In select neighborhoods of Los Angeles, certain street artists keep it local. You might see them in one neighborhood but not another, as the term “all-city” is not too important. Here’s a selection of pieces from the Arts District, Culver City, West Hollywood, Echo Park and Venice.
As we depart the City of Angels and the Devils go back to dirty old New York here are some images from the more organic and populist walls that exist in certain neighborhoods in every city. A Street Art pulse-taking, you can observe and assess the vitals of a community and some of the currents running through it just by observing these magnet walls that attract a cacophony of expression.
In the case of this block of walls, the Street Art is notable also for the high degree of political speech one can not find in “papers of record” on display for anyone who cares to see it or report on it. Whether it’s AIDS, censorship, or the military industrial complex, political speech has always been integral to the conversation on the street that these artists bring. With references to leaders like Julian Assange, Ronald Reagan, Ben Bernanke, and Nelson Mandela as well topics ranging from Abu Graib, FOX News, corporatized American Indians, and of course MOCA’s Jeffrey Dietch whitewashing the work of Italian Street Artist BLU’s wall, the LA Street Art scene is on fire with popular discontent and acidic criticism. With roots in people’s movements, seeing these displays from a great number of sources is actually a bit of a tribute to free speech and the city that permits its continuance.
The variety of styles and processes is pretty wide, ranging from large-run stickers and screen printed posters to hand stitched abstract geometry and penciled portraits, some exhibiting the New Guard that didn’t make it into the timeline at the museum show running this summer. Aside from the political, other themes include celebrity, video games, pop culture and simple illustrations and fascinations or daydreams. As usual, some of the freshest stuff is displayed in the gallery of the streets – uncurated, unpermissioned, unbought, unbossed, and – giving lie to the charge of street art as a simple marketing tool – many times it is unsigned. As today’s new street artists claim what they consider a birthright to circumvent the established system and take their work to the street, you’ll see an ongoing conversation that is full of life.
It’s been a hot week in Los Angeles for the Brooklyn set, this much warmth and sun consecutively is unsettling for cold northerners accustomed to six months of winter and unbearable cold. The hundreds of museum goers who are lined up to enter the MOCA “Art in the Streets” show this morning mark the end of official events over the last week as well as the private openings, events, and walls that popped up everywhere.
This weeks interview with the streets is largely an interview with Daniel Lahoda, an Angelino who has procured walls for visiting and local street artists in a few neighborhoods of the city since 2009. With no membership fee or admission, everyone is able to see the work of a whole lot of street artists where it was originated thanks to his organizational and diplomatic skills and his vision. We were very fortunate to receive a personal tour of the walls from Daniel over the course of a couple of days, including the gargantuan piece finished this week by Dabs & Myla with How & Nosm and the still fresh 42nd LA Free Wall as it was being completed by Street Artist Aiko. Since so many artists were in town for the general craziness, expect to see some new walls going up shortly that will thrill and delight.
So here’s this weeks interview with the street featuring Aiko, Augustine Kofie, CA, Carl Rauschenbach, Crayola, Dabs & Myla, David Flores, DFace, X, Herakut, How & Nosm, JR, Kid Zoom, M-City, Nomade, Philip Lumbang, Ripo, Roa, Saber, and Shepard Fairey.
Amid the madness that is the MOCA LA rollout of “Art in the Streets” this week, one of Brooklyn’s hometown favorites popped in her falsies and applied a fresh coat of Chanel Rouge lipstick before sinking her pointy incisors into the New Image Gallery in West Hollywood.
Dressed head to stiletto in black and florescent night glamooouuuur, the gallery that had the balls to champion a number of unconventional street artists for more than a decade gave every inch of floor, wall and ceiling to Street Artist Judith Supine for this installation. Since the MOCA show so far looks like a compendium of the last 50 years, it’s understandable that it overlooks the 30 or so New Guard on the streets today who are ushering in an era of storytelling and mashups, but clearly Miss Supine will be in BSA’s “Art In The Streets” show when we’re talking about the 2010s.
A smaller version of the full blowout Supine did at English Kills in Bushwick Brooklyn a couple of years ago, “Ladyboy” is a more focused and tight hallucinatory play of collaged and freakish imagery alluding to the underground sex industry, child exploitation, and the magnetic allure of iniquity. When this heavy stuff is cut with a handy pen knife in your handbag, fed through the surreal filter of Ms. Supine’s mind and flooded over with a thick shiny coat of liquid glass, the dark magic is suspended in time. Our time.
Yes, Banksy is here. The giant “Art in the Streets” show opening this weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles gives a patch of real estate to the international man of mystery who has contributed greatly to the worldwide profile of this soon to be, maybe already, mainstream phenomenon known as street art. A smattering of his pranksterism is an absolute must for any show staking claim to the mantle of comprehensive survey and an excellent way to garner attention. But “Streets” gets it’s momentum by presenting a multi-torch colorful and explosive people’s history that began way before Banksy was born and likely will continue for a while after.
“Art In the Streets” has begun exactly where it started – outside on walls. The number of people in Los Angeles this week to mark Sunday’s opening of the show at the Museum of Contemporary Art grows by the hour and there are more walls in progress than a housing boom. Just in the last couple of days we’ve seen commissioned and non-commissioned new murals, pieces, tags, and installations freshly dripping by people like How & Nosm, Lee Quinones, Shepard Fairey, Blade, Cern1, JR, Augustine Kofie, Invader, Os Gemeos, Nomade, Saner, and many others.
Futura says it’s like Summer camp and others have likened it to a family reunion, which makes us think of lawn chairs, cheap beer, barbecue, and crazy old uncle Jed sitting on a picnic table rubbing egg salad into his hair and talking about the Republicans. But yeah, right now in this little part of LA there is a feeling of a camp that is headed maniacally toward total circus.
The show itself, which we’ve seen in it’s entirety, is an audacious and colorful endeavor to bring about 50 years of Graffiti and Street Art history and a number of it’s influencers and influences under one roof. Engaging and educational, visitors will have the opportunity to learn how certain tributaries lead to this river. No show on this worldwide phenomenon could ever hope to include everyone, and Curator Jeffrey Deitch, along with associate curators Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose have chosen touchstones and flashpoints that push their individual visions of how the story unfolded. While it doesn’t break much brand new ground, only the Bittersons (or Jealousinskis) will find sufficient cause to try to mug this solid, entertaining and participatory show full of surprises. But for a scene that never sought permission in the first place, it won’t matter.
Here are a collection of images on the museum grounds itself. Previews from the show tomorrow.
Barry McGee (Twist) finished this wall before heading indoors to reprise an installation he did in 2000 with ESPO and REAS called Street Market. Roger Gastman says of the new installation that was still being finished as of yesterday afternoon, “This is another version ten years later, basically on crack. They brought in a number of other great artists to help work with them on it. Now it includes Alexis Ross, Dan Murphy, Jeff Flynn and a few others.” (photos tomorrow)
Often people like to refer to what’s happening on the streets today like it’s a homogenized “scene” in which a number of actors are somehow coordinated and in agreement, acting in concert with a predetermined speed and direction to deliberately affect Street Art’s evolution. While you may spot certain themes and influences that are common within the ever mutating scene, it’s important to know that for an individual street artist, usually the whole experience boils down to the personal story, and everything else that emanates from it.
Street Artist QRST recently completed and installed this piece in New Orleans and it’s topic and symbolism could not possibly be more personally meaningful.
His largest piece to date,”Patron” is a tribute to QRST’s father, a biology professor who studied the behavior of bees and wasps and whom he lost to cancer when the artist was a teenager. With this piece QRST attempts to examine “the manner in which a parent, and a father specifically, shapes a person and their view of the world”. He also points out how the memories that we have of the loved ones who have left us can change and fade with time and often all we have left are symbols that helps us connect with them. When QRST talks about this hand painted wheat paste as tribute and catharsis, you can tell that he thinks a lot about his father, his view of the world, and the symbols that remain as he makes his own marks upon it.
“I guess I am ‘Canonizing’ him in my mind with symbols that I associate with him. The person that he actually was evaporates over the course of time until he’s just a symbol, in a manner very similar to a saint in Catholicism. New Orleans felt like the perfect place for him with its brand of Catholicism, saint devotion, Caribbean and West African religious aspects all coming together in a strange and magic place with it’s own dark and long held traditions, ceremonies and celebrations. It felt like the ideal, polytheist environment to place my own devotional piece.”
“As to the specific iconography, most everything here is deliberate. There are a number of references to sex and virility, the bees being obvious (though also a personal symbol for me; he was a biology professor that specifically studied the behavior of bees and wasps); his hand gesture similar to a sexual reference though he’s actual spelling P and A in sign language, both the first two letters of the word “patron” and also spelling “pa”; his fingers are covered in pollen (which again references bees, but also the male half of a haploid reproductive system). He’s approximately seven and a half feet tall with the advantage of being about two feet off of the ground to begin with – this also relates to a fatherly figure in general.
He’s standing in a pile of books as a symbol of learning, teaching, and science, but also as a reference to St Albert the Great, the patron saint of science (and also teaching to some extent) who is generally shown with a book or tome. The books with bees and wasps on the covers are self explanatory at this point I suppose. Some aspect of their latin names are included in several instances, which again relates to both science and the canonizing aspects together. “Sceintia vulgaris” is a really poor way to write “common knowledge” in Latin (which works doubly well, as it’s close enough to get the point across without being pedantic) which is again a reference to teaching, or making knowledge less secret or esoteric. This also relates to my entire understanding of the influence that he had on me: science and reason and nature being the benevolent and humbling magic of the universe; The magnificence of the world around us, the cause to celebrate and be reverential, not because someone else claims secret knowledge of an angry deity telling me what to do and what not to do. The book with the hammer and saw is a reference to Joseph, the patron saint of fatherhood, the tree is a reference to family and ancestory.
I don’t think I’ve ever installed anything this large before. All tolled he’s about 9 or 10 feet tall, so the very top is about 11 or 12 feet off of the ground. Thankfully I had two eager assistants, but I still managed to almost fall off of the foot stool we were using resulting in the minor damage to the ‘Q’ in the banner and a tiny bit of damage to one of the books. He feels already well worn in, like he’s been there for some time, which I quite like. Overall I’m fairly pleased. ~ QRST
French Street Artist LUDO is back in Paris and fresh from his first solo show at the Starkat Gallery in Zurich, which was very well attended and as they say, well receeeeeeived.
The Zurichian streets received LUDO too. Roman from Starkat took these photos on the streets of this “spic-and- span” wealthiest city of Europe and shares a few with you here. LUDO’s ongoing wild imaginary mutant plants look as futuristic and menacing as ever, and in a pristine mall-like environment like this Swiss centerpiece, you have to wonder how how far some of these contraptions can be from reality. There’s some chocolate for thought.
“It was fascinating during the installation to observe neighbors who have seen one another for years stopping to hang out, talk and meet one another. So it’s cool to think that after the images are down, the friendships will continue.” ~Jetsonorama
Street Artist Jetsonorama likes to take pictures of people and create large scale portraits of them to wheatpaste in their own community with the goal of fostering connectedness among neighbors.
Using a friends’ building in San Francisco for a backdrop, he worked last week to put up portraits of two people and a neighborhood dog, BB. The Dogpatch section of San Francisco is the only part of the city left standing after the 1906 earthquake and the fires that followed it. Officially deigned a historic district in 2003, the nine square block section was initially an immigrant neighborhood with hand-built workers’ cottages, factories, and warehouses, many still standing.
Jetsonorama gives us some background on the project here:
“Bruno Mauro of Ampersand International Arts in Dogpatch knew I’ve been exploring the idea of using art to build community through my wheat pasting project on the Navajo nation. He was kind enough to literally offer me his home (after consulting with his wife, Surma), to pursue the idea of community building using his home as a canvas.
In exploring this idea here, Bruno suggested I meet Patricia Parker and her mother, who have lived in Dogpatch in their current house for 50 years or so. Both Patricia and her mom attended Irving M. Scott school, which was built in the 1890s and is the oldest standing public school in San Francisco. Together, these two people are dogpatch history, and they know it.
Imogen Doumani lives across the street from the gallery and from Pat. She represents the youthful vibe coming into the neighborhood. BB the beagle is representing those who give the area it’s name.
The piece is composed of regular bond paper from Fedex/Kinko’s adhered to the wall with wheat paste I made. It’s susceptible to the elements and will go away with time. My hope is that the conversations and community-building started with this project will continue long after the piece is down.”
Veng and Chris from RWK gathered their paint tools and called a couple of their friends over to hang out and paint on their spot in Bushwick, BK. The results have been like chocolate and peanut butter together – you are not sure how it works, but it does. Overunder, ECB, Peeta and Never collaborated on this brand new wall, still in progress.
Since it’s Saturday and you are still in your pajamas and on your third bowl of sugar coated vampire cookie cereal, here’s a look at Bortusk Leers cartoons. The Street Artist has a whole posse of monsters and characters that splurp and plop and zing out of his imagination onto sheets of old newspaper with a child’s paint brush and florescent non-toxic paint that is safe to eat.
The wheatpastes on New York streets look so guileless and unaffected that you might also think his work is simple and unstudied. Truth is Bortusk is deliberate in his depictions of their crazy disproportions and he likes to poke fun at his creatures and play with the viewer. Luckily for the artist and kids, he also learned how to animate his monsters and his inventive short stories have an audience on TV and the web too.
This weekend brings a Spring bounty of delicious Street Art related openings in many cities across this great country of ours. But FIRST, this OLD SKOOL Romanic Boogie Down Production …
Pump Up the Sculpture Jam from SAM3
Sticker Phiends in AZ
Tempeh is a soy product and meat substitute originally from Indonesia. Tempe is a city in Arizona that is hosting the 4th giant Sticker Phiends show tonight. Stickers continue to grow in influence in Street Art and in private collections in black books and refrigerator doors and this is a cool show that gives them away and sells them. They have limited edition “Sticker Phiends” tee-shirts designed by Brooklyn street art collective Robots Will Kill. Also cold beer. Possibly tempeh too because Chris RWK is a good veggie.
FREE HANDOUTS provided by our sponsors
ALL ART for $ale!
Limited Merch for $ale!
Drinks with ID – 21+
Opens at 8pm April 8th!
Cartel Coffee Lab
25 w. University Dr.
Tempe, AZ.
480-225-3899
Some of the names include:
Abcnt, Age, Dolla, DumperFoo, Dissizit/Slick, 123 Klan,Griffin One, Clown Soldier, Mad One, Mat Curran, MBW, 20 MG, Obey, Pez One (U.K.), Sike’, U.W.P., Seizer One
The Carmichael Gallery will be throwing a memorable opening party for Martha Cooper’s REMIX show and, lazy hyperbole aside, this one is one NOT to miss.
Photographs by Martha Cooper
with
Original remixes of these photographs in a range of media by Aeon, John Ahearn, Aiko, Bio, Nicer & B-Gee, Blade, Blanco, Mark Bode, Burning Candy, Victor Castillo, Cey, Cekis, Claw, Cosbe, Crash, Dabs & Myla, Anton van Dalen, Daze, Dearraindrop, Jane Dickson, Dr. Revolt, Shepard Fairey, Faust, Flying Fortress, Freedom, Fumakaka, Futura, Gaia, Grotesk, Logan Hicks, How & Nosm, LA II, Lady Pink, Anthony Lister, The London Police, Mare 139, Barry McGee, Nazza Stencil, Nunca, José Parlá, Quik, Lee Quinones, Kenny Scharf, Sharp, Skewville, Chris Stain, Subway Art History, Swoon, T-Kid, Terror161 and more.
Carmichael Gallery
5795 Washington Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232
April 9 – May 7, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 9, 6-8pm
Click on the link below for more information regarding this show:
In San Francisco ROA will have his opening at the White Walls Gallery with his iconic paintings of nature’s marginalized animals in large scale. Ever the hard worker, ROA paints non stop year round all over the globe on surfaces that are challenging, like this one on the side of a mobile home. If you have only seen his art on line and if you are in San Francisco this Saturday, it’s your turn!
For more information about this show contact the gallery.
White Walls Gallery
835 LARKIN ST.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA. 94109
Phone: 415.931.1500
Chor Boogie in Washington DC
While the Rich Man Party of NO! brings the country to a halt in the Capitol, Chor Boogie will be bringing much needed healing color to Washington DC at The Fridge Gallery.
Chor Boogie is an artist, a conceptual genius, a street romantic, a master of illusion and technique, Chor Boogie is an original. His works can be described as having healing effects by his unique and unmatched use of color, which brings greater meaning and understanding to his works. Every vibrant piece has a story attached to it. Chor Boogie’s colorful paintings are attracting A-list celebrities, art galleries and museums. Originally from San Diego, the artist known as Chor Boogie currently resides in San Francisco but is an internationally known artist and has traveled extensively to exhibit his work around the world.
The Fridge is located at
516 8th Street, SE
REAR ALLEY
Washington, DC 20003
David Ellis and Blu in a collaboration of a loop video from 2009
Yo Son the Boyz from Queens are Comin out With New Jams Next Month!
Street art welcomes all manner of materials and methods, typically deployed without permission and without apology. This hand-formed wire piece …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
Ben Eine in Venice (photo © Jaime Rojo)
