French stencil artist C215 has just released this video, a stylized manifesto of sorts giving his view on his art, his work, and the current state of Street Art.
We are pleased he is participating in “Street Art Saved My Life: 39 New York Stories” this August in LA, and this short but powerful video shows why the stories behind C215’s very personal portraits are some of the most impactful and resilient on the street today.
“I prefer the poetry of small paintings instead of big walls, which are very popular right now in the graffiti scene, but a bit fascistic.”
Our weekly interview with the Streets, this week including images from New York, Detroit, and Amsterdam, and work by C215, Dan Sabau, El Sol 25, Gilf!, Goons, Karma, Nice-One, and Specter.
Street Artist Gilf! has been trying something new by adding to her stencils a bit of toule, which is a departure from earlier work and a hard word to try and pronounce.
Street Artist and burly bear Veng came out of hibernation this spring with a roaring hunger for walls and so far he’s foraged plenty of them in BKLN. From the breezy shores of La Isla Conejo to the rusty thickets of Bushwick, the borough of Brooklyn has a few hundred feet more of aerosol paint since this guy poked his head out of the cave during the thaw.
Just this week we found him placidly smacking his choppers and savoring the last taste of lunch while sitting on a sidewalk and surveying the sweeping Veng Vista across the street; almost one entire block length wall that he’s completing this weekend for the big Bushwick Open Studios 2011.
Now in it’s 5th year and produced by the volunteer army Arts in Bushwick, the studios and streets are fair game for visitors and artists of all stripes and abilities. Each year it is entertaining and educational to witness who’s moved on, who’s still hanging on, and who’s just arrived to claim credit for it all. Veng is one of the hangers-on; in fact one of the starter-uppers when it comes to Street Art here.
As we reported yesterday, Factory Fresh Gallery has two entries in this year’s festival, a veritable double bill of Indoor and Outdoor. Inside the gallery is “Surrealism,” perhaps in honor of the British-born Mexican Surrealist Master Leonora Carrington who passed away May 25th or perhaps to acknowledge Surrealism’s many currents running through pop culture and street culture today.
The Outside portion showcases the “Bushwick Art Park”, FF’s entry to the New Museum’s Festival of Ideas, which proposes to build an art park on this very block of Vandevoort Place where Veng is painting. No stranger to surrealism himself, Veng often depicts his characters in other-worldly portraits with birds as hats and hats as boats and intricately detailed scenes nested within scenes.
These process shots from Thursday show him trampling along on the immense wall and by Friday he told us he’d be done. You’ll need to check this one yourself to verify. While bears can move fast sometimes, they also tend to favor long naps.
1a. John Burgerman crosses Wburg Bridge with Bananas on head
1. BOS 2011 – Bushwick Open Studios This Weekend
2. 3rdEye(Sol)ation
3. “Surrealism” and “Bushwick Art Park”
4. “Stay Gold” at Curbs & Stoops Active Space
5. “Fine-Ass Art” at Kings County Bar
6. GILF! Pop Up
7. New Ludo “Green Beery” (VIDEO)
We really are so damn lucky to be here in NYC. The cultural offerings are always varied, plentiful, inspiring and in many cases FREE. Of course the rent is too high and your bedroom can accomodate a bed or a dresser but not both, but when you hit the streets the cultural stimulation never stops.
For example, newly arrived Noo Yawker Jon Burgerman practiced his good posture and accentuated his down jacket this spring by traipsing through the streets and across the Williamsburg Bridge balancing bananas on his head.
From Jon’s most recent and exhausting email, “Sometimes the things you see (on the street) are rather lovely, like the blossom on the trees and people outside drinking coffee and graffiti so fresh the paint is still wet.”
BOS 2011 – Bushwick Open Studios This Weekend
Hats off to the BOS crew who have laid the foundations for the new artists and curators to grow upon.
BOS ’11 – Bushwick Open Studios is in it’s fifth year and many newly minted blogs and curators are discovering this once desolate industrial pit. It’s still a pit, but at least it’s not so desolate — it also helps that high rents elsewhere have created this steady river of people flowing out of the L train Morgan stop.
Speaking of which;
IMPORTANT TRAVEL ADVISORY: The L train will NOT be running between Manhattan and Brooklyn for the entire weekend. Take the JMZ trains instead and you’ll still get dropped right in the middle of it.
Below are our picks, and while our focus is primarily on Street Art artists and events, please hit the BOS site to take a look at the complete list of events and shows:
Jason Mamarella’s curated a group show featuring Billi Kid, Peru Ana Ana Peru, ASVP, Mike Die, Jos-L, dint wooer krsna, Quel Beast, Septerhed, Choice Royce, Kosbe, QRST, Trixtr Rabbit, Bankrupt Slut, CCB, Wisher 914, ZamArt opens this Friday at 3rd Eye(sol)ation 7-10 pm.
For more information, location and hours about this show click on the link below:
SURREALISM:
twenty artists from the neighborhood wrestle their unconscious.
An exhibition at Factory Fresh for Bushwick Open Studios curated by Jason Andrew and Ali Ha.
Jim Avignon, Kevin Curran, Ryan Michael Ford, Paul D’Agostino, Ben Godward, Tamara Gonzales, Andrew Hurst, Rebecca Litt, Francesco Longnecker, Norman Jabaut, J.P. Marin, Brooke Moyse, Garry Nichols, Patricia Satterlee, Pufferella, Skewville, John Sunderland, Sweet Toof, Marjorie Van Cura & Veng
BUSHWICK ART PARK
A one day community event June 4th, 1-7pm
Located at the proposed Bushwick Art Park on Vandervoort Place
Factory Fresh is sponsoring a street event with art and murals to showcase their entry on this year’s Festival of Ideas that the New Museum produced and staged at the Bowery early in May.
Kings County has hosted a number of street artists for shows at this dark haunt for about four years and tonight a few more get their shine on. You may also coax a a go-go girl or boy onto the bar to add to the visual candy on the walls. Man, that’s some fine-ass art.
Gilf! Pop Up Gallery
107 Forrest Ave btw Flushing Ave and Central Ave (across from
English Kills Gallery)
Friday 7-9
Sat 12-9, opening reception from 7-9
Sun 12-7
New Ludo “Green Beery” (VIDEO)
The latest video from Parisian Street Artist Ludo:
Opera Gallery, that is…as long as we are playing with words.
What you can’t play with is the cinematic experiences Logan is evoking with his black and white portraiture and his ever-growing love affair with architecture, street scenes, industrial machinations and the vanishing point. Logan produces generously in this show of indoor and outdoor scenes, ever more complex, and now with some abstraction and laser etching for balance. Additional warmth of the regal sort emanates from his commanding portraits, many of them African Chiefs whom he met and photographed last year while working on a project in The Gambia, which he reported on here and here for BSA.
Street Artist Bortusk Leer’s smiling and devious characters drawn and colored with a childlike mind continue to make people on New Yorks’ streets smile. As previous artist neighborhoods like Williamsburg are overrun with helicopter moms jogging behind strollers, the professional parents taking their progeny to playdates probably think the wheatpastes are the Universe’s welcome to their bundles of joy.
Actually, Bortusk’s demented and happy monsters predate many of the new arrivals and his googly eyed crew is now in many cities around the world, and more often these days galleries too. Mr. Leer sure gets around with these unruly companions who have a disarming way of bringing the hype all down a notch to the simple joys of swinging mindlessly on the monkey bars and giving Billy Blickstein a wedgy and pulling Danisha’s hair and sticking bubblegum up your nose.
On the occasion of his solo show now on view (extended to June 26) at Tony’s Gallery in Shoreditch, East London’s Don’t Panic conducted an interview with the artist and along with his answers they give us a good view of the multicolor mad man installations:
“I get to Bortusk’s playground just as the rain starts to fall. An Oompa Loompa lets me in through the main gate and guides me across the psychedelic courtyard. I take shelter under the peppermint trees and wait for my maniacal host to arrive. The walls are lined with weird, nu-rave creatures; a colourful assortment of monsters and mismatched porcelain dolls, watching through beady, fluorescent eyes as I wait for their master…“
Urban Viking timberwolf Dennis McNett just returned to Brooklyn from a gothic crusade across the US invoking the imagery of mythic god monsters and engaging the imaginations of the ever-legion artistic minions who follow him. The Street Artist, performance art director, professor, and proto-historic re-enactor knows how to engage the fun loving child and the warrior beast within students and artists alike. Whether invoking the Latino folk beast the Chupakabra, Nordic mythology, or McNett’s own mystical Wolfbats and Wolf-eagles, the 3-month tour successfully summoned the awestruck to participate in a loosely guided theater and public performance art wherever it went.
” The students UW each made helmets, axes, swords, and also helped to build the frost giant, the blood ice castle, and Wolfbat Sled. After processioning through State Street we went out onto the frozen lake to conjure the great frost giant Ymir from his blood ice castle and we had a ceremony of battle” – Dennis McNett
Leaving the major metropolitan centers to the effete and coddled lily-livered mama’s boys and girls, Dennis trudges into the nether regions of a vast continent to 10 outlying wolf settlements including Vermillion, SD, Bellingham,WA, Madison, WI, Jacksonville. FL, St. Louis, MO, Kansas City, MO, Emporia Kansas, Wichita, KA, Omaha, NE, Lubbock, TX, and Odessa, TX. At each encampment, McNett’s imagination and enthralling storytelling persuades locals to participate in parades, prop making, and to summon the roaring grunt from deep within all mythic monsters to slay adversaries and chest pound with victory.
By now McNett’s mask making and heavily carved contour lines have mutated to include everything they intersect with, and participants are game to call forth the roar of the inner wolfbat and light stuff on fire, with a torch in one hand and a shank of grizzled wilderbeast in the other. During the tour the McNett adventures involved sacrificial burnings, fortune telling, piñatas, the guttural roaring of metal bands, custom trains, chupakabras, Viking vessels, blood ice castles, and of course, UFOs.
“This event involved a lot. The guys at Escapist allowed me to have a show of work at their space – so that was the end spot for the nights chaos. We built a Wolfbat War Vessel that started at the Inkubator where there were two alien pinatas built at Wichita State Univeristy. Sedlec Ossuary (a metal band from Topeka) was set up inside the vessel and students from KCAI, Emporia State, and Wichita State showed up in Wolfbat warrior regalia.
The local crowd from the First Friday art walk gathered as we slayed the aliens and proceeded down the street with the band growling. The street was overrun and traffic had to move at the pace of the Wolfbat mob. After making our way to Escapist we slayed 3 more alien pinatas, burned a sacrificial war eagle in the street, and lit off tons of fireworks. Thank you Deluxe, Vans, and Volcom for filling the pinatas and the support. Thank you Ericka, James, and Miguel and Wichita State, KCAI, and Emporia state students for showing up and getting down” – Dennis McNett
“Omaha is known as the “Gate City of the West” because it is where Union Pacific Railroad built and started the first transcontinental railroad, making it a major hub leading west by train. For the my visit to the University of Nebraska, Omaha we launched the first ever Wolfbat Railway. I built a print covered train steam engine and all the students made cowboy hats. On the last day we paraded the train to the new business center where it will live” – Dennis McNett
“The Chupakabra have joined with the Wolfbat in order to track the Jackalope and reclaim their territories in west Texas. The Jackalope have come down from Wyoming and have been over breeding the lands and pushing the Chupakabra out. Once the head Jackalope heard the Chupakabra had put a hit out for his life he fled. Unknowingly the travel agent booking his flight to Stonehenge was actually working for the Wolfbat and booked the flight to the Stonehenge replica in Odessa, TX where the clan are awaiting his arrival” – Dennis McNett
Seizing the moment after a high-visibility Super Bowl performance, street artist Alberto León created a wheatpaste titled “America” in Barcelona. …Read More »
A transformed school bus becomes a mobile healing site at the US-Mexico border. This documentary short (Guadalupe Maravilla’s “Mariposa Relámpago”) …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
