“This mural contains the shapes of each one overlapped in layers and erasing lines to emphasize color, our great passion,” says Zosen of his new collaboration with artist Mina Hamada. The two have created many color-blocked organic and chaotic visual feasts on walls around the world over the last few years, and this one puts an optimistic face on the new year in Paris.
Zosen & Mina Hamada in collaboration with Art Azoï. Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of Art Azoï)
In fact, the painting pair haven’t been able to do a large scale mural like this since late 2019 in Japan, where Mina hails from. “After more than a year, pandemic and confinement in between, we wanted to do something different and fresh to have fun.”
Zosen & Mina Hamada in collaboration with Art Azoï. Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of Art Azoï)
In coordination with L’association Art Azoï and Les Plateaux Sauvages in the 20th arrondissement, the Barcelona-based pair were bundled up and on cherry pickers in the early January cold weather, tracing out their long-pole lines over the top of one another. “For this mural, we prepared two different designs,” says Mina. “Then we mixed over the lines to make the mural.”
Zosen & Mina Hamada in collaboration with Art Azoï. Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of Art Azoï)Zosen & Mina Hamada in collaboration with Art Azoï. Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of Art Azoï)Zosen & Mina Hamada in collaboration with Art Azoï. Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of Art Azoï)
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening participants at Festival Asalto 2020: 1. MrFijodor, “Logo Al Rogo, MEMORY/OBLIVION” 2. Bunker Walls. Street art inside the cave. 3. Fabio Petani: Phosphorus Oxide & Narcissus 4. TANC at Pavillon Carre de Baudouin 5. Mary Wells 1944-2021 6. Chick Corea 1941-2021
BSA Special Feature: MrFijodor, “Logo Al Rogo”
For a project called with twelve artists called “Street Art Inside a Cave” in September 2020 in Bozen, Italy, graffiti writer / street artist / muralist MrFIJODOR worked on three walls creating a storied set of shadowy forms and symbols that he says tie the past with the present – in an unnerving way. He says the goal is to keep the memory of the atrocities of history alive, precisely to ensure that they never happen again.
From the project description “The wall is inspired by the theme ‘Memory and oblivion’: the one is a constant motion of the human mind, the other erases memories and consciences to start a ‘new cycle’ of reminiscences. But there are events that cannot be forgotten, such as the atrocities of the Second World War. The artwork blends art with history: the chromatic fidelity to the Nazi flag contrasts with the provocation of the piece: the swastika is made up of glasses, shoes, teeth, prosthesis of hands and feet, all those ‘personal objects’ of which the deportees were deprived to become what Primo Levi in ‘I sommersi e i salvati’ calls as “human material”. The work is also a sign of contemporaneity. Some speeches and attitudes of current sovereigns create and feed useless violence born from the manipulation of everyday life: symbols, concepts, promises and intentionally repeated gestures of which these ‘powerful’ make it their leitmotif to conquer and subjugate more or less indirectly peoples.”
MrFijodor, “Logo Al Rogo, MEMORY/OBLIVION”
The exhibition “Mythos. Ten impressions” is organized by Cooperativa Talia and MurArte Bolzano.
Bunker Walls. Street art inside the cave.
Fabio Petani: Phosphorus Oxide & Narcissus
Remember summer? Last August Fabio Patino painted this large scale mural for a private gig in in Chivasso, Italy. He calls it Phosphorus Oxide & Narcissus Pseudonarcissus.
TANC at Pavillon Carre de Baudouin
Paris artist TANC began in graffiti moved into abstraction, color washes and geometric illustration – and now enjoys a commercial/fine art career as well. Here with a project for L’association Art Azoï, he painted the exhibition wall at Pavillon Carre de Baudouin a colorscape to offset the grey of winter.
Norwegian street artist Pøbel made a splash last spring with his stencil of a passionate couple kissing with their masks. That was early in our understanding of how the virus might be spread. Today we see his newest piece that lifts a front line medical worker aloft, or rather Minister of Health Bent Høie does. It is good to see that the importance of masking is more evident.
Here on this clean concrete wall alongside car traffic, Pøbel references an arched pose from the ballet (or the movie “Dirty Dancing”) that gives us all a reason to breathe, to exult the love of life, to dance again.
Imagine being forbidden, proscribed by religious law. Haram.
Yemeni artist Ahlam Jarban says that she felt that her very existence as a girl and a woman growing up in her country was forbidden. Now imagine being a female graffiti writer in that war-torn country, eager for your work and your ideas to be seen and considered.
“To be a woman in Yemen is forbidden (haram),” she says. “Street art was my way in Yemen to say ‘I’m not haram; I’m proud of being a woman.’ ”
The Haram wall: Ahlam Jarban in collaboration with Art Azoï. Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of Art Azoï)
Her new mural was created in collaboration with the Agency of Artists in Exile (Atelier des Artistes en Exil), where she is an artist in residence. Using aerosol and stencils, she draws attention to this denial of personal agency in the world through patterned calligraphy of “Haram” interrupted by the occasional pair of photorealistic eyes, always watching.
Ahlam Jarban in collaboration with Art Azoï. Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of Art Azoï)
Part of an exhibition along a 50-meter long wall at the Pavillon Carré de Baudouin in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, the artist is actively assessing and critiquing the patriarchal behaviors she witnessed during her youth before arriving here in 2018. She is also making connections between the two cultures.
Getting up in earlier days. Ahlam Jarban (courtesy Agency of Artists in Exile – Atelier des Artistes en Exil)
“I painted eyes because I think that was the only thing that was free on a woman’s body,” she says as she describes the various emotions and intentions that are communicated by people purely with their eyes. Immediately she pivots to the correlation to life in her new European home where everyone is encouraged to wear a mask during the Covid-19 pandemic, and people are learning to rely more on communicating with their eyes, perhaps more than ever before.
“I think this mural can be very interesting for the Arabic French people and for the French people to know more about how it can be to be a female in Yemen,” she says in the video below.
Ahlam Jarban in collaboration with Art Azoï. Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of Art Azoï)Ahlam Jarban in collaboration with Art Azoï. Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of Art Azoï)Ahlam Jarban in collaboration with Art Azoï. Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of Art Azoï)
Ahlam Jarban in collaboration with Art Azoï. Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of Art Azoï)Ahlam Jarban in collaboration with Art Azoï. Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of Art Azoï)Ahlam Jarban in collaboration with Art Azoï. Paris, France. (Photo courtesy of Art Azoï)
Checking in with Panteón Cultural Center in Mexico City, where we first took you when it was inaugurated in 2017, we find street artist/ fine artist Said Dokins participating in a large exhibition and a new mural for the storied interior. It’s reassuring to see “This is not the end of the world,” the title of the collective show featuring many Mexican artists in this venue that is refined and raw and at least in some ways community based – Not such a typical scene these days.
Here in this grizzled colonial complex that deliberately preserves its unfinished character, you can now see the expansive use of Dokins poetry within the stylized calligraffiti, sacred circular wreaths, and dynamic diagonals racing across fresh canvasses and battered walls of this historic property lying in the middle of the oldest, crusty colonial part of CDMX.
In collaboration with Gama Gallery, the artist also creates his mural Winter Language (video at bottom), into which he “decided to place some writings, ideas, and poems that came into my mind about the difficult times we’re living in, where uncertainty lurks, and the hope of a new cycle still permeates some of us.”
It’s been a rough winter in Mexico City. The pandemic pushes people apart, and a fractured national response to it lead to many illnesses, with many family members left behind, many futures newly uncertain. When the travails are so harsh, is there any wonder that many of us are now turning to poetry, philosophy, and the comfort of religious traditions?
“This winter in Mexico, between the sounds of ambulances, desperate messages looking for oxygen,” Said says, only compounded the dystopia, along with the “psychological numbness before the tragedy and the fiction of individual good sense; while criticizing our neighbors, getting angry with different groups, society, or the government. We are leaving behind family, friends, and people that we love.” The words march and fall in lines through our heads and crosswise on these walls.
One of the challenges in creating a book about anamorphic art is presenting images that tell the viewer that they are being tricked by perspective yet hold onto the magic that this unique art conjures in people who walk by it on the street.
Leon Keer. “Break Glass In Case Of Lost Childhood”. Published by Lannoo Publishers, Belgium, 2020
In a way, that brass skeleton key that allows entry into another world is precisely what Dutch pop-surrealist artist Leon Keer has been seeking for decades to evoke in viewers’ heads and hearts. Some would argue he is preeminently such; certainly, he is the wizard whose work on walls and streets has triggered memories for thousands of children and ex-children of the fantastic worlds they have visited.
“You develop your senses all your life. Through what you experience, you involve affinities and aversions,” he says in his first comprehensive bound collection of gorgeous plates entitled In Case of Lost Childhood Break Glass. “Your memories shape the way you look at the world. When it comes to reflecting my thoughts, my memories are key. I needed to feel some kind of affection or remorse towards the object or situation I want to paint.”
Leon Keer. “Break Glass In Case Of Lost Childhood”. Published by Lannoo Publishers, Belgium, 2020
Looking through the various venues he creates with and within, you can find an imagination that fully entreats you to join in the fun. Whether they are street paintings. floor paintings, anamorphic rooms for you to pose in, experiments in augmented reality brought alive on your phone, enormous land art paintings, or oddly shaped painted canvasses, Keer is not keeping the fun to himself. You are the welcomed and necessary ingredient that will supremely complete the scene.
Los Angeles art dealer Andrew Hosner writes an introduction to the book, representing Keer to collectors and curating his work commercially. He is felicitously taken by the artist’s ability to conjure a familiar yet unusual world, describing the mind-melt that occurs during a typical Leon Keer encounter. “Bending your perspective, and opening your mind along the way, has never been more rewarding.”
Leon Keer. “Break Glass In Case Of Lost Childhood”. Published by Lannoo Publishers, Belgium, 2020
As you turn the pages, you wonder what some of the stories behind the pieces are, and he’ll often give you a clear description of what was going through his mind when he created it or what the particular significance is to him. You may also marvel at his dedication to preserving that precious world that each of us once lived in. Ingenious, witty, technically precise, Keer is a responsive and trustworthy guide.
Leon Keer. “Break Glass In Case Of Lost Childhood”. Published by Lannoo Publishers, Belgium, 2020
“Every day I try to be a child, but when I look in the mirror I am reminded that time is marching on,” he writes. “Gray hairs in my beard and a receding hairline make me realize that my childhood years are far behind. Yet my curiosity is never burned so bright.”
Leon Keer. “Break Glass In Case Of Lost Childhood”. Published by Lannoo Publishers, Belgium, 2020Leon Keer. “Break Glass In Case Of Lost Childhood”. Published by Lannoo Publishers, Belgium, 2020Leon Keer. “Break Glass In Case Of Lost Childhood”. Published by Lannoo Publishers, Belgium, 2020Leon Keer. “Break Glass In Case Of Lost Childhood”. Published by Lannoo Publishers, Belgium, 2020
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. The first day of February brought New York a blizzard – a foot and a half of snow, complete with winds and drifts and buried cars. It drives everyone outside to experience the new world, especially kids, big and small.
I am a poem of blizzards trapped in snow; paralyzed in a city of 8 million snow-poems digging out of record wind-fuelled drifts of snow; trapped in the wintery vice of its wintery vice-like grip of treachery.
–Rupert The Red Nosed, “The Language of Snow”
And like kids, we too like to stomp through the snowy streets in big boots, looking for hidden missives and pieces of poems, delighted by the mysteries buried in this cold and windy town.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Carl J. Gabriel, Chris RWK, Dare2, Eye Sticker, George Floyd, HOACS, Jeremy Novy, Par, Praxis VGZ, Roachi, Skewville, Sticky, Sule Cant Cook, Viler, and Zexor.
Freshly coiffed botanical crowns, community stakeholders, a formal design committee, studio photography with stylized gender blending sitters, two weeks of public mural painting, a certain inflection of romanticism, and an opening celebration anointed with live jazz performances on the sidewalk by two stunning talents with their fingers on the pulse.
This is the wholistic, even transformative work you’ve come to expect from the collaborative approach of street artist, muralist, historian, activist, lecturer, trend watcher, and sociologist GAIA – but it keeps coalescing into a plentiful and integrated cosmos.
This project is called “Overjoyed,” a mural completed this autumn on Greenmount West and Old Yorke Road in Baltimore, Maryland. In what he describes as the satisfying outcome of 18 months of planning and community collaboration, GAIA summons a richly textured, quietly reverential visual and floral feast of natural, yet poised, beauty. Moreover, it is rooted in the people who live here and the location itself.
“Considering this wall sits in an important intersection for local transportation history and that the 32nd street farmers market is such a beloved aspect of the neighborhood,” says GAIA, “a composition with flowing floral arrangements and past street scenes from Waverly was ultimately developed.”
The three sided wall took four weeks of painting to complete and was concluded by an informal celebration with a performance by Brandon Woody and Devron Dennis.
GAIA would like to extend many thanks to the Central Baltimore Partnership for the funding through their Spruce Up Grant program, @waverlymainst to apply for and administer the grant and community engagement, and Greenmount Partners for the private funding and wall donation.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening participants at Festival Asalto 2020: 1. “BY VIRTUE OF” a collaboration project between Faith XLVII and Zane Mayer 2. Five Minutes with: 1UP Crew in Berlin – Via I LOVE GRAFFITI.DE 3. MadC1 Via Tost Films 4. Tiacuilos: A film by Federico Peixoto.
BSA Special Feature: “BY VIRTUE OF” a collaboration project between Faith XLVII and Zane Mayer
These hands first appeared projected on a 10 story building in Jacksonville, Florida. A compilation of hands filmed during interviews with America’s homeless, the collaborative video piece by Zane Meyer and Faith XLVII is instructive, expansive, colorful, genuine. Say the artists about the focus of this work, “Like books, the hands tell stories of what they have been through. Slow movements, delicate gestures, and subconscious motions make up the scenes of the film – a match is lit, stones are organized, tattoos are shown, sand is filtered. Clenched hands narrate stories of power, or anger, while open hands suggest an offering or a search for an embrace.”
“BY VIRTUE OF” a collaboration project between Faith XLVII and Zane Mayer
Five Minutes with: 1UP Crew in Berlin – Via I LOVE GRAFFITI.DE
Looks like 1UP Crew are up to no good, as usual. On a large scale, as usual. Impressive, as usual.
MadC1 Via Tost Films
A small taste of the stunning MadC painting her highest mural to date – 56 meters (184 feet) high – in Abu Dhabi for @forabudhabi – with a team from 7 different countries.
Tiacuilos: A film by Federico Peixoto.
As we have always done; here is an excellent opportunity to broaden the conversation about this world-wide people’s art movement that goes by many names. Tlacuilos: “The definitive film chronicle of Graffiti and Hip Hop in Central America”. A film by Federico Peixoto.
Ferrara-based Alessio Bolognesi (Bolo) is a part of the Vida Krei Collective with two other Italian artists, Psiko and Rash. Here in Molinella last fall for the ARTU festival, BOLO went solo to paint his “Folaga Partigiana”, or “Partisan Coot.”
The huge event invites many artists to paint – one creative activity that isn’t really constricted during the pandemic – and one that draws an appreciative audience.
BOLO. “Partisan Coot”. ARTU Fest. Molinella, Italy. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Bolo’s mural focuses on a Coot – the medium-sized water that are members of the rail family, Rallidae – and who figure into regional history. He places and old water mill on the bird’s back, and since Molinella comes from the Italian word for mill, Molino, you can see where he is taking you. He places a red handkerchief around its neck in solidarity with the partisan struggles in this area, he says.
BOLO. “Partisan Coot”. ARTU Fest. Molinella, Italy. (photo courtesy of the artist)
“I wanted to create a work that can be read at different levels” – Bolo explains – “the first impact is certainly due to the contrast between the bunch of colors in the background and the black of the coot which, I hope, is positive for those arriving in the village since the wall of the railway station on which I painted the mural is located right on one of the main access roads to the town. However, if you want to read beyond the aesthetic aspect, then you can stop and reflect on the references to the territory and history I wanted to include in the project “
BOLO. “Partisan Coot”. ARTU Fest. Molinella, Italy. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Artists who participated in the festival included Kiki Skipi, Mi Chiamo Zeta, Vesod, Fabio Petani, Paolo Psiko, Alessio Bolognesi, Ermes Bichi, Alessio Anthony, Pasa, Burla, Turbo Kidd, Luca Lorenzoni, Edo 9000, Gloria Goderecci, Adamo Morky, Luca Falesiedi, Inch the Kid, Marco Gallini, Brome 732, Rash, Mr S and Jato.
BOLO. “Partisan Coot”. ARTU Fest. Molinella, Italy. (photo courtesy of the artist)
We have a departure for Chilean muralist INTI today – no figurative mystic signaling secret truths to you from under a hood. This is “El Tamarugo”, a colorful depiction of the native tree of Chile that thrives in arid climates, like the Atacama desert. The artist chose the piece not only to marvel at its abilities but to talk about the “devastation of resources caused by mega-mining in these lands,” he says.
INTI. “El Tamarugo” Nomad Desert/Iquique En Color Es. Iquique, Chile. (photo courtesy of the artist)
INTI. “El Tamarugo” Nomad Desert/Iquique En Color Es. Iquique, Chile. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Using pattern and palette from the indigenous cultures of his country, INTI pays tribute to the tree and the fortitude of people who resist the greedy who damage the lands and drain them of life. The Tamarugo as a symbol speaks to “The ability of this species to survive,” he says. “It has been vital to the communities that inhabit these places since ancient times, and a symbol of life and resistance.”
INTI. “El Tamarugo” Nomad Desert/Iquique En Color Es. Iquique, Chile. (photo courtesy of the artist)INTI. “El Tamarugo” Nomad Desert/Iquique En Color Es. Iquique, Chile. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Project Name: “Iquique En Color Es” Organized by @nomadesert
No More Normal is a semi-regular newsletter written by Jeff Stoneon his substack. He recently interviewed us on the topic of activist street art and we’d like to share his article here.
In May 2020, Todd Lawrence and Heather Shirey were taking pictures of graffiti focused on the coronavirus in Minneapolis when a police officer killed George Floyd just a few blocks away.
The two cultural historians from the University of St. Thomas had recently started taking pictures of the murals, graffiti, stickers and tags throughout the Twin Cities in an effort to preserve that work during a once-in-a-century pandemic. Their archiving, though, took on a new level of urgency when a police officer murdered Floyd and footage of the killing went viral, sparking anti-racist demonstrations in Minneapolis and throughout the world.
The movement had sparked the greatest proliferation of street art in recent memory, Lawrence says now, even if much of it was ephemeral, controversial and quick to be erased. At a time when the coronavirus was decimating communities of color, though, and with renewed attention on police brutality, street art represented a kind of live communication between neighbors.
“Street art, advertising and political propaganda have merged into a kind of collective funhouse mirror, instantly revealing indications about how a culture sees itself, as well as telling you about the tenor of discourse at any given time,”
“This was all happening a few blocks from my house and, when I went out in the mornings, there was art everywhere, tags everywhere and graffiti everywhere,” Lawrence told me during a recent call. “People had started to write on the boards that were up over broken windows. We realized right off the bat that this was the most art we’ve seen overnight, like instantaneously.”
An archive of all that conversation, the logic goes, will help activists, students and researchers more fully understand what it was like to live through a historic moment, particularly as many of the museums, concert halls and other hubs of shared cultural experience remained closed.
“Street art, advertising and political propaganda have merged into a kind of collective funhouse mirror, instantly revealing indications about how a culture sees itself, as well as telling you about the tenor of discourse at any given time,” Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo, co-founders of Brooklyn Street Art, a New York collective told me in an email.
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
