Yes, it’s April 1st in Brooklyn. And of course it’s raining all day today.
But you know what they say:
April showers bring May flowers.
Truthfully, New Yorkers won’t have to wait until May to see signs of spring. Here are some new photos from our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo.
On a day where we are all reeling from a public display of violence this week toward a 65-year-old Asian New Yorker on her way to church, we reiterate what the street artists are telling us – “Stop Asian Hate.” More upsetting than the violence was the seeming apathy of some toward it – and they should feel ashamed for not helping.
We know that our individual actions speak louder than words. Don’t stand by and feel helpless when you see someone being abused! You can help! It’s everyone’s responsibility to do whatever we can to stop the hate.
Don’t be a Bystander: 6 Tips for Responding to Racist Attacks
Billboard message subversion dates back to at least The Billboard Liberation Front and The Guerrilla Girls undercover antics of the 1970s and 1980s mangling commercial messages to expose their underside or to call out hypocrisy. Later artists like Ron English did scores of billboard “takeovers” that focused on fast food and cereal brands and their links to obesity and diabetes.
Despite an assumed increase in surveillance these days, it is surprising how many artists still get up every year on these high-profile slabs to re-engineer their message, or to put up an entirely new message altogether.
In that tradition, the activist art collective who call themselves INDECLINE say they recently took over a rather plain billboard ad-space from Christian Aid Ministries on Interstate 22 West in Byhalia, Mississippi – re-configuring their message into one they would presumably abhor. Indecline states that the new work offering Planned Parenthood services is “in direct response to lawmakers throughout the South who continue their attempts to overturn Roe v. Wade.”
In a modern twist on this story of detournement, the anonymous crew says they plan to convert the imagery of the vandalized billboard into an NFT. For profit? No, they say they plan to auction it off and give the proceeds to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
Sara Lynn-Leo. Well-placed, well-rendered, witty, insightful, incisive.
These are hallmarks of the miniature pieces of street art that New Yorker Sara Lynn-Leo has been putting up in many neighborhoods in alleyways, doors, dirty corners, magnet walls, street furniture, and lamp posts. Finding these offerings can be difficult. They may be tiny in size and often placed out of eye view.
Look carefully; her furtive insecure, and smart characters will wag their intellect at you, eliciting empathy and possibly delight if you are not too bitter and hardened. During a year where everyone you met had a meltdown or two, she melts with you.
Actually, the first one we found in Brooklyn was made of vinyl – maybe in 2019? She mostly works on paper now, and she’s been experimenting with collage. She’s a regular on the BSA Images Of The Week section and a previous special feature HERE.
Her appeal rests in grand part for her willingness to explore scabrous issues without lecturing or grandstanding and, as we mentioned, with humor.
This week we found five new pieces on the streets of Manhattan…
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week as we head into Passover and Easter. If street art reflects society, and we know that it does, Governor Cuomo is in hot water and may not keep his job. But then, we thought the same about the war criminal George Bush and the grifter Trump, so never mind.
Thank you to reporter Jim O’Grady for interviewing us for a story on WNYC radio this week – along with our colleague Sean Corcoran who is the Curator of Prints and Photographs and a graffiti historian from the Museum of the City of New York.
“As Covid Ravaged New York, Street Artists Fought Back” is the name of Jim’s eight-minute exposition – and his storytelling adds so much to our appreciation of the city and the environment that gives life to our street art and graffiti scene here. Thanks for including us Jim.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring: Chris RWK, CRKSHNK, Dwei, Hope Hummingbird, I Heart Graffiti, Little Ricky, Peachee Blue, Raddington Falls, Rambo, SacSix, Sara Lynne-Leo, Sticker Maul, and Technodrome.
We’ve seen an uptick of messages on the streets aimed at Governor Cuomo
It was an auspicious night in New York City, but a very strange one also.
The governor of the state had cleared the way for movies to be seen in theater settings in March, although only at 25% capacity. Fotografiska, a premiere global photo gallery emporium, had invited us after the movie screening to speak with Martha Cooper onstage with Sean Cocoran from the Museum of the City of New York, but there was once catch: everyone had to wear masks. Maybe this has become normal for politicians, but it was odd for all of us. Later when graffiti writer/historian Jay Edlin and artist Aiko joined us onstage, we all were having more fun, but also felt even more claustrophobic.
Chalk it up to experience, as they say. And ultimately it was a true pleasure to share the new cut of “Martha: A Picture Story” by director Selina Miles as it is being released commercially in the US four and a half years after we first suggested to Selina that she might make a documentary about the celebrated photographer in September 2016 in Detroit. The audience appeared to enjoy the film, even though chairs were 6 feet apart, and we even had a book giveaway at the end.
We thank our hosts at Fotografiska for inviting us and for running a great event for Martha and all of us as we emerge from a year locked down.
“For this evening’s screening Martha Cooper was joined in live conversation by Jaime Rojo and Steven P. Harrington, founders of the influential art site BrooklynStreetArt.com and curators of the current “Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures” retrospective exhibition at Urban Nation Museum in Berlin.
Moderated by Sean Corcoran, Curator of Photographs, Museum of the City of New York. Utopia Films’ Martha: A Picture Story is a portrait of trailblazing photographer Martha Cooper – an American photojournalist who became the first female staff photographer for the New York Post during the 1970s, later becoming best known for documenting New York City communities and the graffiti scene of the 1970s and 1980s. Director Selina Miles’ affectionate tribute to Cooper journeys viewers from her snapping shots on a motorcycle trip through east Asia in 1963 at the age of 20, to today, an influential icon to the global movement of street art.”
Recent reviews of “Martha: A Picture Story“
The New York Times
‘Martha: A Picture Story’ Review: Snapshots of a Career
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/movies/martha-a-picture-story-review.html
ELLE
Martha Cooper Talks to Zoey Grossman about the Art of Photographing Street Art
https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a35949029/martha-cooper-interview-zoey-grossman/
“Question: When you’re finding the moment within the environment you’re shooting in, do you always go up and ask the people you’re photographing if you can take their photo, or do you try and blend in?
Martha: It depends on the situation. Often if you ask first, you destroy the moment you’re trying to capture. My preference is to be a fly on the wall.
The Los Angeles Times
Review: ‘Martha: A Picture Story’ shares the joy of a septuagenarian NYC street photographer
“But it’s not just her great eye that makes her such an icon on the street art scene; it’s also her unique nerve that led to her photograph so many iconic moments for fans of graffiti, taking risks as she takes photos.”
The San Francisco Examiner
‘Martha: A Picture Story’ celebrates street art
“Documenting street art, which was vilified as an unsightly manifestation of vandalism at the time, Cooper demonstrated that it, in fact, involved imagination, skill, beauty and other qualities connected with art.”
Dazed
“Martha Cooper is the photographer documenting decades of NYC graffiti”
https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/52085/1/martha-cooper-has-documented-this-outlaw-art-in-nyc-since-the-1970s
“But, back when Cooper first turned her lens on this ephemeral art form, it was truly anti-establishment. As a potent means of talking back to power, graffiti presented an opportunity for public self-expression and protest. “1977, the Bronx was burning down. No one really wanted to write that graffiti was an interesting thing. But I don’t want to shoot something that’s done with permission,” Cooper explains. ”It’s an outlaw art. That’s what makes it thrilling.”
Rogerebert.com
Nell Minow
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/martha-a-picture-story-movie-review-2021
“Decades before the work was taken seriously by the art world, her focus helped the people creating the work think of themselves as artists and it inspired a generation of new artists to express themselves. One of the joys of this movie is seeing these young people treat Cooper as something between a rock star and their grandmother (“maybe mother” she tells one of them).”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening:
1. DREAMER: Jahmal Williams Life n Art and Skateboarding.
2. CASCADES: X L’Atlas x Emmaus x Art Azoi
3. CELSO via Tost Films
Improvisational, his work is like jazz that way. As a skater, he’s a musician. As an artist, he’s a composer.
DREAMER: Jahmal Williams Life n Art and Skateboarding.
CASCADES: X L’Atlas x Emmaus x Art Azoi
Completed half a dozen years ago, this kinetic work by L’ATLAS is emblematic of the lasting and ephemeral pictorial interventions that Art Azoï programs and produces. A twenty-storey building in rue de Ménilmontant becomes the vibrating geometric jam that shakes the neighborhood, thanks to the sharp and organic patterning L’ATLAS lays down the wall.
CELSO via Tost Films
Life breaks you into many pieces. It’s up to you to mortar them all back together to make a fine mosaic. Let Celso show you the way.
– Artesano Project San Pedro de Macorís
A worthy companion to the original tome, Bjørn Van Poucke and Lanoo publishers extend the hitlist of favored muralists that he & Elise Luong began in Street art/ Today 1 – and the collection is updated perhaps with the perceived cultural capital many of these artists have garnered since then.
Replete with full-color plates from the artists’ own collections and garnished with brief overviews of their histories, creative background, and philosophies, the well-designed and modern layout functions as an introduction for those unfamiliar with the wide variety of artworks that are currently spread across city walls as large scale opus artworks in public space. As organizer and curator of The Crystal Ship mural festival in Oostende, Belgium, Mr. Van Poucke has had his pick of the litter and has showcased them during the late twenty-teens.
“It feels like the peak of street art’s identity crises is finally behind us, and we’re witnessing the re-birth of a new, reinvented scene,” says writer Sasha Bogojev in his introduction, and who could disagree. This has always been true of the organic form of subversive street art. Published on the eve of Covid-19, surely we know that everything has changed again, and the scene is reinventing itself once more – perhaps closer to its roots this time.
With some interviews with artists and insights from selected cultural observers, the artists work is collected into groupings that help organize stylistic themes including Abstract, Figurative, Realism, and Urban Interventionism, Part 2 will make a quick study for collectors and fans alike.
Street Art Today 2: The 50 most influential street artists working today. By Bjorn Van Poucke. Published by Lannoo publishers, Belgium.
A year ago NYC went into complete lockdown. Spring went on without us. Holed up in our homes we missed the burst of new life such as the myriad of flowering trees of New York, pear trees, peach trees, cherry trees, magnolia trees, the empress tree, dogwoods…
We missed the daffodils and the tulips on the sidewalks and the wisteria vines climbing on the front of brownstones. The burst of color and fragrances that permeate the city during the Spring is unmistakable. Nature comes alive and with it our desires to go out and celebrate the new beginnings.
Spring is also a cultural season. New exhibitions open and with that, the cultural life of the city begins in earnest. Indoor and outdoor cultural offerings abound with you presented with many choices to select from.
Now there’s an optimistic feeling of a renaissance after a year of sacrifices and suffering, loss and despair.
Most of the city’s museums, gardens, and parks are open to the general public in a limited capacity. Please always check with the institutions’ guidelines and policies before you go. Most if not all of them have requirements that must be observed prior to visiting. So please plan your visit and have fun.
About midway through this video, the artist is lifted into the air above the street, away from walls, suspended – and the audio is that of a heart thumping quietly, uncrowded, unfogged, unadorned.
You may think this is about a particular painting, as these videos often are. But instead, it is a video about the practice of painting in public and a relationship built around it.
A late 90s graffiti writer in Madrid, Dourone flew solo on the streets, teaching himself the craft, experimenting with painting styles and disciplines. Later in the 2010s, he joined together with Elodie, forming a painting duo. With 90 murals around the world – Lyon, Los Angeles, Paris, Madrid, Zurich, Miami, Johannesburg… you wonder more about the people than their work at some point.
Fragmented Record is a project that allows you to see behind the scenes and initiates the viewer into the process and approach. “All these years we have shown you the result of our work but very rarely the realization.”
We always appreciate the repurposing and re-imagining of existing features in the man-made environment. Artists have myriad ways to reconfigure and transform the simplest of situations, and here in Porto, Portugal MrKas has done it twice. First he elongated this fallen wooden beam and imagined it as a lit match stick. Later he painted over his own creation, transforming the view to a human heart pierced by an arrow.
It’s good to see his imagination at work. He calls this anamorphic wall in an abandoned factor, “Still I heal”.
Nowruz Mubarak! Happy Persian New Year to all the New York neighbors who celebrate it. Also, Happy Spring! Did you think it would never arrive? Already the birds are chirping in the trees, and the crocus is popping up from beneath the garbage and dog crap. That guy who lives downstairs named Manny and his brother are washing their car on the curb while blasting a mix from Marley Marl & Red Alert at top volume for the block to enjoy. All the while, there is a colorful parade of young bucks and shorties who are strutting around the neighborhood with big eyes and a burning flame of hope in their hearts.
Another reason Brooklyn is feeling hopeful is the announcement Friday by Chuck Schumer saying that New York is to get 1.6 million COVID shots every week thanks to a ‘vaccine supercharge.’ One year after the sounds of ambulances filled the air and refrigerator trucks became mobile morgues on Brooklyn streets, people are eagerly running to pharmacies and Yankee Stadium and Citi Field to get the shot.
New Yorkers are also taking to the streets to protest Anti-Asian discrimination and violence locally and nationally. Many point to Trump’s use of the term “Chinese Virus” repeatedly in the last year as a direct causal relationship to increased acts of prejudice. But once again, New Yorkers know how to re-enforce the message: “United we stand, divided we fall.” As a New Yorker and as a person, it makes you feel proud.
Finally, street art is popping off in all kinds of stylistic and thematic directions this week – from the secular American saint, Dolly Parton, posed as a vaccine nurse by SacSix, to Sticker Maul’s Priority Mail collages, to Winston Tseng’s subtle and damning phone booth campaign of Walmart and McDonald’s workers who represent our formerly middle-class neighbors who are paid so little that they actually qualify for food stamps.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring: Almost Over Keep Smiling, City Kitty, D7606, Damien Mitchell, Ethan Minsker, Invader, LET, Matt Siren, Mort Art, NET, Rambo, Raw Raffle, Royce Bannon, SacSix, Sara Lynne Leo, Sticker Maul, Tram, Voxx Romana, and Winston Tseng.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY