The writing is on the wall, literally, throughout the street art and graffiti scene right now, and you’re forgiven if it is confusing. We’re confused. We’re also clear on a few things.
The silent storm of Covid-19 has battered our doors and now is simply caving in the roof. The open rift between races and our legacy of disenfranchisement of our own is on parade. The one party system disguised as two stands by; quietly and deliberately offering no big ideas or massive structural programs to backstop the economic collapse either, content simply to hand out the contents of all the cupboards to friends.
The prediction from the first piece below doesn’t sound like the prophetic future shock of Gil Scott Heron as it did when he released it. Rather, its a given. While social media is still relatively unregulated, that is.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Amir Diop99, Melvin Q, Michaelangelo, Mustafina, and Pedro Oyarbide.
“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Graff train writer, street artist, and studio artist CRASH invokes a Bible verse (1 Corinthians 13:13) here to find common ground in a nerve-wracking, sad, and polarized time in New York.
This year’s Welling Court Mural Project was necessarily unannounced, as organizer Alison Wallis wanted to be responsible for people’s health and avoided the possibility of crowding – inviting just a few people at a time to paint, and notifying just a few that the action would happen.
The artists didn’t always know what they would do ahead of time either, including old-skool NYC goldstar veteran CRASH and one of the last decades’ stencil talents Joe Iurato, who decided to combine their styles to see how it would play. Then they got talking, thinking and in a flash decided to collaborate.
Joe’s stencil was cut from a photo he had taken at the same spot at last year’s edition of Welling Court; Cey Adams had painted there last year as well and he had taken his grandchildren along for the ride. At some point, the three kids were sitting on the step ladder together and Joe snapped the photo. Iurato thought he’d bring the kids back this year via stencil.
“Joe and I didn’t talk about integrating our work together,” says CRASH, who was assisted by Gemini. “We just did it! – it looks really nice.”
CRASH says he was encouraged by artist Queen Andrea to do something new for the wall instead of writing his name, which he customarily would innovate by playing with fonts, styles, colors, and techniques. When he was thinking of a word to convey his hopes for his fellow New Yorkers, he tells us that at first, he was going to do the Spanish word for love – Amor. But ultimately ‘Love’ won out.
“Each letter is a different typeface that signifies something,” CRASH tells us. “The letter ‘L’ contains a play on a thermometer because of the health crises we’re in. I wanted to keep the ‘O’ light so I used ice cream colors so it looks like an ice cream cone. The ‘V’ is falling because love is becoming something that is almost nonexistent and we need to hold onto it. The ‘E’ is just an old-fashioned graffiti style ‘E’ which is what we do,” he says, “So put it all together and it’s love in a tough time.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Chip Thomas and True Artivism
BSA Special Feature: Chip Thomas and True Artivism
We’re switching it up a little this week and recommending an audio podcast with Radio Juxtapoz instead a film. We think you’ll dig it.
Chip Thomas (aka Jetsonorama), his art, and his photography has of course been featured on BSA and his work/life/activism perhaps 40 times since the late 2000s, but its usually been a blend of other peoples’ stories that we have helped him deliver.
Over the years we have facilitated his historically informed storytelling on the health and life of people on the Navajo Nation, the US dumping radioactive matter there, issues surrounding climate change, the voting rights act, the March on Selma, the favelas in Rio, his “Painted Desert” multi-year project with invited Street Artists.
All the time Chip has been showing us how to bridge communities, raise awareness, through socially engaged street art and photography.
Here you’ll enjoy Evan Pricco and Doug Gillen as they dig deep through the personal and professional history of this artist, activist, and doctor. For once here you’ll hear his actual voice and trace his navigational route in storytelling about himself and the path he’s taken to bring to the surface of our consciousness the people who the US historically makes invisible.
Chip Thomas Is Telling The Story Of The Navajo Nation Through Street Art. Via Radio Juxtapoz.
Occupy City Hall is a movement that appears to bear a very close resemblance to the Occupy Wall Street movement nine years ago. Born with the protests against police brutality and the murder of George Floyd, this movement created an encampment located on Centre Street next to City Hall Park and near The David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building, named after the 1990s mayor.
Occupy City Hall is open 24 hours a day and at the height of the protests it drew hundreds of people who joined the activists with their demands to trim the NYPD budget at least $1 billion from the police department’s current $6 billion budget. During the debates and passing of the new budget at the beginning of July the City appeared to have cut a billion, but critics say it was some fancy footwork that gave the appearance of giving citizens what they demanded.
We went to the camp on a day just after the encampment had experienced heavy rains and suffered an early morning raid by the police. It had an unsettled atmosphere, with some raging outbursts and some quietly warm generosity exhibited among the primarily young crowd. Guess everyone needs a sense of balance these days. The encampment has a communal library, a space for drinking tea, room for meditation and, a sign-making workshop. Most people are welcomed and it also provides a safe space for homeless people in need of a hot meal, a place to rest, and clean clothes.
Now these New Yorkers are calling the location “Abolition Park” and as the encampment evolves it continues to be a very well organized community of people with volunteers serving hot meals, distributing protest kits, water, and first aid for those in need of it.
It’s when you have an opportunity to see a piece of art on the street in person. The combination of portraits, graphic design, and text treatments may spring more from the imagination of those in the design fields but up close you can get an appreciation of the warmth and vulnerability of the figures as well. The stories that are told are down to earth, universal, and here for you to bear witness to.
“Quoting Isaiah 54:17 in the Bible, this mural inspires us and girds us and reminds us that when it comes to systemic racism the battle is not for the faint of heart. Can we get an ‘Amen’?”
A recent street stencil work by John Fekner, Don Leicht, and Brian Albert is a reprise, a sad reminder that the legacy of racism in the country has been with us for what seems like forever. During another chapter of Fekner’s creative life on New York streets he sang a visual HYMN to the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in the wake of the murderous brutality of white New York teens in Queens. Now thirty three years later the viciousness of police violence against black citizens on display can make you think nothing has changed fundamentally, even though we know it has.
We asked the artist how this HYMN at the Welling Court Mural Project this summer is a counterpart to the HYMN project more than three decades ago – a collaboration by John Fekner and Brian Albert.
John Fekner and Brian Albert. Hymn. Queens, New York. 1987. (photo courtesy of John Fekner)
“HYMN was a collaboration by John Fekner and Brian Albert. The project constructed on an embankment overlooking the Grand Central Parkway in Queens was intended as a call for peace, an immediate response to the growing racial tensions over the death of a young black man in New York City. A gang of white youths in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens brutally beat three black men whose car had broke down in the neighborhood, chasing one of the three, 23-year-old Michael Griffith from Bedford-Stuyvesant, to his death when he was hit by a car crossing the Shore Parkway on December 20th, 1986.
The piece consisted of a tombstone-shaped concrete electrical power box painted black with the word “HYMN” stenciled in 12-inch high white letters. Flush with the ground, in front of the ‘tombstone’ was a translucent 40” x 50” photographic print portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., illuminated from a light source in the ground. The electricity necessary for the underground lighting was tapped from a streetlamp, which switched on at sunset.
Hymn was installed for Martin Luther King Jr. Day on January 19th, 1987. Passing motorists could see the work both during the daytime and at night when it transformed into a subtle glowing image of harmony and peace. The illegally sited work remained for a few weeks and was eventually removed from the parkway embankment.”
John Fekner (with Don Leicht and Brian Albert) Hymn 2020 (Rest In Power) (above) is intended to be a solemn reflective message to show empathy and compassion to the local community and beyond, during this time of protest, police reform and positive change.
(Installation by Dante, Roman & Dave Santaniello at Welling Court Mural Project NYC)
Massive
and bright and staring at the summer sky, the new mural in the Tegel area of
Berlin is quintessential BustArt. Two decades after starting his mark-making as
a Swiss graffiti writer, his style borrows elements from that classic graffiti
mixed with cartoons, pop art, and perhaps an eye toward others like Crash and
D*Face who themselves point to the Roy Lichtenstein.
His brand of ‘neopop” mixology is unique to him of course, and the tireless effort, scale of work (40 meters x 16 meters), and relative speed that he works sets him in a category of his own.
“This is the biggest wall I have painted so far and I could not be more happy with the outcome,” he says of the two week gig. The confident command of visual vocabulary, character and line work tell you that this new mural is a challenge BustArt was more than ready for.
Bustart also
wants to shout out his mate @sket185 for the enormous help, the folks at @yesandpro who orchestrated along with Urban Nation, and we all
give thanks to photographer Nika Kramer for sharing her work here with BSA readers.
Hanging tough is what New York does, and the art in the street is 10X more potent than six months ago. It’s almost cliche to say that Street Art and graffiti are about a conversation on the street, but the words and sentiments being expressed right now on monuments, edifices, and in doorways are a direct reflection of the high-emotion, high-stakes conversations that we must have about the true state of race, freedom and social mobility in 2020 US.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Art 2 Heart Art, Calicho Art, Chris RWK, Col Walnuts, Eortica, Irena Kenny, Jilly Ballistic, John Ahearn, Know Justice, Sac Six, Scratch, Shiro, Top Bun Artist, Zachary Ginsberg, and Zero Productivity.
We’ve been hearing fireworks for weeks in Brooklyn and across New York City. That is not unusual activity to see leading up to this holiday celebrating the start of the country, but the quantity and quality of fireworks available on the black market (fireworks are largely illegal in NYC) and the duration of the explosions into the night has been wearing down already frayed nerves of people in some neighborhoods, spawning rumors and conjecture.
Have you ever noticed that every conspiracy theory appears to involve black SUVs? Or maybe black helicopters? Dude, what do you think that means?
Tonight we’ll expect a cavalcade of illegal fireworks to light up the sky all over the city nonetheless. In the morning we’ll expect that none of our social and political problems will have disappeared overnight because of a patriotic holiday. We know that none of us are free until all of us are free, so there will still be work to do.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “No Weapon Formed Against Thee Shall Prosper” Cey Adams, Sophia Dawson, and Marka 27
BSA Special Feature: “No Weapon Formed Against Thee Shall Prosper” Cey Adams, Sophia Dawson, and Marka 27
Quoting Isaiah 54:17 in the Bible, this mural inspires us and girds us and reminds us that when it comes to systemic racism the battle is not for the faint of heart. Can we get an ‘Amen’?
“No Weapon Formed Against Thee Shall Prosper” By Murals For The Movement, Cey Adams, I’m Wet Paint and Marka 27 is dedicated to the victims of police brutality and mass incarceration.
Free spirit Lady Pink has sprinkled a summer bouquet across a wall here with friends in Queens for the Welling Court Mural Project this year. The Ecuadorian-American artist is known by many for her graffiti writing on trains in the 1970s and 1980s and her latter day murals empowering women, exploring the cityscape – and themes of rebellion or self-expression.
Here she has decided to keep it simple for summer 2020, perhaps in the face of the complexity of our lives at the moment. These colors and motifs of flora are reassuring and soothing – possibly to give a salve for our collective wounds as she subtly pays tribute to those names of black and brown people brutalized by our system.
The city is hurting, black people are hurting, poor folks are hurting. In times like these, Lady Pink and her painting family know what you need, because they need it too.
Shout out to Alison Wallis for organizing this years Welling Court Mural Project, despite the challenges of Covid-19. Read more about the project at wellingcourtmuralprojectnyc on Instagram.
The marauding crowd, faceless and multi-podel, rumbling with half ideas and mislead missions. If you have lived in cities you know the feeling of being swept along inside one as it hurtles down the stairs, up the escalator, through the lobby, across various stadia.
We like it because we feel like we are part of something bigger, something that must have a logic of its own. In losing yourself, in becoming one with these others, we are reassured for that moment that there is something larger and of consequence, if only to break apart again into one once more.
Isolation
and pandemic have scarred many minds in the last few months because they’ve been
couple with fear, but these events have opened a few minds as well because we’ve
had time to examine, correlate, critique, observe our own impulses and needs
and wants.
Artist Alex
Fakso tells us that he used to be an avid traveler for his work, relying perhaps
on incessant movement for his sanity – moving from city to city sort of
mindlessly. He says he may have taken some things and people for granted,
including himself. and the current world crisis has allowed him to reflect on
what was left for granted by many people including himself.
In his installation
for the disconnect exhibition in London, he says these ideas of panic and isolation
are at the core. A distanced exhibit, he’ll be happy to see you contemplate the
images of crowds placed here. He hopes it will be “a dive into a world which
has dramatically changed,” he says, and one in which, “as individuals, we
currently long to belong again.”
Adam Neate (UK) Aida Wilde (Iran) Alex Fakso (Italy) Mr.Cenz (UK) David Bray (UK) Herakut (Germany) Icy and Sot (Iran) Isaac Cordal (Spain) Vhils (Portugal) ZOER (Italy)
This one caught our eye for the merging of classic graffiti nerve, blunt style execution, sentimental velvety roses, inspirational verses, …Read More »
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