It’s hard to even comment on this bellicose war-loving president and his military industry profiteers all ginning up a war against Iran – except to say, “Fool me once…”. Wait, how does that go again?
This week we take you back to the Wynwood neighborhood in Miami, where Primary Flight started a huge graffiti throwdown in the 2000s, later picked up by Tony Goldman to create Wynwood Walls. The current fare throughout the neighborhood is record-setting: from the sheer number of murals and art installations, to the parade of families and friends coming here to take tours and selfies. Catching a shot of a piece without people in the frame is like trying to run in between raindrops.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Miami, and this time featuring 1UP Crew, BK Foxx, BustArt, Cranio, Cush Kan, Dam Crew, Dia5, Komik, Quake, Ripes, Sipros, Starve, Thomas Danbo, and Urban Ruben.
“Are you from the media? Tell the prime minister to go and
get f**ked from Nelligen,” yells an exhausted firefighter out of his truck
window to the TV cameras.
“This is fine” by artist Lush (JAMES ROSS/EPA-EFE/REX)
“Stand down now. You don’t deserve to govern. You knew this was coming. It’s been coming for a few years. You’ve been totally ignorant of it,” says another firefighter on a TV news interview as she lays bare her contempt for the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in the wake of the worst fires ever sweeping the country. He’s been facing a lot of angry voices lately.
Morrison hits the high seas with bags of money while the forests goes up in flames in this wheatpaste by Huggies.
Surrounded by unprecedented fires and animal deaths that are widely predicted and attributed to the climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels, the PM nonetheless went to Hawaii for a vacation over the Christmas holiday while half of his country was in flames during the bushfire crisis.
A handmade sign rates the PM’s response to fires.
Naturally, Street Artists have been creating works to
address the issue, as well as to accuse him and others of being employees of
coal companies, especially in light of his perplexing denials of any
relationship between fires and those related industries.
Scott Marsh’s depiction of the Hawaii paradise that the PM enjoyed while his own country was engulfed in a bushfire crises back home.Artist Van T Rudd surmises on his instagram @van.nishing that the profiteers of the coal industry are responsible for the fires.@van.nishing
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. SpY / Full Story / Takin Over Public Spaces In The City 2. Matth Velvet. Parees Festival 2019 3. Bomb Shelter/Pete Kirill/Wynwood, Miami
BSA Special Feature: SpY Takes Over Public Spaces
The brilliant Spanish interventionist is profiled here by a brand – but its not obtrusively involved in the video. His approach to the city is educational, humorous, full of adoration and witty simplicity. A graffiti writer who challenged himself to interact with the public spaces in new ways, he credits those early years bombing with his heightened understanding of the urban environment, and how to skillfully disrupt it.
SpY / Full Story / Takin Over Public Spaces In The City
Matth Velvet at Parees Festival 2019
A new video from PareesFest 2019
featuring a painter on the wall, and demonstrating the entirely different
approach a mural is when realized with brushes. A tribute to historical
Olloniego mining, the artist is Matth Velvet and the video is by Titi Muñoz.
Bomb Shelter/Pete Kirill/Wynwood, Miami
Taking the trip local, Pete Kirill tells you about his project in Wynwood, Miami – a graffiti and art supply store, gallery, and community hub that is rooted in graffiti and of course spreads out far from there. A unique opportunity to see this transformed neighborhood through the eyes of Miami folks – a mini tour of one spot just after the deluge of art fans and tourists during Art Basel, which happens in Miami every year at the beginning of December.
With the earth at the center of the eye, Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada tells us that the first of two murals he painted for the recent COP 25 conferences is called “Forest Focus.” As the world has been watching the largest forests of Australia burning this month, he clearly knows what we’re all facing.
“With an image of the world as the iris,” he says, “This mural has an artistic focal point that symbolizes the values set forth at the COP25 conference being held in Madrid.”
The Cuban-born Street Artist, now based in Barcelona, was partnering with a public art program/platform called GreenPoint EARTH during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference, or COP 25 to create two new street art pieces.
Well known for his “Terrestrial Series” of artworks spread over masses of land that are visible by planes flying overhead, Rodriguez-Gerada blends social and ecological themes seamlessly with sometimes profound results.
His second mural of the series is a portrait of Hilda Pérez, a person indigenous to Peru and theVice President of the National Organization of Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Women of Peru (ONAMIAP). The team says she was chosen to represent indigenous people because their voices are frequently marginalized in discussions about ecology and climate change, despite occupying 25-50 percent of the Earth’s land.
“We need to think of every tool in our toolkit because time is ultimately running out,” said Greenpoint Innovations founder Stephen Donofrio at a panel discussion with the artist at the Action Hub Event during the COP25.
He was speaking about the pivotal role that Street Art has been able to fill in education, as well as his own interest in partnering with artists and other collaborators to raise awareness for a myriad of environmental issues. “That’s why it’s really important that Chile/Madrid COP25 has this really strong message that it’s time for action.”
With
more plans to involve Street Artists around the world “to inspire climate action with
positive messages about the interconnected themes of nature, people, and
climate,” Donofrio says he believes that the
power of communication that Street Artists wield can be focused to make real,
impactful change.
“The connectivity is really important
in these projects to establish that we are dealing with globally challenging issues
that boil down to a really local consequence.”
What
sound does a cactus make? What a ridiculous question.
And
you know the answer if you are on Iracema Beach that borders a neighborhood
located in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza. The new sculpture cactus features bells
crafted from recycled old fire extinguishers of different sizes, says its
creator, the Street Artist and inventor of public art, Narcelio Grud.
People have been grabbing the ropes on this musical piece, each bell creating a different musical note. Mr. Grud has created many musical interventions of his own free will over the last decade that enable people to make music in public space – like the one at a bus stop a few years ago for example.
This one was installed during a big musical event called Férias na Praia de Iracema. It’s a free entrance music event organized by the local government, but you can still make your own music with Grud’s cactus anytime you like. It’s easy, says Grud,
“The bells are activated through the ropes attached to the bell clappers, allowing people to interact with the artwork.”
Programação de férias na Praia de Iracema terá atrações locais e nacionais #JornalJangadeiro-O Jornal Jangadeiro é exibido na TV Jangadeiro/SBT de segunda a sexta, a partir das 11h40 e às 19h15
The ever-morphing conglomerate crew called 1UP appears and disappears in cities and countries across the world today, their tag aesthetics drawn from a smorgasbord of styles, rather than just one or two. On the radar, yet skillfully under it, the membership of this large team includes the raw and the polished, the illustrative and the calligraphic.
During Art Basel in December, it appears that a few writers of One United Power were in Miami outputting the simple one-color tags, tight bubbles and sparkling throw-ups, as well as full-blown productions that conjure other worlds and childhood fantasy-scapes.
You can see Wynwood from Miami Beach now, thanks to new multi-story buildings sprouting up in this art-washed neighborhood, transforming its former glory into something far above you. Soaring upward a few stories are these three, painted by the west coast street artist Miles MacGregor, known as El Mac, who elevates the everyday hero once again on a large scale.
The new
apartment complexes like these are replacing the charming one story high stucco
“bodegas” and warehouses selling Chinese manufactured goods in bulk. The
young sitters appear to be of African and Latin ancestry and you are reminded
of America’s professed love of inclusivity and equality – not the class/wealth-based
exclusivity that is constantly hammered into our collective consciousness by
the relentless ads of luxury brands and lifestyle marketing that only a very
small fraction of the populous will ever own.
These
are soft-faced, serene-looking children; two of them holding a single rose and
one of them with his hands extended as if offering a prayer or beckoning you to
step into his world. Perhaps they are saints, but it is difficult to discern
what their role is. El Mac asks us to turn our attention to the experimental
novel ‘Beautiful Losers,” by Leonard Cohen.
“What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. …
Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.”
Welcome to Wynwood! – A little piece of chaotic urban paradise and real estate development that has blossomed into a mini-holy city for fans of murals.
The convergence of three events during the 2010’s – cheap digital camera phones, social media, and mural festivals – have created this intense and colorful tourist neighborhood in Miami during the same time. The sheer number of happy extended families, groups of friends, and couples in love all were converging on the evolving neighborhood to see art in the streets. They also take pictures with it, pose in front of it, buy refrigerator magnets of it, and listen to tour guides speak about it.
During a recent day in the Wynwood Walls compound, which is surrounded on neighboring streets with a plethora of other murals, unsanctioned Street Art, and graffiti, we saw a number of newly painted murals that have replaced others there. We also saw that a few of the old favorites have been reinvigorated. Here is just a handful of images of the action.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Miami, and this time featuring Dasic Fernandez, Ernesto Maranje, Faile, Michael Vasquez, Buff Monster, Futura, Dan Kitchener, and Tats Cru.
You ever feel as if you are levitating above the sidewalk
when walking through the city? It happens. Maybe you just got Tui-Na in
Chinatown and your spinal column is especially stretched and tall. Maybe your
girlfriend just told you that you are definitely The One and your head is in
the clouds. Maybe you are high on opioids.
Hard to say exactly how we felt when walking in Wynwood, Miami last month when we saw this figure from Anthony Lister on the sidewalk across the street from the new Museum of Graffiti.
We’d seen the big Lister tag that accompanied this on the wall above it, smashed alongside the work of so many other artists up and down the block that have occurred since Director Alan Ket and his amazing team opened the museum during Art Basel Week a month ago.
Maybe because it differentiates itself from the myriad murals around the neighborhood, maybe because his newly abstracted superheroic figure appears to float slightly above the surface, it caught our eye and made an impression – creating a sensation of levitation without heavy optics or heavy hand.
It’s good to know that art on the street can still do that. No surprise it was Lister who pulled it off.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Swoon: Cicada at Deitch 2. Biancoshock: GRAFFITRICKS 3. Bien Urbain Festival 2019 Re-Cap by Kristina and Nazar from MZM Projects 4. ARTinfect 4 – The Pfaff Project Part 2
BSA Special Feature: Swoon: Cicada at Deitch
Long time supporter of Street Artist Swoon in her work on the street and in the studio, gallery director Jeffery Deitch has again given a platform to the enlightened wanderings and otherworldly investigations of the artist with a new exhibition in Manhattan. Directed by Frederic King, the character/s of the artists now have dimension, and movement, and a curious way of revealing and concealing. Once again the undercurrents in Swoon’s work are formidable, the presentation ornately manifested.
Biancoshock: GRAFFITRICKS
Biancoshock is back with a new collection of handmade tools that enable hoodlums to write graffiti, or some variation of it in a multitude of ways. In a continuous stance of provocation, the Italian conceptualist redefines the street game by creating one ingenious invention after another. For him, “This is a simple demonstration that creativity can easily fight every kind of institutional control and prohibitive policies.”
Bien Urbain Festival 2019 Re-Cap by Kristina and Nazar from MZM Projects
The 9th edition of Bien Urbain is just completed and MZM Projects presents a tonal treatment to the uniquely contextual festival. You don’t know who the stars are, because in the case of Bien Urbain it truly is a more inclusive conversation – to use an overused word – about the role of art and intervention in the urban environment.
ARTinfect 4 – The Pfaff Project Part 2
The graffiti writer’s lexicon continues to evolve and spread into areas that early writers would have considered verboten. Today graffiti artists often do the same stuff as Street Artists but the labels aren’t important as long as you know how to command the can.
Here in Kaiserlautern, a city in southwest Germany, the artist Carl Kenz has curated the new edition of ARTinfect with a sensibility toward space that recognizes the individual artist – and is a little uncommon in the ‘graffiti jam’ event world. Here you see that each artist is afforded ample industrial framing to develop their work – unimpeded by a too-close neighbor. These abandoned factories are often splendid staging spaces, and it is good to see this international selection of artists granted a good place to create harmony with the decay.
To welcome the new year we spent the last few weeks presenting a collection of images that stirred us and paired them with BSA Wishes for 2020.
Below the video is the full list of all the wishes, along with our non-scientific lists of “Top” stories, videos, images, books for the year (and in one case, for the decade which we’ve just departed). For the past couple of weeks we have been sharing one wish at a time with you.
With gratitude for the year that was, and hope for the year that will be, our hearts are full. We’re sending love to you BSA friends and family. Happy New Year.
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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