Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Almost Over Keep Smiling, Billy Barnacles, Gianni Lee, City Kitty, CRKSHNK, Early Riser NYC, Seven Line Arts Studio, M*Code, Ori Carino, Sticker Maul, Turtle Caps, Urban Russian Doll NYC, and You Go Girl!
“Instead of cooperation, we have divisions among countries,” reports Alaniz from here in Stornara, Italy. “There are people that still now think the virus is not real.”
Alaniz & Federica in collaboration with Stra Murals Crew. Stornara, Italy. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Alarming and true, anti-intellectualism
has expanded to new heights during this pandemic – likely resulting in people
getting sick and/or dying who didn’t really need to. If it’s any consolation to
you, dear reader, history tells us that there were anti-mask
naysayers during other mass illnesses too – standing firmly in opposition to
public health directives because of feared encroachment on civil liberties, or simply
because Jesus told them. Ah well.
The Argentinian born nomadic painter Alaniz says that his new figurative mural with his “new family” in Stonara is a collaboration with his love Federica – and it took 10 days to complete. It features a beleaguered turning figure wearing a facemask, but its final face is macabre, frightening. The presentation is confused, perhaps because of the sun-drenched and cheerfully eye-popping palette.
Detail from a new mural by Alaniz in collaboration with Stra Murals Crew. Stornara, Italy. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Overhead is a dove flying with a hypodermic need in its beak, perhaps the elusive vaccine meant to inoculate people against Covid-19. Or, possibly it is carrying a 5G microchip shot from the Bill Gates foundation that will communicate your thoughts to any nearby Alexa speaker. Hard to tell.
“After 10 days of work we present this wall as a representation of the mixed feelings that this lockdown generated in most of us,” says Alanis. “This has been a unique situation that has affected everybody’s lives and that has shown the failures of our actual society.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. From the Archives: Keith Haring 2. Friday Night, August 14th – From Funkadelic 3. One Thousand Stories / The Making of a Mural / A Project by JR
BSA Special Feature: From the Archives: Keith Haring
Why are we thinking about street artist Keith Haring so often right now? Possibly because we are remembering how he used his art practice to talk about crisis on his doorstep, and took risks to get his work out, and we are seeing more artists stepping up to that challenge on the street today.
When we think about this pandemic and the ways in which the artistic community has swiftly and forcefully responded to illustrate with their art the general mood, the ethos, the official response from our political leaders, the health providers unequivocal rush to action to save lives, the scientific community pushing to guide us during this still ongoing crisis, the dissemination of information and misinformation on social media, and the decisive actions from the mainstream media to educate the public on the pandemic one New York City artist comes to mind.
Keith Haring. He used his art to talk about Apartheid in South Africa, the crack epidemic, and the scourge of AIDS, a disease that took his life in 1990. We wonder what he will be doing on the streets if he were still alive. He’d be 62 now, still an age where he’d have the creative energy imbued with wisdom and experience. Below we share with you a vintage reel of him getting up on the NYC Subway.
As you watch this video for a mass TV audience under the guise of kooky kuriosity, it also crosses your mind that the police handle him with kid gloves – they don’t tackle him and slam him on the ground. Would his fate have been the same if he were black? And the reporter follows him around like a curious puppy, in awe of his escapades, intoning that vandalism is cute when its done by white guys from Pennsylvania who sell canvasses in Soho. There is so much we can learn from archived footage like this.
So you know what tonight is, right?
One Thousand Stories / The Making of a Mural / A Project by JR
Belgium’s ROA, whom we have featured in perhaps 30+ articles, put out his “CODEX” monograph this spring, and while sitting inside your lockdown we thought you would enjoy freeing your mind to travel the world with him.
A gypsy by nature, a naturalist by practice, he has investigated and heralded the animal world, complete with its heartless savagery. Accurately depicting many of the most marginalized and endangered specimens, this uncanny portraitist spooks you with the scale of his animals, draws you in to their presentation without guile.
Willing to let his work do the talking, ROA is still anonymous after more than a decade on the global street art stage. Following his own path, we recognize his achievements here, and wish him good travels wherever he goes.
Back in June, BSA published the first article on disCONNECT, a project created in London during the lockdown due to Covid-19. A collaboration between Schoeni Projects and HK Walls, disCONNECT involves the take over of a period building by 10 artists from different countries.
Disconnect “reflects on the creative and physical constraints of the current global crisis, exploring psychological and political reactions to the crisis, as well as the role of technology as conduit between the two.”
We’re pleased to bring you our final article on the project with images of the works of all 10 participating artists. For our previous coverage click HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.
Free Tickets for disCONNECT are now available. 24 July – 24 August, Wednesdays – Sundays. Hourly slots starting from 11am to 5pm, with a maximum of 8 people per slot. Please book below, we can’t wait to share this journey with you!
Fun summer shots at Welling Court in Queens today as two big names from the New York graffiti scene, Daze and BG183 (TATS Cru) collaborated on a piece. The symbols they use meld together some of the favorite New York iconography – fire hydrants, subway trains, high-rises and family. Call it a dream sequence born in the hot sun, a reminder that Covid 19 may be gripping our minds right now, but some things like your love for New York never changes. Big up to Alison C. Wallis for hosting Welling Court 2020.
An outstanding and unprecedented cohesion of many communities has been on display in cities across the United States this spring and summer as “Black Lives Matter” is painted across the streets in expansive letters. In New York City, where the marches are wide, the speeches are forceful, and the conversations go deep – this panoply of painted colors and patterns is no joke.
The slogan, a rallying cry that is objectionable to some and painfully, obviously necessary to others has been painted in myriad styles across city streets in 8 prominent locations; Brooklyn (2), Staten Island, Harlem, Queens, The Bronx, and Manhattan (2) – making it a mural program that is truly All-City, as the graffiti writers used to say in the 1970s and 80s.
On a serious and joyful day in July, we donned our masks and met up with photographer Martha Cooper to safely shoot and talk with members of the Tats Cru, and a number of other artists, activists, community members, media, and elected leaders along Center Street and Foley Square in the City Hall section of downtown Manhattan to see the installation of one of Manhattan’s two BLM street murals. (The second one is on 5th Avenue in front of Trump “Tower” – a soaring glitzy paean to shallow values and a deep disdain for civic ones, but that is a well-worn critique we’re all tired of). This site is only yards away, a five-minute walk, really, from “a graveyard where historians estimate there may have been as many as 10,000[6]–20,000 burials in what was called the “Negroes Burial Ground” in the 1700s.”
As you scan through these photos taken by Martha we notice the determination in the body language of those involved. The weight of the moment escapes no one this time as police and state violence seem to have tipped the scale this spring and summer in the US. It is as if everyone is awash with layers of history – drawing direct connections to the present in this, a society whose very foundations are built upon enslavement.
Intertwined is a celebration of the struggle, and of the colors that artists can facilitate to help us tell our individual and communal stories as the city proclaims something that wouldn’t be necessary if it were obvious in all our actions and across our societal systems.
“I’m very, very supportive of the arts and I think that the Black Lives Matter movement needs to incorporate the arts, whether it is murals on plywood, or poetry, or prose, or music, or this amazing outdoors public art on the street. People relate to the arts, they can express themselves in a much more dramatic way,” said Gale A. Brewer, Manhattan Borough President.
We wish to thank Martha for sharing her photos with us for this article.
Additional Information and Resources:
The mural was conceived in a partnership with Black Lives Matter of Greater NY and Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer. Spearheaded by WXY Studio, the project was supported by a group of architects and allies. Artists installed the mural July 1-3, 2020.
If you are not seeing opinions and theories being expressed on social media or raging cable, you can always go to the streets today, as the voice of the people is marching out to grab a soap box and yell their opinion. Faced with a daily firehose of government neglect and corporate disinformation, you and your neighbors are either being tricked into hating each other of divining the truth.
You may not agree with the sentiment of the street artists who are going out right now to paint or wheatpaste their art and perspectives, but somehow you have more empathy and trust for them than the millionaires behind microphones on screens wherever you look.
Shout out this week to a new kid on the block, an artist named Stickermaul who puts out a smart array of messages using collage, hand written text, pasted text, photos, and USPS stickers to convey a number of quick socio/political messages in Manhattan. The new voices right now are informing us of the evolutions/revolutions that are taking place.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Bella Phame, Coby Kennedy, Elle, Live Thoughfully, Lust Sick Puppy, Mad Artist, and Rono.
Muralist Inti finished a metaphorical mastery in Grenoble, France last month that helps us to put ourselves in perspective, remembering that in the system of planets we reside in, the earth is just one minor player. This rising giant, perhaps goddess in a hand-tied apron and silenced by a flower, holds the globe in her hand.
Quoting the astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, Inti imparts an observation he is contemplating; “…Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” (Carl Sagan)
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Freight Train Graffiti Melbourne. Can’t Do Tomorrow Festival 2. Anthony Lister – Head Hunter 2020
BSA Special Feature: Freight Train Graffiti Melbourne from the “Can’t Do Tomorrow” Festival 2020
Graffiti Writers and a major collaboration with Southern Shorthaul Railroad (SSR)
There is not unanimity of opinion about painting trains these days – in fact perspectives cannot be further apart when you consider the hot invective spilled on graff writers in some cities – and the invitation and embrace of them in others.
The video above from New York in January presents a conundrum of many sorts – a full train covered by graffiti is enraging to some, an indication of lawless disrespect for society. Only a month later Melbourne government blessed the Can’t Do Tomorrow Festival which invited graffiti writers to do something very similar to an entire train. Cognitive dissonance much?
Face it, for artists and fans the two videos below are a bit of freight porn – products of the urban art festival where a group of old school and prolific graff writers transformed a 22-carriage Southern Shorthaul Railroad (SSR) freight train into the largest outdoor gallery in Australia.
From the producers of the festival “Can’t Do Tomorrow was a massive
celebration of urban art and contemporary culture in one of the most iconic
underground spaces in Australia: The Facility. Across 10 days, over 16,000
PEOPLE immersed themselves in a new way of consuming, or being consumed by,
art.” Eloquent and on-point.
We also appreciate the description of the aspirational outlook of the organization,
“We don’t pretend to be custodians of the contemporary urban art scene. We’re a
micro-movement inside a macro-movement. We are serious about creating a
community that will garner the contemporary urban movement the recognition it
deserves.”
Freight Train Graffiti Melbourne. Can’t Do Tomorrow Festival
Anthony Lister is Head Hunting in 2020
Automated speech synthesis transcription is a current fashion and Anthony Lister cleverly frightens you while hiding behind this audio accompaniment to the video – a disjointed emotionally vacant spirit that parses at a metronomic tempo before melting into the hounds of Satan. How better to introduce the fascinating masks he has been creating for years.
“But in so
far as we are social beings who live in a community of similar individuals with
whom we are in continuous and direct competition, often unconsciously,
primitive beings also feel the urgent need to be different, to impress, to
bewilder and to instill fear, so that they may make themselves revered and
respected.” Happy head hunting!
Street artist Elbi Elem is revealing shapes that are inside this old building in Catalonia- a series of “Variable Geometries”.
Elbi Elem. Geometrias Variables. Konvent. (photo courtesy of Elbi Elem)
Productively using these days of social isolation, the artist has often created surprise sculptural installations in unconventional spaces. This one arose from wanting to “draw with thread.” An curious description, but it gets even better!
Elbi Elem. Geometrias Variables. Konvent. (photo courtesy of Elbi Elem)
“I wanted to achieve the perception of actually sewing the walls,” she says, “as if it were a wound and suture, drilling and piercing them, without use no visible element for its subjection.”
Elbi Elem. Geometrias Variables. Konvent. (photo courtesy of Elbi Elem)
This old factory
in Cal Rosal provided ample opportunity to test different techniques until finally
the desired effect was achieved.
Creating it as
a guest with Konvent Punt Zero the artistic residence in Berga, Catalonia, Elbi
says its the kind of space that encourages experimentation, research, and
expression. “I wanted to make a suspended composition of geometric shapes
aligned with each other,” Elbi says, “without the use of knots, joining both
ends to make them look like a unit.”
Elbi Elem. Geometrias Variables. Konvent. (photo courtesy of Elbi Elem)Elbi Elem. Geometrias Variables. Konvent. (photo courtesy of Elbi Elem)Elbi Elem. Geometrias Variables. Konvent. (photo courtesy of Elbi Elem)Elbi Elem. Geometrias Variables. Konvent. (photo courtesy of Elbi Elem)Elbi Elem. Geometrias Variables. Konvent. (photo courtesy of Elbi Elem)Elbi Elem. Geometrias Variables. Konvent. (photo courtesy of Elbi Elem)Elbi Elem. Geometrias Variables. Konvent. (photo courtesy of Elbi Elem)
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
That’s the text of a cable sent by the writer Mark Twain from London to the press in the United States after his obituary had been mistakenly published, so the story goes.
Similarly, the “elite” of 2020 may be suitably surprised by this new text piece by street commentator ELFO on the streets of Verona, Italy. Since there are roughly four months remaining to the year, maybe this is a meant to be prophecy, but from what we all can see, the “elite” are getting richer and richer from this pandemic, as well as the custom-tailored “bail-outs” from the right- and left-wing politicians who write the bills.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
