Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Not much to say this week, except we’re all in the thick of it and 20,000 are dead in the US.
Stay positive, stay strong, say a prayer for the families who have lost someone and the medical personnel who are working so hard. Happy Easter! Happy Passover!
Check out Andrea Bocelli singing live from Milan today. Love to you all.
So here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring P.V, Devils Fools, Hoacs, and Patrick Picou Harrington.
When times are suddenly hard, you have to be creative.
Many artists have gone without work in the last month across the US and Europe and elsewhere – their freelance jobs have dried up, their side hustle stopped hustling.
Artist Matthew Burrows from Sussex in England has come up with a way for a growing number of artists to band together and help one another, to alleviate a little of the financial insecurity, to gain greater exposure to potential buyers, and strengthen their personal networks with one another. What was initially a local effort appears to be successfully spreading internationally.
The ARTIST SUPPORT PLEDGE is not complicated and depends on the honor system. Post one of your works on Instagram for sale at 200 dollars (or Euros) and use the hashtag #artistsupportpledge. Every time your sales reach $1000, you pledge to spend $200 on another artists work.
This sounds like an excellent way to leverage support and circulate at least some wealth in the greater artist community. Also, there is nothing like have the great satisfaction of supporting one another, and feeling supported.
If you have $200 to buy art, we heartily encourage you to check out #artistsupportpledge today!
#artistsupportpledge on Instagram
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. 2020 RPM / UNO
An expert interconnector of textures and patterns of urban living and pop art sensibilities, the Italian Street Artist UNO captures the essence of his inside life during quarantine in a new brief video today.
A clicking time meter of life passing and the daily benchmarks that give shape to one continuous life in captivity, it’s the repetition that reveals the patterns, the subtle variations encoded in the DNA of living.
Here’s UNO in Rome, spinning at 2,020 revolutions per minute.
2020 RPM / UNO
There is a good amount of delusion and illusion being proferred in these near-hysteric times.
Take a breath, stay grounded, and look for something positive. Stick to the facts, and accept them for what they are. We can do this.
Always wanted to make suggestions to Okuda about his color choices? Interested in being an assistant painter in his Madrid studio? Wishing you had an opportunity to adult-color but are missing the actual coloring book?
Have no fear Quarantennial! We have just the thing for you to download and print out and while away the hours. These are new polygonal spirit animals from Okuda San Miguel for you or the children in your home to create a mask with. Once you have finished coloring it and cutting it out, imagine the theatrical photos you can take around your bunker – not to mention the opportunity for role playing!
Ignited as a project with the Red Cross (please donate) the artist hope to bring color and positive vibes into your home. The learn more about his Colouring the World initiative, check out @inkandmovement on Instagram.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE MASKS
Thinking outside the box is a prerequisite for most graffiti writers and Street Artists. You may say that they are so unaccustomed to the prescribed routes of reaching an audience with art and ideas that they simply barge into new ones, and bringing the art to you.
The same can be said of the Berlin creative laboratory YES, AND … productions (YAP), and their forward-thinking cultural partners at the newly mobile Museum of Now (MON). Together they are presenting new ways of bringing art to the people.
Now thinking outside the museum, the team brought the museum outside to Berlin streets this week thanks to their new nighttime programming that mixes classical western standard-bearers like Michaelangelo with modern masters of new forms like the light artist Multiscalar. The end result is a newly energized city block that projects both artists on facades just outside your living room, viewable from inside it.
Allowing museum-goers to stay home and stay safely physically distanced from strangers, MON director Denis Leo Hegic tells us that the neighborhoods where MON has been this week have become suddenly alive. People are attracted to their windows by the blasting music and continue hanging out of them to watch the show, looking out at the few stragglers on the sidewalk who are likewise smitten by the unannounced exhibition suddenly stealing their minds for a moment, away from the mundane worries and credible fears of COVID-19.
Because of the heaviness of our time right now, Multiscaler chose a message that was optimistic – which you can see here. The artists’ messenger is Michelangelo’s David – writing a letter to us as he would perhaps send today.
Hegic tells us that the whole project was set up, planned and produced within just a few days as a joint venture between the Museum of Now and YAP. “Without the YAP crew, this project would never have seen the light of night,” he says.
With a projector and speakers in the back of a van, many an anarchist and artivist is familiar with using their voice to protest. For the museum, it is about making art accessible to everyone, and Hegic says that many institutions are committed to this, yet very few of them actually put this into practice.
“I believe that the post-Covid world will be different from what we know now, and it is up to us how we want to shape it, “ he says. “For my part, I will fight for a culture that is alive and vivid – and accessible to everyone and always.”
We had an opportunity to talk to Hegic more about the project:
BSA: This is an ingenious solution to having a museum experience at a time when museums are necessarily closed. How do you choose the location of your exhibitions?
Denis Leo Hegic: At a time when we all have to stay at home to reduce the spread of the virus outbreak, our cultural participation also decreases. Therefore, it is very important that we do everything we possibly can to keep art and culture from coming to a standstill. When choosing the locations, it is very important to have spots with great visibility from a large number of windows and balconies. We want the largest possible audience to be able to see the exhibitions from their homes
BSA: Have you had the opportunity to speak with any audience members?
DH: We have not spoken to anyone in person as we keep physical contact to a minimum. But digitally, via social media and email, we have had a lot of exchange with the audience.
People are surprised and thankful to see a positive message. In times of crisis when doomsday news is omnipresent, it is art and culture that brings people together.
BSA: Projections are often used for commercial pursuits as well today. Is it a challenge to communicate to people that this is intended as public art?
DH: Not at all. Everyone immediately understood what it was about. This is probably partly because we play quite loud music and sounds – which would be rather uncommon for advertising projections in housing areas.
BSA: As a philosopher, academic, and aesthete, what or who was your inspiration for this project?
DH: The word “inspiration” comes from the word “muse”. And the muses reside in “museums” – the temples of inspiration. My inspiration, my muses are always the people, and if they can no longer come to the museum, we will bring the museum to them.
Your opportunity to put your creativity to the test is a daily undertaking these days thanks to unprecedented social and economic change – and a global health threat. London-based Street Artist and fine artist Phlegm says that he has been finding his balance while staying inside with his pregnant partner and two-year-old son – or at least trying to.
Balancing internal worries and turmoil with quotidian home responsibilities and family care, he says that finding a creative way to process his thoughts and feelings has been imperative in this period of self-isolation. The first step he realized is one that many of us have been learning – the value of implementing a routine.
“I tried to take time out to do an hour of work a day but every time I tried to engrave or do the very detailed work I realised my hands were shaking too much,” he says. “So instead I thought maybe I can just paint and draw something small and loose that’s kind of cathartic. I can use it to process my thoughts like meditating.”
Luckily for fans of his darkly whimsical illustrations, Phlegm’s agile pace and his knack for spot-on allegory have kept up with the quickly changing news these last few weeks, addressing everything from fears of isolation to the comedy of social distancing and irrational hoarding — and the appreciation we all feel for those in the medical profession who are caring for our neighbors, friends, family, and each other.
“We isolated fairly early because we saw things escalated pretty fast and with knowing little about how this could affect pregnancy we started about a week before the official lock-down in London,” he says in-between his sketching. “I think the first week I was entirely in fight or flight mode. Securing online weekly deliveries, clearing out the garden to make it toddler-friendly and just grafting every waking hour. By the second-week official lockdown was being talked about and people were just queuing for miles to get a year’s supply of toilet roll,” he says with only a little exaggeration.
Using his social media postings as daily communication with the greater world, one by one his monochromatic machinations of whimsy and everyday dilemmas assure you that your strange little thoughts and dramatic fears are, at the very least, normal.
“Maybe because it’s less isolating to feel the same feelings as a group and realise you’re not alone trapped in a personal hell. It now feels like a diary which is a bizarre mixture of banality and terror,” he says.
“I try to keep the work honest and working every day helps. Emotions and actual events are so fast-moving its best to just work day-to-day. Sometimes it’s the very ordinary things that can carry a lot of emotional weight. The only thing I’m trying to be aware of is that people are upset and vulnerable so I tend to sketch out two or three a day and then choose one to ink up. This way I can try and balance the humour with the fear.”
He says that he’ll continue this daily diary for the foreseeable future, giving you a peek into his state of being. His new practice is a genuine “live blogging” with illustrations that describe many powerful and banal aspects of our daily living that is turning long-term – a reflection of the inside life as well as the outside life.
“I want to be realistic and honest, which at times has to include some very dark days but I don’t want to fuel fears and negatively influence people. I think humour is always helpful in times like these, to laugh and cry at the same time. I think also something that happens in huge emotional events like this is that our thoughts become so overwhelmed it’s impossible to express or sort through any of it.”
“I think art can sometimes just give you a place to put it all.”
The numbers of sick and dying continue to climb this week in New York, and so does our determination.
And our appreciation. Stuck inside a building full of artists and weirdos, we hang our heads and hands out the window to clap loudly at 7 o’clock, our Hasidic neighbors across the street gathered on their tiny verandas to do the same. United in our illness, fears, and pain, we are reminded of our common heroes; doctors, nurses, healthcare workers, grocery store workers, restaurant workers, truck drivers, sanitation workers, friends, neighbors and colleagues
“I keep a saucepan and spoon at my window to join in the 7 pm clapping every night,” says photographer Martha Cooper as she describes her solo venture out the window while her cat Melia most likely hides under the bed. “People have even started beating drums. Of course, I never cook in the saucepan but it was my dear mom’s and I remember her cooking in it so I think of her when I’m beating it.”
“The healthcare workers deserve more than applause,” she adds. Amen.
Also, applause can go to at least one landlord in the Williamsburg-Greenpoint neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Mario Salerno reportedly has waived the rent for April, relieving hundreds of people from fear and stress during this economic crash.
Elsewhere in Brooklyn, tenants allege their “Landlord Wants To “Take Advantage” Of Coronavirus To Deregulate Loft Law Units. ” Egad.
Bottom line is, we need BIG thinkers, BIG proposals, and BIG solutions for the hundreds of thousands of people who cannot pay the rent in this expensive city – and around the world. We need a Rent Forgiveness Jubilee, a Universal Basic Income and an actual Infrastructure building mass jobs program. The idea is not going to come from all the millionaires in the White House, the Congress, or the Senate. If people get desperate enough, these changes will be born from the street.
Let’s keep positive, safe, and strong as we weather what comes next.
So here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Berlin Kidz, Chris RWK, City Kitty, Darla Kitty, David Saenz, Food Baby Soul, Surface of Beauty, The Postman Art, TiHumph, Martha Cooper and TV Boy.
This is called disaster capitalism. It’s an actual thing – first gaining notoriety perhaps in Naomi Klein’s book “The Shock Doctrine”.
It involves taking advantage of a monstrous shock to our social and economic system while we are too preoccupied to stop them. People behind corporations actually “game” the future like this – methodically planning to force through changes to society that they always wanted but couldn’t find an acceptable justification for while you were looking. A crime committed right under your nose – while you are worrying about losing your job or paying your rent or your grandma getting sick from Covid-19.
In the case of today’s story of a Brazillian Street Artist named Mundano, the earth, and soil that he used to paint his new mural comes from the region destroyed by a dam break of toxic sludge last January. With hundreds of townspeople and workers swept away by tens of millions of tons of toxic sludge and earth, the people of the area held searches for weeks after and had public meetings full of accusations and fury. They also had funerals.
A similar dam owned by the same company had failed only three years earlier, and many more dams like this are holding immense reservoirs, or poison underground lakes, across Brazil – each potentially breaking apart and poisoning land, water, wildlife, and communities for decades after.
Mundano’s mural honors the workers killed in this man-made environmental disaster and he tells us that the 800 square meter piece references another painting Brazillian modernist called Tarsila do Amaral. Painted in 1933, her work titled “The Factory Workers,” depicts a sea of stern faces with gray clouds rising from factory smokestacks in the background. Mundano says he’s proud of his mural, of the mini-documentary here, and of his neighbors and country people who have raised attention to a situation that appears corrupt, and well, toxic to life.
“In January 2019, Brazil has suffered one of the worse environmental crimes of its history,” says Mundano, “when Vale do Rio Doce’s mining dam broke, contaminating the Paraopeba River with a sea of toxic mud, and killing everything that was in the way, including almost 300 people who lost their lives that day,” he tells us. We talk to him about artists using their work to educate and raise awareness to advocate for political or social change, a term often today called ‘artivism’.
Brooklyn Street Art: With reason, there’s a lot of anger against the government and the owners of the mine about this fatal catastrophe. How did you get involved?
Mundano: The environmental and social causes are a big part of my activism or artivism, and I’ve always been a critic of the exploitation of lands for mining purposes. We have over 200 mining dams operating today in Brazil under the risk of breaking. In the last four years we had two of the biggest catastrophes of our country, both in the state of Minas Gerais; Mariana in 2017 and most recently in 2019 in the city of Brumadinho, where a “tsunami” of toxic mud contaminated the Paraopeba river with 12.7 million cubic meters of sludge, dragging everything that was on the way, including almost 300 people who lost their lives.
As an artivist it is really important for me to be present and see what happened with my own eyes, feel the pain of the victim’s families, follow closely to the inquiry and use the platform and reach that I have as an artist to help these people find justice, and most importantly to put pressure on governments and big companies so that they’re held accountable, preventing this from happening again.
Brooklyn Street Art: What is the role of an artist should be in his/her community? Should art respond to social needs?
Mundano: For over 13 years now, I’ve been practicing artivism in several cities across the globe. My actions and the art I create need to have a bigger purpose. For me, art has the power of bringing reflection into society and impact people’s lives, make them think and reflect on their part in society. That’s how I see my art and how I believe I can contribute to bigger causes. I wouldn’t say it’s every artist obligation, but with these huge global challenges naturally we’re gonna need to become more artivists.
Brooklyn Street Art: The community felt betrayed and abandoned by those who were supposed to protect them. How did they get the strength to rise up and fight in the middle of their pain?
Mundano: I can’t speak for them but I feel that they don’t have other options than to fight for their rights. Brazilians are quite resistant to adversities by nature. One of the main subjects of my work is the cactus, a plant that, like a big portion of our population, survives with little and still manages to share beauty with flowers to the world. It is hard to see a whole city and it’s people destroyed by such a horrible crime, yet, it was such a strong image to watch mothers, wives, sons, daughters, and friends united, marching a year later, screaming for justice, not giving up on the memories of their loved ones. That gave me strength and inspired me to create my biggest and most important work up until today to honor them.
Brooklyn Street Art: Your mural honors and remember those whose lives were lost. Yet there’s some poetic beauty in it with the pigments you used to paint it. You made the paint from the sediment in the river and the earth around it. What were your feelings as you were painting these people faces these materials?
Mundano: The whole process of collecting the mud from the lakebed of Paraopeba River was delicate. I felt the need to talk to residents, local activists, and the families. It was important that I had their consent and that they understood my intentions. The mural was a way of keeping the subject alive, and to honor them in one of the biggest cities in the world, Sao Paulo. I believe that the respect I’ve shown was recognized as I started to receive messages from Brumadinho’s residents about the video, thanking me for the painting, and for me, that’s the biggest recognition of all, it made it all worth it.
Film by André D’elia
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Vermibus Makes a Small Book of His Own Studies
If you are stuck inside and are looking for new projects, this may be a perfect excuse to create a collection of your works into a book, or a collage, a photo album, or a slide show.
There are endless ways to show off your work digitally using programs or as a simple video – and guess what? Lots of people are stuck at home looking at their screens so they may well have an extra moment to see your work too.
For example take a look at Berlin-based Street Artist Vermibus, whose ad takeovers we have written about and presented in talks endlessly for a decade around the world. This little project is just as personal and impressive in this format as any of his large-format subvertizing work.
“It is a simple video but very intimate,” Vermibus tells us, “where I show the beginning of my work process and how this one work evolved in the first months of tests.”
Vermibus “Studies”
Our hearts break when we think of the families and loved ones who remain as many of our neighbors are now dying of Covid-19. May you find comfort in the fact that you are not alone and that your city is here with you. It’s going to be hard but New York is going to pull through this one. We always do.
Welcome to Wednesday, March 32nd.
Just kidding! April Fools!
Truthfully, when you are stuck inside quarantined every day is Blursday. Also all of the leaders at the top seem like fools every day, not just today.
But let’s have a glass half full shall we? We know that optimism is the only thing that can help you in times when it feels like you are full of dread.
You don’t want to spread the virus. But you can still Spread Love. It’s the Brooklyn way.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY