The ever-morphing conglomerate crew called 1UP appears and disappears in cities and countries across the world today, their tag aesthetics drawn from a smorgasbord of styles, rather than just one or two. On the radar, yet skillfully under it, the membership of this large team includes the raw and the polished, the illustrative and the calligraphic.
During Art Basel in December, it appears that a few writers of One United Power were in Miami outputting the simple one-color tags, tight bubbles and sparkling throw-ups, as well as full-blown productions that conjure other worlds and childhood fantasy-scapes.
You can see Wynwood from Miami Beach now, thanks to new multi-story buildings sprouting up in this art-washed neighborhood, transforming its former glory into something far above you. Soaring upward a few stories are these three, painted by the west coast street artist Miles MacGregor, known as El Mac, who elevates the everyday hero once again on a large scale.
The new
apartment complexes like these are replacing the charming one story high stucco
“bodegas” and warehouses selling Chinese manufactured goods in bulk. The
young sitters appear to be of African and Latin ancestry and you are reminded
of America’s professed love of inclusivity and equality – not the class/wealth-based
exclusivity that is constantly hammered into our collective consciousness by
the relentless ads of luxury brands and lifestyle marketing that only a very
small fraction of the populous will ever own.
These
are soft-faced, serene-looking children; two of them holding a single rose and
one of them with his hands extended as if offering a prayer or beckoning you to
step into his world. Perhaps they are saints, but it is difficult to discern
what their role is. El Mac asks us to turn our attention to the experimental
novel ‘Beautiful Losers,” by Leonard Cohen.
“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. …
Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.”
Welcome to Wynwood! – A little piece of chaotic urban paradise and real estate development that has blossomed into a mini-holy city for fans of murals.
The convergence of three events during the 2010’s – cheap digital camera phones, social media, and mural festivals – have created this intense and colorful tourist neighborhood in Miami during the same time. The sheer number of happy extended families, groups of friends, and couples in love all were converging on the evolving neighborhood to see art in the streets. They also take pictures with it, pose in front of it, buy refrigerator magnets of it, and listen to tour guides speak about it.
During a recent day in the Wynwood Walls compound, which is surrounded on neighboring streets with a plethora of other murals, unsanctioned Street Art, and graffiti, we saw a number of newly painted murals that have replaced others there. We also saw that a few of the old favorites have been reinvigorated. Here is just a handful of images of the action.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Miami, and this time featuring Dasic Fernandez, Ernesto Maranje, Faile, Michael Vasquez, Buff Monster, Futura, Dan Kitchener, and Tats Cru.
You ever feel as if you are levitating above the sidewalk
when walking through the city? It happens. Maybe you just got Tui-Na in
Chinatown and your spinal column is especially stretched and tall. Maybe your
girlfriend just told you that you are definitely The One and your head is in
the clouds. Maybe you are high on opioids.
Hard to say exactly how we felt when walking in Wynwood, Miami last month when we saw this figure from Anthony Lister on the sidewalk across the street from the new Museum of Graffiti.
We’d seen the big Lister tag that accompanied this on the wall above it, smashed alongside the work of so many other artists up and down the block that have occurred since Director Alan Ket and his amazing team opened the museum during Art Basel Week a month ago.
Maybe because it differentiates itself from the myriad murals around the neighborhood, maybe because his newly abstracted superheroic figure appears to float slightly above the surface, it caught our eye and made an impression – creating a sensation of levitation without heavy optics or heavy hand.
It’s good to know that art on the street can still do that. No surprise it was Lister who pulled it off.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Swoon: Cicada at Deitch 2. Biancoshock: GRAFFITRICKS 3. Bien Urbain Festival 2019 Re-Cap by Kristina and Nazar from MZM Projects 4. ARTinfect 4 – The Pfaff Project Part 2
BSA Special Feature: Swoon: Cicada at Deitch
Long time supporter of Street Artist Swoon in her work on the street and in the studio, gallery director Jeffery Deitch has again given a platform to the enlightened wanderings and otherworldly investigations of the artist with a new exhibition in Manhattan. Directed by Frederic King, the character/s of the artists now have dimension, and movement, and a curious way of revealing and concealing. Once again the undercurrents in Swoon’s work are formidable, the presentation ornately manifested.
Biancoshock: GRAFFITRICKS
Biancoshock is back with a new collection of handmade tools that enable hoodlums to write graffiti, or some variation of it in a multitude of ways. In a continuous stance of provocation, the Italian conceptualist redefines the street game by creating one ingenious invention after another. For him, “This is a simple demonstration that creativity can easily fight every kind of institutional control and prohibitive policies.”
Bien Urbain Festival 2019 Re-Cap by Kristina and Nazar from MZM Projects
The 9th edition of Bien Urbain is just completed and MZM Projects presents a tonal treatment to the uniquely contextual festival. You don’t know who the stars are, because in the case of Bien Urbain it truly is a more inclusive conversation – to use an overused word – about the role of art and intervention in the urban environment.
ARTinfect 4 – The Pfaff Project Part 2
The graffiti writer’s lexicon continues to evolve and spread into areas that early writers would have considered verboten. Today graffiti artists often do the same stuff as Street Artists but the labels aren’t important as long as you know how to command the can.
Here in Kaiserlautern, a city in southwest Germany, the artist Carl Kenz has curated the new edition of ARTinfect with a sensibility toward space that recognizes the individual artist – and is a little uncommon in the ‘graffiti jam’ event world. Here you see that each artist is afforded ample industrial framing to develop their work – unimpeded by a too-close neighbor. These abandoned factories are often splendid staging spaces, and it is good to see this international selection of artists granted a good place to create harmony with the decay.
To welcome the new year we spent the last few weeks presenting a collection of images that stirred us and paired them with BSA Wishes for 2020.
Below the video is the full list of all the wishes, along with our non-scientific lists of “Top” stories, videos, images, books for the year (and in one case, for the decade which we’ve just departed). For the past couple of weeks we have been sharing one wish at a time with you.
With gratitude for the year that was, and hope for the year that will be, our hearts are full. We’re sending love to you BSA friends and family. Happy New Year.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
