A Concept for a gallery show inspires one street artist to try an on-the-street experiment.
Billi Kid recently completed his version of a shoe-shine box to contribute to the unusual show that Bed-Stuy gallery Brooklynite opens next week, and he decided to take his box a step further.
The 100 artists, mostly street artists, have created their own version of a shoe-shine box, a metaphor for the entrepreneurial spirit. “Having been born in a third world country, Colombia, I have seen many a kid making a living shining shoes,” says Billi. “They hustle a modest living out of their shoeshine boxes. It is a testament to the human will to survive that these kids stretch their craft day and night to simply put food on their table. That is, if they even have a table.”
Billi Kid is a bit of an entrepreneur himself so he used his shine box on the street to sell some of his artwork. In New York City, as a result of street artists winning a fight with the Giuliani administration in the late 1990’s to sell their art on the streets, you are allowed set up a table and sell your own artwork without fear of reprisal.
“I took Brooklynite’s challenge to heart and set out to see if I could actually put food on the table working out of my “SHINEBOX,” says the artist. Taking into account overhead costs for creating his postcards, “I figured that I would need to sell at least 16 postcards per hour @ a $1.00 each to make $8.00 dollars in profit an hour.”
Traffic was pretty good on his spot near the park, and a number of people stopped to look at his signature political-personality postcards featuring the likes of George Bush, Sara Palin, and Michelle Obama. Within a couple of hours, 20 postcards of Billi Kid’s had sold, and the short-lived experiment ended up with Billi and his cameraman in a nearby pizza joint eating the profits. Luckily, there was money left for the subway home.
AND HE MADE A PROMOTIONAL VIDEO WITH THE EXPERIENCE
More on Billi’s experiment Here
Other Articles You May Like from BSA:
Some walls in Visoko still bear the pock marked patterns of bullets from the Bosnian War just over two decades ago. These newly battered walls bring back portraits of its victims. HAD Collective. "...
A uniquely dark atomized aesthetic and vocabulary that references computer modeling and Rorschach tests, the subjects of DALeast’s focus are energetic skins, or simply skin-like armor that moves to c...
Before we lose the warmth of the sun we wanted to reflect on one of the largest graffiti shows curated under one theme that was mounted this summer right on the streets of Brooklyn by members of the l...
Belgian Street Artist Adele winged it over to New Delhi last week to bring one of her multi-feathered friends to this new wall in the Lodhi Colony. With her mother as assistant (and photograp...
Trump thought he could lift his poll numbers or legitimacy or at least his personal wealth by taking a world tour this week where he sold $100 billion in arms to Saudia Arabia, scored $100 milli...