The festival has begun in parts of Mexico – a festival of remembering and celebration called The Day of the Dead. We celebrate this important event with some tears and with some joy – and more importantly, with you.
Special thanks to Core Art, who created this piece here in NYC.
Welcome to New York, where it is basically Halloween year-round when it comes to outlandish fashion on any given Wednesday on the D train or in the laundromat or at Fashion Week. Sometimes you may even think that the best costumers take Halloween off- leaving it to the amateurs. Honey, it’s all drag.
Here are some street art shots to help your mood for ’22.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Happy Halloween
Enjoy this Halloween parade of art on the streets of NYC. Stay safe!
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Adam Fujita, Lunge Box, Entes, Clint Mario, CMYK Dots, Font 147, Laurier Artiste, Nathan Nails, Lin Feitel, Spit, Eyeball Crew, Minvske, Gigstar, and Lou Hugus.
A pronghorn; the only antelope in North America and the fastest land mammal in the Western Hemisphere. The Oppussum is the only true member of the marsupial order that is endemic to the Americas. Basileus, a ring-tailed cat, and mammal of the raccoon family that is native to arid regions of North America.
These are all animals in our environs, yet you may not have ever seen one. They are important to our ancestral history of migration, development, and evolution across these expanses of land, air and water. We have co-existed for hundreds of years with these animals in his new exhibition in a tiny gallery on Manhattan’s lower East Side: a land mass that once was once a fertile landscape of marshes and woods. These furry and feather figures in ROA’s paintings may be far more aware of us than we are of them.
ROA, the street artist, the graffiti writer, the fine artist, the urban naturalist, the contemporary artist – whose work has appeared on city walls and on ruins in the rural countryside across many continents, may be unknown to you. But he has been here on the scene for 20 years, and BSA has been publishing about him for about 15 of them.
As we look at these new works, he speaks of these exceptional examples of species of North America, including more familiar ones like the chipmunk and the bluejay-which is painted here in his signature monochrome palette.
Whether a small drawing or a mid-sized canvas, or a massive multi-story outside wall, ROA stays true to detail and accuracy. The leeway he grants himself sometimes is the compositions, especially in his fictional groupings that also consider overall composition. An example in this show is the graphite on a paper scroll that features a small chorus of animals, an animated scroll of species crawling over each other that he says is “a crazy composition of something that never happened yet.” ROA says it isn’t necessarily a study for a future wall, but he could understand why you may think so.
“It’s unfinished. It’s a dynamic sketch,” he says. “It’s a show of how something could be.”
It is also a similar drawing to an aerosol wall painting that you may have seen elsewhere online. “I did a similar wall in Belgium not too long ago. This sketch is kind of inspired by that wall. It was a rounded wall. It was like 6 meters high, and I forgot the diameter. It is a silo. I painted around and around it, and it took me so long. That wall took me about two months. Not every day – sometimes I took a weekend off.”
After a pandemic period, this is ROA’s first trip back to New York. It’s a small, potent, intentional show that echoes others he has had here but now feels like an old friend returning. One that has survived. A native of Ghent, a city and a municipality in the Flemish Region of Belgium, he’s traveled the world actively until it all screeched to a stop in 2020. We’ve changed. Our city has changed. Nevertheless, he says, “I love New York. I couldn’t wait to get back here.”
ROA. In Limbo, on view at Benjamin Krause Gallery October 20th through November 6th.
149 Orchard St. Manhattan, NYC.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening:
1. Shepard Fairey – The Intersection of Art and Music
2. La Fuite – Pantonio. Via Street Art Fest Grenoble – Alpes 2022
3. Iran’s anti-Hijab protests enter 5th Week
It’s an advertisement for something but Shepard’s recollections of making the connection between art and music, specifically between the punk era and its effect on his creatively formative years, go a long way to illustrate his recurring themes and aesthetic. Interesting that the title is part of a Sound and Vision series, the same theme that is currently running through Faile’s work at their new club downtown, Deluxx Fluxx; “an immersive visual and audial art space and arcade”.
Shepard Fairey – The Intersection of Art and Music – Via Syng
La Fuite – Pantonio. Via Street Art Fest Grenoble – Alpes 2022
A gentle flickering flyby of “The Flight” by Pantonio for the Street Art Fest Grenoble in the Alps.
“Escape or think about the moment a single gesture changed direction,” says Pantonio.”When resistance collaborates in the opposite direction. Each one with his poetry or his determination”
Directed by Olivier Ruggiu Video Assistant: Yannis Lefrançois Drone by Olivier Ruggiu, Images by Oliver Ruggiu.
Iran’s anti-Hijab protests enter 5th Week
In the category of art in the streets, free speech, and protest; We focus on the fifth week of widespread anti-Hijab protests that continue to rock Iran amid the rising calls for the country’s leadership to step down. Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei has now issued a warning to the protesters- as he speaks to largely audiences of men, while the protesters are, in the majority, women.
A young master painting in the Old Master vein, perhaps, this Spanish poet captures something between the past and the future. Sebas Velasco is not yet 6 years out from his Masters in painting, yet he is bringing imagination and emotion to his mural work that gives you a longing to know more.
Along with the photographer, friend, and longtime collaborator Jose Delou, Velasco has been traveling the last six weeks from the Prado in Spain through Germany, then Sweden. Bringing depth to the surface, his portraiture stands astride the beauty, and decay; a romantic alienation found only in the modern metropolis.
While you might hesitate to mention the Spanish and Old Master painter Goya for fear it might complicate the conversation, Velasco is showing us how he will continue to build the image that will captivate. In some way, his manner of capturing the character is familiar, compelling, and somehow impossible.
Writing since the late 80s, Parisian artist PEST pulls out another high-style classic for Art Azoi in the city that has spawned much of the great graffiti since the 1990s – including his own crew named P19. While he has kept up with all the new styles from original New York to German style and many of the newer ones across the world, PEST gravitates to the classic graffiti culture and likes to keep it clean.
Three Chimneys (3 Xemeneies) Park in Barcelona sponsored a fall Mural Jam again this year and photographer Lluis Olive Bulbena shares some of the results with BSA readers. BCN once again organized the event along with the 6th Periferia Beat Festival where more than 50 artists came to show their skills and spend a relaxing day with their family and peers. Also onboard were DJs, concerts, dance performances, a roller skate jam, and an art market. This community event continues to grow and some say that this was the biggest roster by far.
Religion and its practices should be voluntary, not mandatory. For some reason historically, it takes men longer to realize this than women.
The killing of Jina Mahsa Amini for not wearing a headscarf (or hijab) in Iran recently may remind you of the various women’s rights movements internationally in the last century – a loud, messy, often violent insurrection of the oppressed – and the raised voices of those acting in solidarity. Unfortunately, this is how real change happens sometimes; by fighting for it.
Obviously, the young Kurdish Iranian had the right to decide whether to wear a scarf, or not. The ocean of women’s voices from inside Iran and outside over the past few weeks has been a resounding rejection of certain men’s authoritarian attempts to presume to dictate over women – including about completely personal topics like what to wear.
We bring you some exclusive shots of a visual protest inside the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan over the weekend. Unfurling banners from the top end of the continuous winding street of galleries that lead to the ground, a group of activists/artists called Anonymous Artist Collective for Iran, let loose yells and clapping as the red strips rolled toward the floor and captured the attention of museum-goers.
The lateral design alternated a stenciled portrait of Ms. Mahsa Amini with graphic text echoing those slogans shouted in streets in Kurdish, Persian, English, and many other tongues. “Zan zendegi azadi! Woman, life, freedom!”
History tells us that these riots and demonstrations will work gradually, in waves, until the oppressor gives up and concentrate on better uses of their intellect. By choosing a Manhattan museum of such stature, allies may be reaching new audiences who, in turn, will join the crowds at recent demonstrations like those in cities like Berlin, Washington, and Los Angeles – even Tempe, Arizona.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week!
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Chris RWK, De Grupo, Eternal Possessions, J131, ToastOro, Dapo Da Vinci, Mai Gai, SRF, ANSO, NANA, Deepo, BEOR, A Very Nice, Master Moody Mutz, Vers 718, and Love Notes.
Oh, Word? Word.
We may take them for granted, but these can be the most powerful, impactful things that we can do during our lifetime. That is why we follow the street scribes and listen to what is said and how. Because of the effort that it takes an artist or a poet, or a preacher to prepare these texts for us to read in the public sphere, we give them a little more respect. Perhaps you find them inspiring, puzzling, angering, or a waste of time.
If well chosen and well placed, the written word has the power to move mountains.
“Words are free. It’s how you use them that may cost you.” -KushandWizdom
“…But the human tongue is a beast that few can master. It strains constantly to break out of its cage, and if it is not tamed, it will run wild and cause you grief.” -Unknown
“Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate, and to humble.” -Yehuda Berg
“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.” -Joseph Conrad
“Don’t mix bad words with your bad mood. You’ll have many opportunities to change a mood, but you’ll never get the opportunity to replace the words you spoke.” -Unknown
“No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.” -John Keating
“If we understood the power of our thoughts, we would guard them more closely. If we understood the awesome power of our words, we would prefer silence to almost anything negative. In our thoughts and words, we create our own weaknesses and our own strengths. Our limitations and joys begin in our hearts. We can always replace negative with positive.” -Betty Eadie
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening:
1. JIDAR Street Art Festival – Toiles de rue 2022 جدار لوحات الشارع
2. “Battle of Street Art” London BEEF with Carnival Barker and Refreshments
3. SCORP WARS
Straight out of Rabat, its the 5th edition of the JIDAR Street Art Festival. Held this year April 22-28, the Moroccan capital city hosted 12 national and international artists from Morocco, Spain, France, Canada, Argentina and Belgium.
Directed and Edited by Raja Saddiki, Shot by Mehdi Laajali & Raja Saddiki
JIDAR Street Art Festival – Toiles de rue 2022 جدار لوحات الشارع
“Battle of Street Art” London BEEF with Carnival Barker and Refreshments
Yes, this is true, not a parody. Street Art Competition with folding chairs, ongoing narration, prizes, advertisement, refreshments, all facilitated with a Gary Numan soundtrack. Here are the last two years of this battle outside the Secret Art Gallery on Cheshire Street in London.
SCORP WARS
No, this is not true. It is a parody.
Yo Gnarf and Scorp have some beef. These toys have no respect anymore.
Comedian Orion Levine does stand-up and covers many topics. But his knowledge of graffiti codes and modes is on point.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY