We’re pleased today to show you the new article about our exhibition and book “Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures” at Urban Nation – this one from the German Monopol magazine.
“Her voice on the phone is friendly and warm. But Martha Cooper, this is clear, does not want to be bored. Naturally not,” begins journalist Silke Hohmann in her article for Monopol.
Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures. Urban Nation Museum Berlin. Monopol Magazine
“Otherwise she would not have climbed on a motorcycle in 1965 to ride from Thailand to England at the age of 22. Otherwise, she would not have moved to Tokyo as a young woman to explore and photograph a legendary and discrete tattoo scene and one of its masters at work. Otherwise, she would not become the first female photographer at the New York Post in the 1970s where she photographed life in the urban wasteland. Cooper’s photographs of Breakdancers from the 1980s are the first published pictures of a then still unknown dance form, essential for the emergence of Hip Hop culture.”
Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures. Urban Nation Museum Berlin. Monopol MagazineMartha Cooper: Taking Pictures. Urban Nation Museum Berlin. Monopol MagazineMartha Cooper: Taking Pictures. Urban Nation Museum Berlin. Monopol MagazineMartha Cooper: Taking Pictures. Urban Nation Museum Berlin. Monopol MagazineMartha Cooper: Taking Pictures. Urban Nation Museum Berlin. Monopol MagazineMartha Cooper: Taking Pictures. Urban Nation Museum Berlin. Monopol Magazine
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Monumental Shadows: Rethinking Colonial Heritage 2. Os Gemeos: Secrets – Ep. 03
BSA Special Feature: Monumental Shadows: Rethinking Colonial Heritage
Last month we covered this Berlin-based project addressing the staining effect of colonialism and racism on everything we see and the structures that we interact with and are formed by today in so-called Western culture. To see the documentary progression of the project and hear the voices of those who executed it is powerful – and instructive.
“We have to deal with people who feel entitled to exclude other people from participation, from conversation, from civil rights, from society, from history,” say Various and Gould.
Brilliant pieces and campaigns like this that require so much time and energy and resources are carefully planned and considered, and quietly have the opportunity and potential to change hearts and minds – even to alter the course of history.
“It’s nice that the story isn’t made from one point of view. There are many accounts, and from various elements,” says artist Soberana Ziza, and you suddenly realize that this is the very dynamic that makes this series by OSGEMEOS about Hip Hop so ardently insistent on grabbing your attention, and communicating the steely core of a culture born from our common streets.
There are many voices that make a scene, and not only the loudest ones, and that is an important quality that gives such resonance to this scene over time, wherever it grows. Here we get a brief look at the inherent misogyny evidenced in society generally, and therefore in the culture of Hip Hop specifically.
Are we surprised? “What place is not hostile to women,?” asks Soberana Ziza.
Wading and wandering through the late autumn sunlight dappling the graffiti and street art near Alexanderplatz in Berlin, we noticed periodic dotting of the wall above the chaotic visual fray at eye level.
The four dots are a clear, crisp distillation of color that every graphic designer since the print age is well familiar with: CMYK. Expressed in 3-D sculpture dots with a variety of techniques and glued to the wall above us, we were reminded foften during our walk that all colors are a combination of these four.
A one-person mission by Berlin graffiti writer and street artist OKSE 126, the CMYK Dots campaign has traveled across many German and European cities and actually has a map for you to track them down. In addition to prodigious dots on the street, he’s started a line of clothing and art products and has shown his work in galleries like Berlin’s Urban Spree and this month at Hamburg’s Urban Shit Gallery “URBAN ART EDITION 2021” group show. The street art project, which OKSE 126 refers to as a modern technique of pointillism, has exceeded his goals, totaling 1,113 dots, 104 cities, and 16 countries.
Street art naturalist, educator, and land artist Gola Hundun is setting new goals for himself and evolving yet again, this time examining out roots. His one month residency in Kufa in Esch (Luxembourg ) resulted in many large iron and wicker roots poking up through the ground, pushing back into the skin of the city.
The installation group, “is part of my research path called ‘Habitat’,” he explains, “a project that started with the abandoned buildings that were being recolonized by the rest of nature. Now I am approaching living cities, with nature taking back some of their space.”
Working 11 hour days with 4 assistants, Hundun created new sculptures to organically weave themselves into the city and into this cultural centre called Kulturfabrik Esch-sur-Alzette (KuFa), located in a former slaughterhouse in the city of Esch-sur-Alzette in Luxembourg. Their own version of a street art festival encourages artists to think outside the established perimeters of publicly created artworks when necessary, utilizing the program and their work as a platform for sustainable development. The energizing Hudun is the perfect foil of such a challenge.
“Inside each root, there is a plant pot in which ivy plants will grow on the wicker structure,” he tells us, “and through time they will symbolize the flag of our ideal.”
The installations are around town, hopefully opening minds and stimulating conversation – each a group of sculptures to be installed in the train station of Esch sur Alzette.
To avoid any misunderstanding of his intended meaning, Gola Hundun has created a long title for the program: “Economic power must redefine its parasitic position about the world. We need to become a choral system of small self-sufficient centers that collaborate as the roots of a tree contribute to shape a trunk. Respect for other forms of life! Superior Love or extinction now!”
The artist would like to thank @ciglesch, the partner in production and logistic with Kufa and @villeesch, CFL – “and all the magical lovely people that made it possible”.
SpY describes his new public art project “Earth,” as “a luminous red sphere caged inside a structure.” You may wonder what this structure made from building-site scaffolding represents, especially when he says “the sphere is caged within it”. Gaseous fumes? Global Oligarchs? Free-trade agreements? K-Pop fans? We asked him:
BSA: Is the earth the color red because it is on fire, in pain, in a state of emergency, or perhaps in love?
SpY: The red earth in a cage has different meanings.
Having the earth in red is an obvious statement about our behavior as human beings in relation to our home where everything is connected as if were a living creature.
The cage represents the way we are caging ourselves in with fewer possibilities of survival because of human activity.
All of this it’s not about a virus or an economic war, what we want to highlight is the plight of the next generations. Will they have the educational tools, and will they be conscientious enough to grasp the importance of taking small, individual steps to feel a shared responsibility to improve the conditions of the planet?
This sphere in a cube is radiating outward in Plaza de Colón in Madrid is of a grand scale, and rather overpowers the people who walk through, day and night.
At 25 meters high, this glowing red orb is meant to draw our attention to the matters of our home planet, not the other red one you may be familiar with.
According to his press release, “SpY asks us to reflect on the way in which our home makes up a whole of which we form part, and in which everything is connected as if it were a living creature.”
In this charming and historic little village in northern Italy called Isola de Cevo, a new art installation of placards in the streets must have townspeople a little puzzled.
According to most accounts, this town’s population has dwindled to zero; a fate that many Italian towns have been victim of in the last two decades due to changing demographics and economics. If government initiatives are not successful at encouraging outsiders to repopulate, many of these viilages are destined to become ghost towns.
“During the installation we saw only two cars go by on the road,” says Elfo of the new installation he did with The Wa. They call the selection of opinions and bromides on sign posts, “THANK YOU ALL” – an absurdist act that may make you think of the former residents, the lives that once made this a village. “Me and The Wa had this idea that we wanted to search for an abandoned place for our ironic protest,” he says, and it is true that it makes little sense on the face of it.
An Italian and a Berlinian mounting a protest with no protesters in a place with no audience carrying messages with basically no message?
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! We’re thrilled to see you – you look marvelous!
The blustery cold snap outside today follows the mercurial mashup of winds, rains, thunder, and hail that shook our streets and darkened our skies yesterday – denting some cars, pummelling leaves downward. Ah fall; it feels like you are a couch and someone is taking out your stuffing.
The art of the street is indicative of the surreality of our times – a compression of days that also stretch like pumpkin taffy, wrapping around street lamps and fresh new Christmas light displays in Brooklyn. Everything, it would appear, is a dreamland of crisis; the economy, the environment, the bond crisis, the supply chain crisis, growing inflation, an impending food crisis, our faltering belief in institutions, our increasing distrust of each other, the police, the government, corporations, our currency, the medical profession, the church, and certainly our banks, the stock market, and Wall Street – these all define our times. Thankfully we have each other, friends.
Thank God for street art – the tea leaves of our time. Here’s a jolly mix-up of recent work found on the streets of two of our favorite cities – New York and Berlin.
Our interview with the street today includes Chris Jarosz, David Flores, Early Riser NYC, El Toro 215, Kiez Mie, Niko, ONI, Praxis VGZ, Rabea Senftenberg, RAMBO, Sara Lynne Leo, T.B.O.N.S., and Tianoo the Cat.
Street artist and muralist GAIA just finished a new tribute in Lexington, Kentucky with the PRHBTN gallery focused on a local colorful character named James Herndon, aka “Sweet Evening Breeze.”
As narratives about queer culture continue to emerge and evolve, we are seeing how enriched community life has been over generations because of the contributions socially and anthropologically by people who appear all along the spectrum of gender identity.
The Mother of Us All, photograph by John Ashley, 1970s. Sweet Evening Breeze, born James Herndon, sits in the dining room of their Prall Street home, surrounded by their silver collection. Faulkner Morgan Archive.
Consulting images from the Faulkner Morgan Archive, Gaia tells us that he learned a great deal about Herndon’s life (1892-1983) as well. “Sweet Evening Breeze was an orderly at Good Samaritan Hospital and was an icon in Lexington and the local drag scene,” he says. Additional research may lead you to also appreciate that his/her identity was celebrated by many otherwise conservative neighbors, perhaps due to the minority of people in the Lexington community who were like “Sweets”, or, it is inferred in some storytelling, he/she traveled in some influential social and political circles.
From an entry in the NKAA (Notable Kentucky African Americans Database), writer Marcia Rapchak reports, “Originally from Scott County, KY, Herndon moved to Lexington as a child and then was abandoned at Good Samaritan Hospital by his uncle after he suffered an eye injury. After growing up in the hospital, he worked as an orderly for over forty years.”
“He went to church regularly and loved church music. He enjoyed playing the piano, dressing up in women’s clothes and makeup, and entertaining at his house on Prall Street, which he shared with his uncle Andrew Smith in 1920, according to the U.S. Federal Census. The last years of his life were spent at Homestead Nursing Center, and he is buried at Lexington Cemetery.”
Sweet Evening Breeze reclining, around 1955. Sweet Evening Breeze, in a white gown, reclines on a couch. Faulkner Morgan Archive.
Seeing this new mural give voice to a community that has often been overlooked or deliberately erased from history, one wonders how many other stories there are which remain untold. Once mercilessly hounded by police officers and subjected to derision and violence by good Christian leaders and rank-and-file church members, many people like Sweet Summer Breeze spent their entire lives haunted and hunted in their own communities. These stories need to be openly told as well since shame for past transgressions and ignorance has yet to be fully and rightly placed in many communities, and responsibility has not been accepted for the suffering caused, the dreams crushed, denied.
As has been the case over the last decade or so, Gaia will very likely bring more unheralded stories and others to the street – further widening the collective discussion of passersby.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Don’t Choose Extinction – UNDP | United Nations | Jack Black | Climate Action. 2. Os Gemeos: Secrets – Ep. 02 3. Hypercourt Dendermonde
BSA Special Feature: Don’t Choose Extinction
“The world spends an astounding US$423 billion annually to subsidize fossil fuels for consumers – oil,…”
There is not really a lot to say after that.
Os Gemeos: Secrets – Ep. 02
Possibly more important anthropologically than their autobiographical artworks, OSGEMEOS has given us all a huge gift with this new series that documents the rise of hip hop culture at the precise juncture where it intersects with another city far away to the south. Through precise, on-point interviews, they point the spotlight on the crucial elements that formed and pushed “the culture” forward internationally, and personally.
Hypercourt Dendermonde
In the small city of Dendermonde in Belgium, the magic of the drone is helping to bring the new trend of painting basketball courts to video. Literally it seems like we are seeing one per week from all over the world – This one is with the Viewmasters2021 Project, which also created 5 murals around the city, along with this court designed and executed by Drukdoenerij (http://www.drukdoenerij.be) in collaboration with curator of the project Bart Warnier of Whamoffice.
The deconstructing abstractionist Italian Etnik bravely couples with the lush portraiture of Spanish artist Den xl here in Réunion Island. And what a name that is – Réunion. Somewhere between Madagascar and Mauricius, this gorgeous island hosts a mural festival that joins these two distinct styles into a hybrid of futurism and naturalism.
Etnik & Den xl for Reunion Graffiti Festival. Reunion Island. (photo courtesy of the artists)Etnik & Den xl for Reunion Graffiti Festival. Reunion Island. (photo courtesy of the artists)Etnik & Den xl for Reunion Graffiti Festival. Reunion Island. (photo courtesy of the artists)Etnik & Den xl for Reunion Graffiti Festival. Reunion Island. (photo courtesy of the artists)
As you would know if you waited in the dark out in the open night for a freight train to paint, the earth vibrates and the rumbling can raise adrenaline levels with fear and excitement, and anticipation.
Time and again we hear the stories of isolation and community intertwined with “fright writing”, where a graffiti writer takes the “life and limb” thing a little too lightly, risking both to get up on a cross-country platform.
Next month graffiti historian, author, businessman, curator, disruptor, and film director Roger Gastman brings the freights Rolling Like Thunder to Showtime network with a new documentary that he promises will dive into “the secret underground world and history of freight train and graffiti culture, uncovering stories of myth-like artists, remarkable romances, competitive graffiti crews, and battles with the institution.”
It’s part of the network’s announced multi-year Hip Hop 50 initiative in collaboration with Mass Appeal, and will air on December 17th.
Roger sent us a few images from the film and behind-the-scenes shots to whet your aerosol appetite.
Imagine being able to grasp a piece of street art, thanks to a 3D model of the original mounted nearby and made specifically for the blind and visually impaired. We do not recall writing about such a development – and now that we have learned about it, we hope to hear of many more.
In October, following World Sight Day on the 14th, the first 3D models of murals for blind and visually impaired people were set up in Belgrade – led by Street Art Belgrade and a private commercial foundation. Following the first models’ installation in two locations, people were invited for a small street art tour like no other. Naturally, we have seen many sculptures and more three dimensional installations by artists over the last decades, but this is the first time you can witness that a direct translation of the painted work is created in dimensions that help others more fully appreciate the patterns, the relations, the forms at play with one another.
“Street art is considered the freest kind of art because, regardless of its passing character, it is on the streets that belong to everyone,” says Ljiljana Radošević, an art historian from the organization Street Art Belgrade.
“However, not everyone can see and experience it. In this way, we want to bring this contemporary art form closer to blind and visually impaired people and make that dynamic and creative world available to them.”
The two murals selected for the 3D models were done by the artist Weedzor, who’s been working on Belgrade’s streets since 2005 – cylindrical shapes that form the heads of a giraffe and a wolf. In addition to the 3D models placed at shoulder-level on the street, there is a description of the works in Braille. According to organizers, there are more 3D murals planned around the city.
“Any activity that contributes to the blind population having more things they can experience is very important,” says Nikola Djordjevic, president of the City Organization of the Blind in Belgrade in a press release for the program.
“This is not just an art exhibition, but this approach also shows respect for our population.”
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
