We were battered like hell this week by the remnants of a hurricane – not the actual hurricane itself. Yet New York was unprepared for the onslaught of precipitation in such a short period of time – producing flooding like we haven’t seen in ages, or ever. Basement apartments were overtaken in hours, first floors soon after – and lives were lost. We mourn the victims and console their families.
Roads, tunnels, trains, streets, airports – all paralyzed. The seriousness of the damage makes many of us take a step back, take stock – and wonder how many more years the PR disinformation industry can cloud our minds with doubt about climate change. It worked for decades with cigarettes, has worked for decades with the war machine, the health industry, the financial industry, against voting rights, against labor unions….
Hmm… at this rate, it looks like we better buy some flippers and a snorkel.
And in the streets, we are comforted by images of our pop heroes, rock gods, and asundry archetypes.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Allison Dayka, Almost Over Keep Smiling, Came Moreno, DEK2DX, Foxito, Goblin, Hek Tad, HOACS, Lorenzo Masnah, Lucas Official, Psycho Love, Ramiro Davaro-Comas, Roio47, Smet Sky, Tomer Linaje, Trace1, Ultramarine Dream, Vitruvian Truth, and Voxx Romana.
“An archetypal image”, Edoardo Tresoldi says, “is capable of creating a dialogue between past and present, using a language comprised of meanings that recur over time.”
Again he tarries in this trade: the recurrent symbol or motif in architecture lifted from its source and presented in wire and light to evoke hallowed, revered spaces elsewhere. It’s a stunning realization that your emotional rapture is triggered in some way, insignificant or profound, by this relatively simple recreative act.
Opening this week at the Art Museum of the City of Ravenna, Tresoldi re-calls his piece called Sacral for an exhibition called “Dante. The Eyes and the Mind”. Viewable until January 9 the installation occupies the eye of your mind, the central tenant of this Castle of the Great Souls. According to Dante, this central location – pivotal, buoyant, luminous – “is a symbolic place inhabited by the souls of those who left honor and fame behind them on earth. They are the great souls of antiquity – philosophers, poets, scientists, and writers – with grave and slow-moving eyes.”
We’re pleased to help readers gaze upon it and see what essence has been captured from the 16th-century cloister that is relevant to our present – or at the very least, inspirational to it.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Faith XLVII X KOLEKA PUTUMA 2. Moments Like This Never Last. Cheryl Dunn/Dash Snow. Trailer 3. 9 Ways To Draw a Person
BSA Special Feature: Faith XLVII X KOLEKA PUTUMA
South African Street Artist Liberty Du, known as Faith XLVII shares her new collaboration with Koleka Putuma, the South African queer poet and theatre-maker, this week on BSA Film Friday.
“South African women are brave. Strong. And not just a little strong. They are strong down to their bone marrow. They have known great suffering. And still, they sing. What an honor it’s been to know such women! I’ve been humbled in my life again and again by the sheer resilience of friends. The pain is inexplicable. In the first 3 weeks of lockdown, more than 120 000 cases of Gender-Based Violence were reported across the country. We are exhausted from the news each week. Our sisters, mothers, grandmothers, our children were violated, abused, and murdered. Working on this project alongside Koleka Putuma is not something I take lightly, Koleka is a force. Her words break up open in order to really have real conversations about what’s happening.”
Faith XLVII X KOLEKA PUTUMA
Moments Like This Never Last. Cheryl Dunn/Dash Snow. Trailer
The mythmaking stories continue to propagate about this anti-authoritarian creative skateboarding graffiti-writing white guy from a wealthy family who died too young in a drug-fueled life of experimentation and excess. Cheryl Dunn pulls all the stories together to help establish his talents and hijinx as veritable proof that the early millenial was onto something new in the graffiti/street/art milieu of IRAK crew of 2000s New York – partying hard and hitting the heights.
9 Ways To Draw a Person
The possibilities are absolutely endless, if you are to follow the guidance of film director, artist, animator Sasha Svirsky. By mixing abstraction, collage, and animation, he pulls you in and reawakens your earliest knowledge about creativity, reaffirming that you too, can draw a person.
The genesis of Pener’s new wall in Olsztyn, Poland goes back a year ago. He and Krzysztof Dąbkowski, who is the director of the Municipal Public Library of Olsztyn, agreed on the idea that the project should reflect the literary tradition of Warmia and Mazury, the Polish region in which Olsztyn is located.
Says Pener, “Specifically intertwined with the notion of “Atlantis of the North”, the author of which is the poet and writer Kazimierz Brakoniecki. I am very open to this type of synergistic projects that can significantly encourage reflection on our identity. As a creator and artist, I wanted to create something more than just an illustration for a literary text”.
In a bit of cynical irony on the street, creative director/UX designer Mikel Parera teams up with this cluster of graffiti/street artists in Barcelona to parody the grey lines between using art as activism and merely imitating styles to push content. This new collection of graffiti styles are completely divorced from any contribution to or critique of society. The advertising “Creative” is portrayed little more than pre-meditated aesthetic manipulation – in service of a brand.
Roughly translated, here is his wall screed – naturally followed by Instagram handles.
“Who has not ever enjoyed seeing good graffiti? But there is a problem: – Everybody steps on everybody – General discomfort and confusion. – That shouldn’t be like that. It doesn’t seem fair to us either. That is why we make graffiti useful for people. Take a look at our work, contact us and start a project. Use graffiti to create quality content in your projects. Write us today! Refuse dishonest solutions. Don’t hurt your brand or your audience. Get original work and have an excellent experience. Go from feeling disoriented to standing out, being a benchmark in your sector.”
We’ve been through this before, right? – throngs of new excited students marching and plodding back to classrooms as fall approaches full of expectations. And yet, the adults in the room are scrambling to figure out how.
With 90% of families desperate for in-school learning and most kids too young to have vaccine shots, there are still debates about whether masks and social distancing are enough to keep everyone safe. Add to this the periodic closures because some classmates test positive and the rest have to go into quarantine- while parents and grandparents and all kinds of caretakers scramble for childcare and keeping their jobs if they have one. Stir in a toxic politicization of those who are sure this is a political conspiracy of some sort deviously designed to deny personal freedom, and suddenly an auspicious new school year feels like a stove gas leak filling your home with fumes.
You can always rely on street artist Winston Tseng to light a match at the right time. His bright flat graphics are on target: easily read and evidently easily misinterpreted. Familiar images and shapes sometimes require decoding – and he is happy to lead you to the hot spots in our current societal debates. This new fake poster is popping up around New York City this week; making some laugh, and making others breathe fire.
“We are committed to improving our town centre and art and culture has a big part to play in its future,” says Leader of Basildon Council Councillor Andrew Baggott. “We are also committed to climate change and are working towards a carbon net-zero borough by 2050.”
With a new street art initiative called Our Towns, curators Doug Gillen and Charlotte Pyatt are tying together environmental and social concerns with new large-scale murals here in the Essex, UK town.
Partnering artists with the local schools, university, market and community organizations, Gillen and Pyatt have been introducing new public artworks all summer by international artists like Arches (Ireland), Franco ‘JAZ’ Fasoli (Argentina/Italy), and Marina Capdevila (Spain), as well as homegrown UK talents including Erin Holly, Gabriel Pitcher, INSA, Michele Curtis, and Helen Bur.
While some on the roster are known for their street art and others have backgrounds in more formal studio practice, collectively perhaps their works are softening some of the brutalist edges of this town of just over 100,000 residents.
Owing its name to an idea of challenging ourselves to see art and public space in original and meaningful ways that affect positive change, the Re:Framed project is steered by two pros in street art cultural production and analysis. “We are dedicated to developing new and innovative strategies to reposition the role of culture in social and environmental conversations,” says a joint statement by the curators.
“The Our Towns: Climate project will be our most ambitious to date, the legacy for which will see Basildon join the growing number of cities and towns across the world adopting the Global Goals.”
Giving their partnership the moniker Re:FRAMED, Pyatt and Gillen have worked in production, strategy, consultancy and documentation with art on the streets for approximately the last decade and plan to coalesce artists and organizations around social and environmental themes going forward. With high-quality artists and artworks like these, you can look forward to the two reframing both contexts and conversations in public space in their future.
The summer storms keep coming, and yet somehow so does the incredible show of creativity on our streets; the celebration of murals and graffiti burners and painters and sculptors and characters and opinions and cogitations. However hot and steamy and hard New York can be sometimes, it also is positively ebullient and inspiring. We know our many differences are our greater asset, our combined aspirations a stunning new possibility.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring A. Smith, Captain Eyeliner, China, Cody James, CP Won, David Puck, Gabriel Specter, Huetek, Iquene, Jason Naylor, Jitr!, Amanda Valdes, Lorenzo Masnah, M.R.S.N., Not Your Muse, Peachee Blue, Sara Lynne Leo, Sasha Velour, Say No Sleep, Tyler Ives, and Winston Tseng.
CP Won (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Say No Sleep (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Say No Sleep (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Say No Sleep (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Winston Tseng (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Sara Lynne-Leo in collaboration with Tyler Ives. “Remedial Purge” (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Captain Eyeliner (photo @ Jaime Rojo)A Smith (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Specter (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Huetek. Detail. Work in progress for The Bushwick Collective 10th Anniversary edition. (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Cody James. Work in progress for The Bushwick Collective 10th Anniversary edition. (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Jason Naylor. Work in progress for The Bushwick Collective 10th Anniversary edition. (photo @ Jaime Rojo)China (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Jitr! (photo @ Jaime Rojo)David Puck (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Iquena (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Not Your Muse (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Peachee Blue (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Amanda Valdes (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Masnah (photo @ Jaime Rojo)M.R.S.N. (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Unidentified artists (photo @ Jaime Rojo)
Staring at clouds and seeing images is Mother Nature’s Rorschach test about how one sees life’s possibilities; revealing winged angels and horned devils, a ship on the high seas, a milk maiden’s profile, a fire-breathing dragon.
French-Swiss land artist Saype has had plenty of time recently to contemplate the clouds while painting on a grassy mountain and he thinks our vision of the future is reaching a point of clarity, despite our current seemingly cloudy perspective.
The rising, lushly green summit of Moleson-sur-Gruyeres in Switzerland can do that to you.
The artist’s newest ephemeral simulacrum depicts what appears as a child blowing clouds toward the horizon. He calls it “un nouveau souffle” (“a new breath”), he says, and he uses the framing of the majestic Friborg Pre-Alps to give flight to this novel fancy.
Seen on land from a great distance and especially when flying above, the new 1500 square meter fresco is of biodegradable pigments made out of charcoal, chalk, water, and milk proteins.
With time, this vision will fade. Hopefully, our ability to imagine stories, fancies, and promising futures will not.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Talking with Tony Tuan Luong AKA Tyle2 2. OLEK: I Have Nothing To Declare Except My Genius 3. Sofles in Brisbane featuring Gamo & Kitsa 4.MadC – Oasis
BSA Special Feature: Talking with Tony Tuan Luong AKA Tyle2
It’s thrilling to see the many twists and turns on the path of calligraffiti. Here we are introduced to Graffiti, Calligraphy, and Tattoo artist TONY TUAN LUONG aka TYLE2 from Offenburg, Germany, who gives a short interview in this first new “Artist Session” with the Molotov brand. Friday is always a great day for inspiration and we hope this can inspire you.
Artist Session with Tony Tuan Luong AKA Tyle2
OLEK: I Have Nothing To Declare Except My Genius
The Polish street artist has nothing but the usual to declare. She’s been saying it for years. If only you would listen.
Man1 on Hollywood Blvd via Birdman.
“A fun mural I shot with LA native Man1 in Los Angeles, CA,” says photographer and video documenter Birdman.
MadC – Oasis
Modern master of styles, MadC knows how to keep it tight and how to let it flow, like an ocean’s mists, across the walls she climbs and conquers. Its not just the dynamism, the scale. It’s also the confidence, the fact that you feel she can see it before she begins. She is an oasis.
We return for Part 2 of this nearly incandescent display space in the northern woods of Catalonia discovered this month by photographer Lluis Olive Bulbena.
Such an idyllic light and quiet sanctuary for aerosol paintings are on offer for anyone making the effort to investigate. Here you can see the latest trends alongside classic styles of writing for this part of Europe, where lo-fi is as welcome as high-gloss and wild styling.
During a recent graffiti shooting outing the Spanish photographer and BSA contributor Lluis Olive Bulbena ventured into the woods of a remote region in the North of Catalonia.
When he finally found the site, he felt like he was rewarded for his efforts.
Graffiti writers are known to seek out of the way, abandoned and neglected buildings to practice their skills and otherwise “get up”. This complex of buildings once housed a textile factory in a region famous for its textile industry – an industry that was later decimated by floods.
While the architectural details of the buildings date to the beginning of the XIX century, existing documentation tracks this site as far back as the XVII century where the factories were employed in the manufacture of gunpowder. The following century, the records show that it was processing cotton. Now this not-so-secret site is an open gallery for the curious, hidden from the general public – but open to those who know where to look.
Enjoy our first installment of two – new images from a very old place:
This one caught our eye for the merging of classic graffiti nerve, blunt style execution, sentimental velvety roses, inspirational verses, …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
