Urban Legends
Ordinary People
The Birds and the Bees
The Birds and The Bees
Featuring the artwork of Gigi Chen & H. Veng Smith
The Birds and The Bees
Featuring the artwork of Gigi Chen & H. Veng Smith
Spring is the season for growth and renewal and with it, people come together in joyous celebration. Drunk off the familiar sensation of green grasses and blossoming flora, the world is alive and full of inspiration. A romantic essence fills the air with an intoxicating blend of rejuvenating aromas that tempts the body and plays with the mind. It is easy to lose oneself in the cacophony of reawakening, as senses are overloaded and forged into the memory. Through the enchanted feelings resides a notion of self-discovery that enables reckless abandonment, which leads to a multitude of outcomes. Mighty Tanaka is pleased to bring you our springtime show, The Birds and The Bees, featuring the fantastical artwork of Gigi Chen & H. Veng Smith.
The Birds and The Bees is a traditional metaphor for love, yet it also encompasses the sharp stinging pain of loss. It is a constant reminder of balance and desire as well as the shock of reality. As the warmth grows, so does the undergrowth and the tangle of vines and thorns, creating an ever-challenging terrain of hope and expectations to navigate.
Both Gigi Chen and H. Veng Smith utilize a host of inspiring techniques to create their individual work. Both artists create their work from oil paint, yet their achieved outcome differs greatly. As the days grow longer and the sun shines a little brighter, it’s the perfect setting for The Birds and The Bees to come out to play.
111 Front St., Suite 224
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Email: contact@mightytanaka.com
Phone: 718.596.8781
(F Train to York Street, A/C to High Street)
Hours:
Wednesday – Sunday, 12pm – 6:30pm
Ahhh, spring. Birdies, jellybeans, the smell of tulips, lavender hyacinth, aerosol paint. Cyrcle is putting up a new royally purple piece to celebrate the change of the season at LA Freewalls and Carlos Gonzalez was there to catch it in bloom.
See what Winter looked like here.
Let’s start off the week with our 2nd installment of Living Walls in Atlanta for 2012, a splendid overview of Cabbagetown and the installation by three of this years participants creating new murals over a nearly two week stretch, just finished and fresh for you.
Before I engage you with an individual take of La Pandilla and Trek Matthew’s twelve-day long mural production, I must foray into a brief history lesson; Cabbagetown is a tight-knit neighborhood in Atlanta that is rich with folklore and idiosyncrasies. Adjacent to the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills, the neighborhood began as a mill town complete with shotgun-style houses built by Jacob Elsas, the factory owner. After recruiting poor whites from the Georgia Appalachian region to work in his factory, Elsas offered free housing to compromise for insignificant wages and working conditions. Legend has it that the neighborhood assumed the moniker “Cabbagetown” after a truck-load of cabbages spilled across the neighborhood; many recount a brutal smell of cabbages that could be assumed to have followed the accident or maybe it just permeated from their kitchens.
After an extensive effort towards revitalization (some would say gentrification), Cabbagetown reigns as a treasured locality in Atlanta. Although Krog Tunnel features an ever-changing display of graffiti and street art, the CSX walls that enclose the neighborhood have remained four shades of grey. Surprisingly, when Living Walls contacted the Cabbagetown Neighborhood Association to allow La Pandilla, from Puerto Rico and Trek Matthews from Atlanta to paint two murals, they more than accommodated.
As soon as La Pandilla and Trek Matthews began on their wall, joggers, walkers and rubberneckers routinely stopped to chat and observe. Throughout production, community support yielded endless tokens of gratitude – fresh baked bread, beer runs, grilled cheese sandwiches, salvaged fresh-till packaged meals, oral histories and loud music. Even the infamous rogue buffer that verbally threatened La Pandilla (yes, Cabbagetown is home to it’s very own vigilante, occasionally violent buffer) grew to appreciate the finely detailed work that replaced decades of juvenile tags.
The truth is, Alexis Diaz and Juan Fernandez of La Pandilla are insane. Their method of using Chinese ink to translate immensely detailed drawings into full-scale murals costs a lot of time. Although they’d camp out at their wall from sunrise to sunset each day, they failed to finish on time. Hardly defeated, La Pandilla opted to stay an extra day and completed their 25-foot mural in their last hours.
Three blocks down, Trek Matthews, an emerging artist from Atlanta, began on his first public wall. His work incorporates a mash of Aztec patterns and Native American designs, which turns out nicely on the grey concrete. Despite the daunting height of his wall, Trek toughed it out on a scrappy extension ladder.
In a perfect world Living Walls would serve as proverbial residents of Cabbagetown forever. I could tell Juan felt the same way as he waved saying “bye y’all.
To learn more about Living Walls Altanta: The City Speaks and to make a donation to help this year’s conference click here. BSA thanks you for supporting this good work.
Our weekly interview with the street, featuring Alias, B.D.White, Bast, Ben Eine, Bishop 203, Gilf, Istanbul, MEMO, ND’A, Never, QRST, RWK, Sis-Art, Stikman, Vampire Cloud, and Veng (RWK).
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY