographer and avid observer Fer Alcalá, who shares his findings with BSA readers today.

~Fer Alcalá~

I was lucky enough to meet and walk the streets of Madrid with Guillermo from MadridStreetArtProject a veteran actor in the local scene. His way of seeing and understanding the urban landscape is outstanding. He is one of the best hosts that you can find in Madrid.

Pro176. Mind The Wall Project, curated by Swinton & Grant Gallery. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Julieta XLF . Son3K for Arte al Cubo produced by MSAP. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Elbi Elem for Arte al Cubo produced by MSAP. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Ampparito at Lavapiés. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Suso33 (photo © Fer Alcalá)

SM172 at Lavapiés. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Brodbus portrait of Roy Ayers at Esto Es Una Plaza. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

SM172 at Esto Es Una Plaza. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Esto Es Una Plaza (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Eltono (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Ron English. “Guernica” at Espacio Solo. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Espacio SOLO is an EXPERIENCE, not only because of the mystery associated with the project, but for the feelings that you have once you are there. Surrounded by astonishing pieces of fine art, getting lost through alleys and rooms and at the same time, having the sensation of invading someone’s coolest home on Earth.

Laurence Valliéres at Espacio Solo. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Kaws and Tim Biskup at Espacio Solo. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Magda Danysz Brings “Art From The Streets” to Singapore Art Science Museum

January 16, 2018 Artists

“Art From the Streets”, an exhibition at the Art Science Museum in Singapore opened this weekend to coordinate with Singapore Art Week that runs from tomorrow until the end of the month with fairs, festivals and art exhibitions. Commercial art dealer and writer Magda Danysz curated the show with names she represents and whom you will be familiar with – Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Faile, and Futura, for example.

Two versions of the catalogue, one by Felipe Pantone, the other by Futura, are available on the Magda Danysz website .

But she also brings an eclectic mix of others on her roster and possibly lent from some private collections. Collectively they span many of the high profile, the saleable and known over the past 5 decades from various disciplines and philosophical practices; In the case of Jacques Villeglé, whose practice of lacerating posters in the 1960s predates Failes’ by 4 decades, a lineage can be drawn. Other connections are not as easy.

Ultimately the collection gives a sense of the vast number of personalities and techniques that have characterized the street practice in Europe and North America primarily without focusing on any one specialty too greatly. Here are the revered names along with mid-career folks and current darlings who are sure to leave a mark. There is also a small inclusion of more regional favorites like Eko Nugroho from Indonesia, and Singapore’s Speak Cryptic, who each were on hand this weekend with many of the artists for the opening.

Giving tours with microphone in hand during the opening days, the energetic Ms. Danysz educates new fans and potential buyers about an organic artists scene that grew from the streets and is now more frequently being offered for sale in places such as her three gallery locations in London, Paris, and Shanghai. Today it is slowly appearing more often in museums as well.

“Conscious that promotion of the emerging scene is necessary, Magda Danysz took part in many fairs,” says a press release, “such as for example Art Brussels, Arte Fiera in Bologna, Artissima in Torino, Fiac in Paris or Pulse in New York, and is one of the four galleries at the origin of the Show Off Paris art fair.”

This weekend’s activities included short presentations panel discussions and a screen of Wild Style.

Art from the Streets tickets are $17.00 on the Marina Bay Sands website.

A complete list of artists varies online with artists listed on the museum website including:

Banksy, Tarek Benaoum, Stéphane Bisseuil, Blade, Crash, Speak Cryptic, D*face, Fab 5 Freddy, FAILE, Shepard Fairey (aka Obey), Futura, Invader, JR, L’Atlas, Ludo, M-City, Nasty, Eko Nugroho, Nunca, Felipe Pantone, Quik, Lee Quinones, Blek le Rat, Rero, Remi Rough, André Saraiva, Seen, Seth, Sten Lex, Tanc, Hua Tunan, Yok & Sheryo, YZ, Zevs “and many more“.

Elsewhere online the roster is said to include 2Koa, Jef Aérosol, Ash, André, A-One, Aplickone, Banksy, Benjamin Duquenne, Tarek Benaoum, Stephane Bisseuil, Blek Le Rat, Boulaone, C215, Crash, Dface, Dondi, Dran, Eror729, Shepard Fairey, Faile, Futura, Keith Haring, Isham, Jayone, Jonone, Jr, Katre, Kaws, L’atlas, Lem, Ludo, Barry Mc Gee, Mikostic, Miss.Tic, Mode 2, Steve More, Nasty, Nord, Yoshi Omori, Os Gemeos, Psyckoze, Quik, Rammellzee, Recidivism, Rero, Remi Rough, Seen, Seth, Skki, Sore, Space Invader, Spazm, Spécio, Swoon, Tanc, Toxick, Vhils, Jacques Villeglé, Nick Walker, West, Yz, Zevs, Zhang Dali, Zlotykamien and Zuba.

Young New Yorkers, Street Artists, and Keeping Teens Out of Jail

May 10, 2017 Artists

The Street Art community donates time and art to a program that keeps teens out of jail in New York. An annual auction overflows with work by today’s Street Artists.

Marco Mazzoni. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

With the precision indicative of her architect training Rachel Barnard describes the art/criminal justice project for youth that she founded five years ago – which keeps growing thanks to artists’ help, community involvement, and an evermore engaged criminal justice system.

“Alternative Diversion,” she calls it, this court-mandated art program that prosecutors can offer to New York teens as a sentencing option instead of incarceration or doing community service.

“What we’re talking about here are 16 and 17 year-olds in Brooklyn who have been arrested for things like jumping the (subway) turnstyle or having a small amount of marijuana on them or petty larceny,” Barnard explains in a new video for YNY.

Peeta. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“Say you get a misdemeanor record at 16,” she says “What that means is that you’re less likely to get employment, even though you are more likely to be poor and need employment more than most other 16 year-olds.”

Each year the programs called Young New Yorkers (YNY), which Barnard founded, work directly with these youth to redirect their route in life, to provide guidance, foster self-analyzation and to set productive goals for the future.

A photo by light artist Vicki da Silva. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

To some observers it may sound ironic that Street Artists, many of whom have done illegal artworks on walls throughout New York City, are the principal artists pool who are donating their time and talent here to the fundraising auction in lower Manhattan.

With high profile names like Shepard Fairey, Daze, Dan Witz, the Guerrilla Girls and Kara Walker on this years list of artists donating to the auction, the program boasts a cross section of established and emerging Street Artists, graffiti artists, culture jammers and truth tellers who heartily support this program that since 2012 has given more than 400 city youth a second chance.

Guerrilla Girls. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

But then we think more about the history and psychological/anthropological makeup of the Street Art scene and it makes perfect sense: What segment of the arts community has such a rich history of activism, self-directed industry, challenging the norms of society, using public space for intervention – and a penchant for consciousness-raising?

Even after 50 plus years of youth culture in love with graffiti and Street Art these artists and their practice are seen as outside the proper curriculum of many universities with art programs and museums have arduous internal debates about supporting exhibitions that are dedicated to Street Art and graffiti specifically.

Kaws. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

This is precisely the kind of marginalized movement/ subculture that has necessarily thrived often with little encouragement or funding – overcoming the barriers to success that more institutionally recognized art movements don’t encounter. In fact, many have gone to jail for what they do.

Uniquely, Young New Yorkers continues to build its partnerships with artists, teachers, lawyers, volunteers and several agencies within the criminal justice system, including criminal and community courts, the District Attorney’s Office and the Legal Aid Society. The program’s art shows mounted by graduates are frequently attended by members of the justice system as well and art becomes a facilitator of strengthened community ties.

Joe Russo’s photo of Street Art twins OSGEMEOS. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA has supported YNY every year since its first auction benefit and this year is no exception. Please go to Paddle 8 to see the items for sale or better yet, go to the auction in person. We stopped by while they were hanging the show yesterday and we were able to take a few shots for you to see what’s up for grabs.

Sean 9 Lugo. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Shepard Fairey. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

K.R. Kitsch. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Li-Hill. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dain. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Icy & Sot. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Young New Yorkers Silent Art Auction Honoring Actor and Activist Michael K. Williams

Wednesday, May 10, 2017
548 West 28th Street
New York, NY
6:00 VIP hour with Michael K. Williams (Star and Super Star Tickets)
7:00–10:00 party (Regular tickets)

More information at YoungNewYorkers.org http://www.youngnewyorkers.org/

To learn more about the work that Young New Yorkers do and to get involved click HERE

Holy Faile ! “Savage/Sacred Young Minds” at Brooklyn Museum

July 8, 2015 Artists, Interview

FAILE may be a religious experience this summer at the Brooklyn Museum, but only one of the hallowed installations is called Temple. The seedier, more dimly lit venue will surely have the larger number of congregants by far, bless their sacred hearts.

Celebrating the duality and appropriation of words, slogans, and images has been the baliwick of the duo since they first began hitting Brooklyn streets at the turn of the century with their stencils and wheat-pastes on illegal spots and neglected spaces. In FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds, their new attention commanding/refracting exhibit organized by Sharon Matt Atkins at the Brooklyn Museum, these guys pour it on, compelling you into a complex panoply of possible re-imaginings of meaning that reference pop, pulp, myth, art history, 50s sci-fi, 60s advertising, comics, punk zines, consumer culture and their own pure artistic and branded fiction.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

For fans of this collaboration between artists Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, Savage/Sacred is a joyride swerving through the visual vocabulary and terminology they’ve been emblazoning across walls, doorways, canvasses, stickers, sculptures, prayer wheels, wood blocks, paintings, prints, toys, and a museum façade in their steady ascendance from anonymous art school students and Street Artists to a highly collected top tier name in contemporary art.

Offering you a full immersion and opportunity for titillating interaction, this show provides an unambiguous sense of the industry that is backing the Faile fantasy. Throughout their work and your imagination and assumed role, you may be villain, distressed damsel, wolfman, fairey, vandal, wrestler, hot-rodder, madonna, whore, supplicant, avenger, surfing horse or simply an arcade hero who is whiling away windowless hours punching buttons, popping flippers and pumping Faile tokens into tantalizing art machines.

FAILE. FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Central to the formative Faile story is an image of the teenage Patricks piecing together clues about the world in these dark dens of possibility and teenage angst, awash in fantasy, aggression, testosterone and communal alienation.

Miller talks about the arcade atmosphere with a certain reverence, “All through Middle School, especially on the weekends, you’d just get dropped off at the mall and be there all day. There is something about the idea of this being a somewhat sacred space as a teenager in arcades. They are sort of a “Candyland” – a magical space mixed with a little seediness. You had kind of a large age range in there. You could get in trouble if you wanted but through the video games you could live out these crazy fantasy experiences. Historically arcades have been like that – very much with the Times Square notion. They’ve always had that connection to an underbelly of things.”

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: Do you think New York is still seedy?
Patrick Miller: It seems like it is getting harder to find, in a way.
BSA: So really you might say that this is a public service, this installation.
Patrick Miller: There are so many young people who have never had this experience today. Not only are we trying to share what that was like, it is something that shaped the way we are inspired as artists and the way we make imagery, the way we make icons. The roots of video-game culture are there and now that has sort of bled out today – but also we’re interested in the shared experience because so much of the video game experience is now mobile or is just had on your couch, I think people have forgotten that there used to be these places were you congregated to do this.

For the 5^th public offering of FAILE BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade and the first in a museum setting, Faile extends the scope and adds a handful of new NYC-centric scenarios to the mix and again partners with fellow Brooklyn street artist and spin-cycle collage mutator-in-chief BÄST, whose stylistic counterplay alerts undercurrents of tension with a punk-naïve primal hand painting and humoristic Dada collaging.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: Can you describe the working dynamic with Faile and BÄST?
Patrick Miller: We’ve always been really inspired by BÄSTs work because we start from a similar place but we end up totally differently.
BSA: Yeah the end result is very different
Patrick Miller: Ours are probably more structured and narrative.
Patrick McNeil: I think over time we have tried not to step on each others’ toes. He generally controls the half-tone territory and we control the line-drawing territory.
BSA: So his are more photography-based and yours tend more toward the illustration.
Patrick McNeil: Yep
Patrick Miller: I think the work comes from the same place but his is just turned up to “11”.
Patrick McNeil: Yeah his is more put into a blender.
Patrick Miller: But that has always been what makes us work well together, the styles mix and marry really well and they kind of bring the best out of both.
BSA: And he has become even more abstract recently – more lo-fi outsider artish…., although you guys have delved into children’s coloring books for inspiration as well
McNeil: I think BÄST would like to call it more “outsider art”.
BSA: Why has it been important to keep Deluxx Fluxx a Faile-BÄST collaboration over the last five years thoughout its various iterations?
McNeil: We started this project as a collaboration and we’ve been collaborating with BÄST for fifteen years. We’ve always enjoyed working with him because we just love the friendship and we love the product of our collaborations. I think having the opportunity to be at the Brooklyn Museum and to do it together with him is really special.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Twenty-two in all, the custom designed variations on arcade video and pinball games from the 1970s and 80s alert competitive urges and quests for domination alongside more mundane tasks like alternate side of the street parking and completing atypical digital art-making sessions where “winning” is defined entirely differently.

Social, sexual, comical, criminal, and environmental concerns all pop and parry while you nearly mindlessly and repetitively punch buttons and fire guns at herky-jerky 2-D motion graphics that transport you to the hi-charged arcade experience rumbling in malls and sketchier parts of town before the Internet. Get a taste for those darkened caves where you racked up points while quarters were sucked from your pockets; you are the favored hero at home in this seductive lair, surrounded by an ear pounding audio-musical triumphalist barrage of hypnotic hormonal victory and id-shattering explosions.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The adjoining cavernous black-light illuminated fluorescent foosball room is papered with mind-popping illustrations derived and sutured from comics, pulp and smarmy back-pages advertising that once stirred secret desires. Walking in on this teen temple you may feel like looking for dirty magazines sandwiched between mattresses; surely a hyped up juvenile would choose these alternating graphic “floor tiles” in radiation yellow, sugar coated pink and neon orange, giving your footsteps a spongey depth perception test on your way to a round of table football.

The floor-to-ceiling hand painted posters took four people six months to complete, both Patricks tell us, and they all compete for your attention, each a narrative re-configured and augmenting secret storylines, myths, and plenty of white lies.

FAILE’s Patrick Miller demonstrates an art experience where you rip posters off the wall to reveal yet more Faile posters underneath, which you can rip further. FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Somehow it is here in the day-glo madness that we see the closest approximation to the original Street Art experience passersby had in the early 2000s with Faile’s work when they were still a trio that included artist AIKO and in those years just after her departure. These are the bold, familiar graphic punches thrown in a direction you weren’t expecting and can make you laugh.

FAILE’s Patrick McNeil demonstrates how to tag subway walls before the “Bast Ghosts” come after you. FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In a media- and advertising-saturated society our tools of discernment and reason are compromised, deliberately so. Faile is recognizing some symptoms of this compromise and is examining the stories and the narratives that are told, crafting their own dramatic nomenclature from the pile. You might say that their stories are melding with an idealized simplification of North American white dude history, a heroic paranoid absolutism that lays bare the prejudices behind it.

A simple survey of words illustrates the perspective: prayer, bitch, horse, rainbow, sinful, Jesus, warriors, forbidden, Indian, hero, poison, brave, strong, boy, guilty, pleasure, bedtime, cowboys, hotrods, savage, gun, trust, stiletto, tender, hotel, confessions, fight, wolf, saved, girls, lies, vanity, inexperience, restless virgin, innocent, willing, heartbreak, torment, stories.

These are Faile stories, reconfigured with a slicing knife down the middle of the belly, an idiosyncratic collaged pop/pulp style that owes as much to the Dadaist Hannah Höch and pop collage originator Richard Hamilton as it does to Lichtenstein’s sense of storybook romance and Warhol’s repetitive emotional distance.

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In the book accompanying the exhibit, Sharon Matt Atkins, Vice Director for Exhibitions and Collections Management, who organized the exhibition, says the presentation of the arcade in a museum setting “highlights how the present work relates to the art of the past and expands our expectations of the use of public spaces dedicated to art.” Here, she says, “Deluxx Fluxx’s arcade machines, which are simultaneously sculptures and functioning games, may call to mind Surrealism, Dada, and Fluxus, as well as the enigmatic boxed assemblages of Joseph Cornell.”

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Similarly, the signature Temple project has not been presented in its entirety in museum settings previously, and it feels like it is a bit of inspired genius when you are standing in its shadow beneath the soaring sky light at the Brooklyn Museum. The full scale church in ruins was presented out of doors in Praça dos Restauradores Square in Lisbon in conjunction with Portugal Arte in 2010. Echoing its surroundings in Lisbon, the Temple here is also a willful remix of the epic and the rather lesser so.

Culture-jamming at its height, it’s a punk subversion in ceramic, marble and iron that simultaneously genuflects and gives the finger to antiquity and to our soulless consumer culture. By casting reliefs of stylized font-work, romance novelette themes, and ads for call girls in puzzling non-sequitors, the Temple ridicules vapidity while honoring connections to age-old themes, sort of humbling all involved. Here again Faile is questioning the received wisdom of art history, religious customs, and tales of great societies we’ve learned to be reverent of, or maybe just questioning our true knowledge of history altogether.

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

During the last months while it was being unpacked and assembled we heard the Temple also called a tomb, a mausoleum, a chapel – the differences shared by their ties to the architecture and sculpture and tiled mosaics and ceramic under one roof. The roof in this case is destroyed – possibly because it caved in or because it was ripped off by an angry god who said, “You have missed my point entirely!”

In any case it is a formidable structure allowing meditation, reflection, confusion. In an act of ultimate bait and switch, Faile has deliberately played with what you are supposed to be paying attention to, substituting the associated original intended and inferred meanings of a religious institution and its power. You approach with reverence, looking perhaps for an allegorical means to access the transcendental, but expected symbols have been supplanted by the shallow relics of a culture you may have intended to escape.

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ultimately Faile is not unlike a lot of the world’s great religions; Comforting, reassuring, challenging, mysterious, inpenetrable. Sometimes you have the feeling that there are other people who understand it much better than you. Oh, ye of little Faile. Lean not upon your own understanding. Failes ways are not necessarily our ways. Whether these words and narratives are written by man or handed down from a higher power, why sweat it? It’s a holy good show.

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

With FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds the Brooklyn museum is once again meaningfully invested in the present and jumped ahead in the examination of what clearly is the first global grassroots art movement, giving the stage to the current century’s voices of the street – perhaps because it has engaged with the city’s artists and communities.

With an enormous new Kaws sculpture in the lobby, Basquiat’s notebooks and Kehinde Wiley’s exhibition in the same year, Faile adds an important voice to the local/global narrative and to the dialogue about the appropriate role of art in the public sphere and major institutions in the cultural life of the community they a part of.

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Fantasy Island. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Wolf Within. Detail. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Ripped canvases. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” at the Brooklyn Museum will open Friday, July 10th. Click HERE for further information.

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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
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This article is also published on The Huffington Post

BSA Images Of The Week: 06.28.15

June 28, 2015 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Yo sis the joint was rockin this week in the USA with public healthcare snatched from the jaws of defeat, Same Sex Marriage approved by the Supreme Court coast to coast, and Obama singing Amazing Grace at a heart-breaking memorial after the racist shootings in Charleston. Locally we were happy to work with Chip Thomas (Jetsonorama) to get into Brooklyn and put up his new powerful piece on Black empowerment commemorating the 50 year anniversary of the Selma marches, the huge 30 piece Coney Art Walls project officially opened Wednesday night, and Brooklyn’s Maya Hayuk is suing Starbucks for stealing her art to sell coffee.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Andreco, Barlo, Ben Eine, Biella, BR, Brolga, Crisp, Denton Burrows, Eva Mueller, Gaia, Kaws, Oji, Old Broads, Lungebox, Praxis, Pyramid Oracle, and UFO907.

Top image above >>> Denton Burrows, Crisp and Praxis collaboration. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Denton Burrows, Crisp and Praxis collaboration. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Gaia in Kingston, NY from 2014. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Barlo made this mural on the island in Lamma, Hong Kong. It is meant to recall a simpler way of living that is now eclipsed by rapid modernization. “It talks about a traditional practice (using long sticks to propel your fishing boat) that the main city of Hong Kong seems to have lost. It is in these small islands and villages where you can still find elements of this lifestyle, ” says Barlo.

brooklyn-street-art-barlo-hong-kong-06-28-15-web-1

This new KAWS sculpture was just gifted to the collection at The Brooklyn Museum and is on display in the lobby of the museum until December. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

UFO 907. This sculpure was originally made by the 907 Crew for an exhibition at BAM in Brooklyn. HERE is the coverage of that exhibit. We were pleasantly surprised to have seen it on this field someplace in the country side of this vast state. The UFO has landed indeed. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

These posters advertising a downtown party bring some nostalgia of years past when things were simpler but hidden. Today’s world might be more complicated but many things are more open and accepted in public. This is the spirit in which this weekend celebrations are based on. Inclusion and acceptance. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Old Broads. Speaking of acceptance. Artist Old Broads has been painting and pasting her drawings of women of a certain age embracing life and their bodies as a thing of beauty…the way it should be. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

We have been spotting this character on the streets of NYC for some weeks now. At first glance it looks like a molar with a life on its own. We don’t know who is behind them UPDATE: It is LUNGEBOX – but this one caught our eye for its well rendered simplicity. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Andreco is back on BSA with this “Living Mural” a project he has had in his mind since 2010, he says. when “I was doing my PhD in environmental engineering on the environmental behavior of green technologies, green roofs and green walls in particular. At that time I decided to combine the Artistic with the Scientific research when doing a mural with an integrated vertical garden. The wall painting is ephemeral and it will change over the time with the plant growth,” Andreco tells us.

Part of the “Hydra Project” at the Cittadellarte-Pistoletto Foundation in Biella, Italy, Andreco used Natural paint, aluminum strings, climbers plants, soil, dry rocks wall, and an irrigation system for this piece.

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BSA Images Of The Week: 05.03.15

May 3, 2015 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

We’ve been seeing an increase in the number of politically charged pieces showing up in the street lately. It is no surprise given the rise in marches and demonstrations and discussions in our city and country about topics like racism, police brutality, and rising economic inequality. Street Art has a tradition of addressing socio-political topics, sometimes gently, sometimes yelling at the top of its lungs.

This comes at a time where the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is banning all political speech and religious ads in the advertisements it runs. “Hateful speech is not harmless speech. Only a fool or rogue would argue otherwise,” said Charles Moerdler, an MTA board member and Holocaust survivor who voted for the new policy. Of course any time you start to ban speech you don’t like, you are risking someone banning yours.

One could argue that all speech is political but you don’t recognize it when the message expresses views endorsed by the dominant culture; BP ads tell us that it is splendid to burn fossil fuels, CitiBank ads on bicycles tell us that bankers are nice community-minded people, and McDonalds ads tell us that eating meat is nutritious. Nothing political there right? Do you think the MTA would allow you to run an advertisement saying the opposite of any of those messages? Or would that suddenly be political?

The first few messages of this weeks walls are examples of speech, some of them political, some of them not. The streets will decide which get banned.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring 907 Crew, Adam Cost, Anthony Lister, Balu, bunny M, Cash 4, David Shillinglaw, Defs, Deeker, FWC Crew, HA3, Icy & Sot, JR, Kaws, London Kaye, Merve Berkman, Myth, Omen, R2, Rambo, ROA, Rubin 415, SEA, Smells, Sote, and Specter.

Top Image: Turkish Street Artist Merve Berkman brings this Syrian refugee with child from the streets of Istanbul to the streets of New York. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who are oppressing them” a quote from Assata Shakur in this new Myth piece. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!

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Images Of The Week: 03.23.14

March 23, 2014 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Aine, APC, Bast, Billi Kid, Dain, David Shillinglaw, Dee Dee, Dennis McNett, Droid, Enzo & Nio, Kaws, Li-Hill, Seazk, Stikman, and Wing.

Aine. Often when we talk about art in the streets we refer to it as the gallery on the street, and in this case it literally is one. This artist contributed this collection of his own works and studies of a couple of others, installed on the street. The collection has changed over time and most people just appreciate it and move on. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Aine. Next to his own character illustration, a study of the Mary Cassatt’s 1893 oil painting The Childs Bath is in the collection.(photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Images of the Week 07.22.12

July 22, 2012 Artists, Brooklyn, Manhattan, NYC, On the Street

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, featuring Aiko, Cost, KAWS, Leon Reid IV, Mint & Serf, Nick Walker, Phlegm, Poster Boy, REVS, Swampy, and Wing.

We start off the review with this pretty amazing and magical new installation by Street Artist Phlegm in a children’s playground at the Fulton housing project. He also hit a gate and a quick wall while he was in New York, but this series will be taking kids on rides through their imaginations for a few years to come.

Jetsonorama. Donté. Click on the link at the bottom of this posting to see more images of Jetsonorama at the Navajo. (photo © Jetsonorama)

AIKO. Detail of her installation at the Houston Wall. For process shots and full completed wall click on the link at the bottom. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Click here to see the full documentation of AIKO getting up on the Houston Wall.

Click here to visit Jetsonorama’s life with the Navajo through images and words.

Johannes Mundinger: “La Bella Confusione”
April 25, 2024
You are inundated with information, disinformation, propaganda, images, videos, entreaties, siren calls, threats, promises, summaries, conjecture, stunning beauty, deliberate obfuscations, …Read More »
BSA Hits The North! – See You Soon in Belfast, Northern Ireland
April 23, 2024
We are excited to announce that BSA will be part of the exhilarating ‘Hit the North’ 2024 festival in Belfast! …Read More »
BSA Images Of The Week: 04.21.24
April 21, 2024
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! “It’s the only time of the year when New York City smells good,” …Read More »
Barcelona Tributes for The Amazing SKE
April 18, 2024
Today, we pay tribute to an iconic figure from the Puerto Rican graffiti scene, Eliezer “SKE” Pagán Torres. Born on …Read More »
Elfo Declares “I’m a Figurative Painter”… and I’m the Queen of England!
April 16, 2024
Elfo, the ever-witty Italian street artist, strikes again with his latest work scrawled across an abandoned building in Italy. Known …Read More »
BSA Images Of The Week: 04.14.24 / “Return2Burn” in Hunts Point, Bronx
April 14, 2024
Welcome to BSA’s Images of the Week. We decided to dedicate this weekly survey to the artists of “Return 2 …Read More »
Martha Cooper and Seth in Kibera. Kenya: Part 2 / “We Are One”
April 11, 2024
Nestled within the bustling city of Nairobi, Kenya, Kibera is a testament to its inhabitants’ challenges and its collective indomitable …Read More »

KAWS: WHAT PARTY

February 26–September 5, 2021

Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, 5th Floor

Pro176. Mind The Wall Project, curated by Swinton & Grant Gallery. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Julieta XLF . Son3K for Arte al Cubo produced by MSAP. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Elbi Elem for Arte al Cubo produced by MSAP. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Ampparito at Lavapiés. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Suso33 (photo © Fer Alcalá)

SM172 at Lavapiés. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Brodbus portrait of Roy Ayers at Esto Es Una Plaza. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

SM172 at Esto Es Una Plaza. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Esto Es Una Plaza (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Eltono (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Ron English. “Guernica” at Espacio Solo. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Laurence Valliéres at Espacio Solo. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Kaws and Tim Biskup at Espacio Solo. (photo © Fer Alcalá)

Two versions of the catalogue, one by Felipe Pantone, the other by Futura, are available on the Magda Danysz website .

The Street Art community donates time and art to a program that keeps teens out of jail in New York. An annual auction overflows with work by today’s Street Artists.

Marco Mazzoni. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

With the precision indicative of her architect training Rachel Barnard describes the art/criminal justice project for youth that she founded five years ago – which keeps growing thanks to artists’ help, community involvement, and an evermore engaged criminal justice system.

“Alternative Diversion,” she calls it, this court-mandated art program that prosecutors can offer to New York teens as a sentencing option instead of incarceration or doing community service.

“What we’re talking about here are 16 and 17 year-olds in Brooklyn who have been arrested for things like jumping the (subway) turnstyle or having a small amount of marijuana on them or petty larceny,” Barnard explains in a new video for YNY.

Peeta. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“Say you get a misdemeanor record at 16,” she says “What that means is that you’re less likely to get employment, even though you are more likely to be poor and need employment more than most other 16 year-olds.”

Each year the programs called Young New Yorkers (YNY), which Barnard founded, work directly with these youth to redirect their route in life, to provide guidance, foster self-analyzation and to set productive goals for the future.

A photo by light artist Vicki da Silva. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

To some observers it may sound ironic that Street Artists, many of whom have done illegal artworks on walls throughout New York City, are the principal artists pool who are donating their time and talent here to the fundraising auction in lower Manhattan.

Guerrilla Girls. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Kaws. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

This is precisely the kind of marginalized movement/ subculture that has necessarily thrived often with little encouragement or funding – overcoming the barriers to success that more institutionally recognized art movements don’t encounter. In fact, many have gone to jail for what they do.

Joe Russo’s photo of Street Art twins OSGEMEOS. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Sean 9 Lugo. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Shepard Fairey. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

K.R. Kitsch. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Li-Hill. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dain. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Icy & Sot. Young New Yorkers 2017 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Young New Yorkers Silent Art Auction Honoring Actor and Activist Michael K. Williams

Wednesday, May 10, 2017 548 West 28th Street New York, NY 6:00 VIP hour with Michael K. Williams (Star and Super Star Tickets) 7:00–10:00 party (Regular tickets)

More information at YoungNewYorkers.org http://www.youngnewyorkers.org/ To learn more about the work that Young New Yorkers do and to get involved click HERE

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE’s Patrick Miller demonstrates an art experience where you rip posters off the wall to reveal yet more Faile posters underneath, which you can rip further. FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE’s Patrick McNeil demonstrates how to tag subway walls before the “Bast Ghosts” come after you. FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Temple. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Fantasy Island. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Wolf Within. Detail. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Ripped canvases. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

FAILE. Ripped canvases. “Faile: Savage/Sacred Young Minds” Brooklyn Museum, July 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Top image above >>> Denton Burrows, Crisp and Praxis collaboration. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Denton Burrows, Crisp and Praxis collaboration. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Gaia in Kingston, NY from 2014. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BR (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Barlo in Hong Kong. June 2015 (photo © Barlo)

Barlo in Hong Kong. June 2015 (photo © Barlo)

Two wolves at the dentist. Pyramid Oracle (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Lungebox (photo © Jaime Rojo)

This new KAWS sculpture was just gifted to the collection at The Brooklyn Museum and is on display in the lobby of the museum until December. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

UFO 907. This sculpure was originally made by the 907 Crew for an exhibition at BAM in Brooklyn. HERE is the coverage of that exhibit. We were pleasantly surprised to have seen it on this field someplace in the country side of this vast state. The UFO has landed indeed. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

UFO907 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Oji (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Oji (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Wednesday, May 10, 2017
548 West 28th Street
New York, NY
6:00 VIP hour with Michael K. Williams (Star and Super Star Tickets)
7:00–10:00 party (Regular tickets)

More information at YoungNewYorkers.org http://www.youngnewyorkers.org/

To learn more about the work that Young New Yorkers do and to get involved click HERE