Murals are making inroads into communities once again in ways that are meaningful and constructive, not only decorative.
Evoca1. Rudy Daniels. Erie, PA. October 2019. (photo courtesy of Iryna Kanishcheva)
An outgrowth of the illegal graffiti and Street Art movements, this new mural renaissance has once again engaged with the community rather than functioning as a means of protest or defiance. In our minds, art can serve many important roles in the communication of principles, ideas, values – and each expression in public space contains an opportunity for better, stronger, connections among community members.
Here in Erie, Pennsylvania a senior member of the community has been given an honor by Dominican born artist, muralist & designer EVOCA1, who painted a soaring portrait of Rudy Daniels on the side of Methodist Towers, where he lives. Blind since age 20 from a gunshot wound, the 71 year old has been a positive and familiar fixture on area streets and sidewalks and businesses for quite some time.
Evoca1. Rudy Daniels. Erie, PA. October 2019. (photo courtesy of Iryna Kanishcheva)
A
project endorsed by the mayor, with local artists assisting with the mural
using materials purchased in the community, honoring a neighborhood member?
Here is one sincerely positive outcome to a global mural movement that grew
into something quite positive.
A shout out to curator Iryna Kanishcheva, organizer Patrick Fischer, and Erie Arts & Culture for making this project happen.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “AfroGrafiteiras” featuring Andrea Bak 2. Magda Cwik / Hotel 128 / Street Art City in France. Via After Hours Project 3. INDECLINE Presents: The Bird Box 4. INDECLINE Presents: Trumpster Fire 5. Mura Masa – Deal Wiv It with slowthai
BSA Special Feature: “AfroGrafiteiras” featuring Andrea Bak
AfroGrafiteiras is an urban art training project focused on the expression and promotion of the leading role of Afro-Brazilian women in activity since 2015.
Here in Episode 6 we get to see the bright mind of Andrea Bak as she talks about this Rio-based program that examines identity, society, tradition, and empowerment through the aerosol can.
To learn more about the #AfroGrafiteiras project visit www.redenami.com
Magda Cwik / Hotel 128 / Street Art City in France. Via After Hours Project
Check into the abandoned Hotel
128 in Lurcy-Lévis, France and you’ll find a stunning array of portals to
worlds customized by Street Artists. Here’s the latest one, Room 108, painted
by Magda Cwik.
INDECLINE Presents: The Bird Box
A quick commercial or not? Hacking the consumer system by re-cycling a new scooter craze into something useful for the homeless, who are now legion in LA? Either way it’s INDECLINE, who will literally tell you anything as long as you keep watching.
INDECLINE Presents: Trumpster Fire
You see the dumpster with Trump’s face on it, and you know what’s next. Thank you for completing the visual allegory that many have imagined.
Mura Masa – Deal Wiv It with slowthai
And now something new from the “No-Hope” generation. Back with his friend Slowthai, it’s a pop-locky-pock-marked-futility-fueled screed leading us into the weekend. Also, there is hope here.
“Have you taken down the names for your paper yet?” she asked me. “Stay by my side and I will dictate them to you: the Count and Countess of Caralt, the Marquess of Palmerola, the Count of Fígols, the Marquess of Alella, the …
In the decade before the Spanish Civil War, Barcelona was on the verge of boiling over, and perhaps this castle in the Pyrenees mountains to the south was at its height of glory thanks to workers in its coal mines. The Count of Figols and his family enjoyed the view from the tower while the miners, some as young as 14 years old, kept toiling about 13 kilometers away – until they revolted in 1932.
“The mining company, the greater part of which was owned by Liverpool-born José Enrique de Olano y Loyzaga, First Count of Figols, prohibited union organization and paid its workforce in tokens redeemable only in the company stores.”
Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, by Danny Evans.
Today you can hashtag Figols (#figols) on social media and you can see the tower (Torre del Compte de Fígols) and wander through the ruins of the castle (Castillo Conde de Fígols) – and discover new graffiti pieces and paintings throughout the rooms. That’s what photographer Lluis Olive Bulbena did last week when he went to check out some fresh stuff he heard was painted here about 120 km north of Barcelona. We thank him for sharing his images with BSA readers from the castle of the Count of Figols.
A children-friendly installation in a city that needs some love, the artist who began as a graffiti writer in 1989 here brings his famous faceless characters called the “Gouzou” to pop out of the box buildings and water the flowers of growth here.
JACE says he’s been painting this character since the early 90s and they are complex, despite their appearance. “The “Gouzou” is an anthropomorphic character, cheerful and endearing but not without a touch of malice,” says his bio, “Soft and delicate, he can be just as impertinent and teasing!”
This new community mural is in a housing estate in the district called “La Grande Borne”, or perhaps, “The Great Frontier”, but over time its reputation has become somewhat tarnished due to high unemployment, lack of economic opportunity, and probably systemic racism.
The Wiki entry says “Built as a 1960s social utopia with winding coloured buildings, it was intended to become an ideal dormitory town. With 11,000 inhabitants, it has become a by-word for poverty, drug dealing, arms trafficking, youth criminality and attacks on police, as well as arson attacks on public buildings.”
In a 2015 article in Le Parisien even the Socialist MP Malek Boutih has said about La Grande Borne, “A city where officials, including elected officials, make a pact with evil, thugs, offenders, corruption.” (translated with Google)
Maybe JACE’s Gouzou will bring a positive influence on the neighborhood?
At least that’s what the mural program “Wall Street Festival” has in mind.
“Bringing culture to working-class neighborhoods is like a duty for me,”
says organizer and founder Gautier Jourdain. “This is where the works are most
important.”
Occurring on the outer rim of Madrid, this collection of thinkers and conceptualists challenge almost every concept of the sad digression called the “mural festival” today – with the sincere focus of bringing the practice back to the community and creating work in the context of it.
Artist Elbi Elem tells us that she and Sue975, Aida Gómez, Octavi Serra, Clemens Behr, Brad Downey and Marina Fernandez were living and working in this barrio in the southern part of Madrid for two weeks. Rather than “parachuting” in and immediately putting up a mural that has nothing to do with the city, she tells us that it was important to spend a week to get to know the barrio and the people.
“Then we chose a location and got the materials,” she says of the recycled items with which she built this sculpture. “It is metal and mostly tubes and plastics that were found in abandoned places and waste from some factory of the industrial area that we were in – like plastics that had been used for signs or skylights.”
Officially running from October 1-20, Circular says that the entire concept is meant to reconsider the role of urban art in a city and to return its scope and proportions away from the enormous expanses we have been seeing on the sides of skyscrapers to something that is more, well, human scale. In addition to supporting themes such as sustainability and scale, organizers say they’re less interested in being a tool for gentrification or revitalizing areas for tourism, and more interested in bringing art to neighbors.
“By taking the festival to this area of southern Madrid, we contribute to the decentralization of culture in the city, to the democratization of art and to bringing it closer to all types of audiences,” they say in a description of goals.
For Elem’s sculpture, which she calls a “floating art installation”, she welded the metal and tried to use colors that are natural to this human-made environment.
“At the same time the colors I used were also the same as the surroundings, being integrated with the landscape,” she says.
“I decided to work under this long-roofed area at the entrance of the main market. I liked the environment and the background and it was easy to hang the piece. I loved that place because you could see a lot of movement of people going to shop and it was interesting seeing their reactions,” she adds, “mostly of surprise.”
“Festival Circular” in San Cristobal de los Angeles, Madrid, is curated by Madrid Street Art Project.
Dalek (James Marshall) and Buff Monster host
their second collaborative exhibition in as many years at GR Gallery in
Manhattan’s Lower East Side, sandwiched between the high art of the Bowery
Museum and the hungry and homeless people of the Bowery Street. A perfect
snapshot of inequality in modern New York, the neighborhood has not lost its
reputation in the last 10 years as a place for those desperate city folk with
no means – and those city folk who need to collect art for their homes.
Here we find the escapist vocabulary of cartoons in both artist’s collections. Character-driven avatars of the street/mural/canvas painters themselves, the true emotions and predilections of Dalek’s “Space Monkey” and Buff Monster’s “Melty Misfits” are hidden under the sugary gloss of pop and sharply defined graphic styles.
The influences are sometimes overlapping, but each takes their tips from slightly opposing signposts on the commercially cartooned metroscape – scenes of cosmic war and ice cream and cleverly digital labyrinths cavorting in the clouds floating around the many mansions of Murakami and Harajuku.
The 30 pieces, including paintings, works on
paper, site-specific installations, are an afternoon’s respite from the roar of
traffic and construction and grey particulate matter flying in the air outside,
a serene laboratory for experimenting with new creative impulses and fantastic
narratives, brightly lit. It is a combined wit, a shared attraction to a “Surface
Fetish.”
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Abe Lincoln Jr., Adam Fujita, Alexcia Panay, Anthony Lister, Below Key, BK Foxx, Bobby Hundreds, Downer Jones, Dragon Art, Hops Art, Maia Lorian, Mastro NYC, Muebon, Pricey Alex, Shiro, Sinclair the Vandal, VKrone, and Want.
Aerosol in pursuit of the “Masters” (Eurocentrically speaking) is a permutation of Street Art and the mural making tradition going back decades, including murals made directly by “Masters” (Latino-centrically speaking) like Rivera or, say, those of the Olmec civilization in the pre Hispanic period, for example. In the last decade Frenchman and Street Artist Julien de Casabianca has documented, printed, and wheatpasted large-scale reproductions from classical painting upon city walls as part of his “Outings Project” in multiple countries.
Today we see an Italian former graffiti writer who went to university to study fine arts in Milan take his aerosol spray technique to a wall in Corbeil-Essonnes, France (population 50,400). Painted as part of the ongoing “Wall Street Art Festival”, the new mural may inspire the next generation of artists here as well.
Andrea
“RAVO” Mattoni sings praise to a slice of Mona Lisa on this school building as
his reinterpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s original, which is much smaller, hanging
in the Louvre Museum about an hour’s drive north of here. The 38 year old
artist, who was born in Varese and comes from a family of artists, including
his father and grandfather, decided to leave the painting as an in-process “unfinished”
work that shows a grid pattern and da Vincis background color for educational
purposes.
“It
is a good teaching aid for the school’s teachers,” says the walls’ artistic
director, the gallerist Gautier Jourdain, “which they now use to explain the
process to their students.”
If Gautier had any doubts about Mattoni’s qualifications with the spraycan, he was likely persuaded by the artist’s Caravaggio reproduction on the side of the Gemelli Hospital in Rome two years ago. More recently, as part of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, the artist created 5 large paintings at the Château d’Amboise. So this is number 5.5 perhaps.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Paradox and CPT. OLF and Daredevilry in Berlin 2. The Tunnels. Nuart Festival 2019. A film by MZM Projects 3. Post-graffiti artist Jose Parla for ‘Isthmus’ in Instabul
BSA Special Feature: Paradox and CPT. OLF and Daredevilry in Berlin
In the videos featuring daredevilry, parkour and graffiti the Lengua Drona has been adding words to our visual vocabulary that were once reserved for extreme sporting, National Geographic docs, Crocodile Dundee and James Bond.
Now the pixação writer and urban climber, Paradox releases unprecedented adventure footage and editing from photographer CPT. Olf, and its sending shockwaves.
Somehow this is a new way to synthesize wall-climbing and train surfing; positioning it as a visual and audio symphony that almost makes you forget that these are graffiti vandals “fucking the system”, pushing their limits – and yours.
As you thrill to these evolving genre-combining aspects of Oleg Cricket, 1Up Crew, Berlin Kidz, and Ang Lee, it’s important to realize that these are real risks that people take that could result in serious injury, death, and rivers of grief if a miscalculation happens. So, yeah, we’re not endorsing the irresponsible risks or a mounting “arms race” of stunts, but we are endorsing the athleticism, imagination, and sheer slickness of this FPV drone mastery, which appears to have taken this stuff up another level.
Hold tight.
Currently Paradox is on exhibition at Urban Spree in Berlin, a show that we hope to see soon and pick up our own copy of “CPT.OLF 16-19”: The Photobook, published by Urban Spree Books in October 2019
The Tunnels. Nuart Festival 2019. A film by MZM Projects
A positioning in text, a re-strung manifesto for a moment from the past, now revisited in your Nuart or Nuart Aberdeen branded t-shirt. Here is the work in the tunnels of Tou Scene, unfolding before you by Ukranian directors and street scholars Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoshchuk. It’s a beehive of activity as participants in this years’ event in Stavanger, Norway create their installations in preparation for the big opening.
“This film is a journey,” explain the directors/authors/poets/narrators, “it is moving backward from the last 7th tunnel until the introductory Tunnel Zero in order to show the development of the movement with its modern variety of artistic practices and the parallels with the past.”
Brand New, You’re Retro, that 90s jam from Tricky, is presented here as a doorway to pass through to get to the 70s and then to return through to see the last moments of the 10s. Here is open rebellion against a system that suckers you in, gives you succor, sucks you, and regales you succulently with a promise. Sung by angry hopeful canaries in the coalmine, here are some winners and losers, as ever. Shout out to Yatharth Roy Vibhakar for a splendid soundtrack that is glitchy and timely, of this time.
Post-graffiti artist Jose Parla for ‘Isthmus’ in Instabul
Jose Parla is not a Street Artist. He’ll tell you that himself. Here he presents himself as a post-graffiti artist in Istanbul. You may also see possible labels of public artist, artist working in public space, muralist, studio artist, sculptor, contemporary artist, gestural abstractionist, pottery designer, decollagist a la Villeglé – taking posters from the street and applying to canvas. Here you follow him in the streets as he creates his “first-ever exhibition in Turkey, inspired by the word ‘ISTHMUS,” consisting of a new body of works on paper, paintings, sculptures and ceramics.”
Happy Halloween! It’s going to rain on all the Trick or Treaters in the streets in New York tonight. Nevertheless, ye olde drizzle and mist doesn’t really put a damper on the eerie festivities, including the East Village Halloween Parade, which is reliably a misshapen, humorous and frightening mess of creativity, imagination, psychiatric therapy, music, and theatrical spectacle; all of it careening through the sloppy streets for your pleasure.
This holiday used to be only for children and art-inclined weirdos, now its cosplay across the nation with children of all ages are in costume on the subway, on the bus, in line for pumpkin-spice latte.
In Baltimore Street Artist TOVEN has made plenty of preparations for you: cheerful and possibly unsettling skull wheatpastes for you to see out of the corner of your mask as you run door-to-door asking for candies.
Nothing to lose your head about, but you’ll be thrilled
to hear about the long-anticipated release of the new monograph by the
ingenious troublemaker and largely incognito Chicago Street Artist DONT FRET.
Emerging on the streets for a decade or so with painted wit and misshapen characters wheatpasted where you least expect them, he’s the sharp observer and human humorist whose work is as brilliant as your cousin Marlene, as funny as Johnny at the funeral home, as handsome as the guys behind the counter at Publican Quality Meats.
Well,
maybe not that handsome.
“This is place-based Street Art, a running commentary on life in this neighborhood that captures the off-the-wall imperfect nature of humans in a pock-marked and still proud American city after capital leaves it, slowly imploding, coasting on fumes, hopefully rallying, quickly stratifying into luxury lofts and the rest of us,” writes Steven P. Harrington in the foreword to this hefty chunk of comedic meat. Peering through these pages, the feeling is inescapable; Somehow you sense like you know DONT FRET’S people – probably because many of them came directly from these streets.
We wanted you to have an opportunity to take a quick look inside the massive quirky tome yourself, because it is as eclectic and disarmingly insightful as this sidewalk bard and documentarian, and to let you know the book release is in December. Also, DONT FRET’s got a special gig going for its release with a limited edition screenprint and original sketch with signature in the book.
“I think you have to live life like you are invincible,” says the artist on the back cover of Life Thus Far, “but I also think you have to live life understanding that that sort of thinking is a result of a serious psychological disorder.”
We’ll talk to
you more about this in a few weeks, and with the artist, and we’ll find out
about his circuitous route to the streets of working class Chicago, how a fish
rots from the head, the significance of the original Billy Goat on lower
Wacker, and why Studs Terkel is more relevant today than ever.
DONT FRET “LIFE THUS FAR” Schiffer Publishing, Atglen, PA. 2019
Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)
No spray paint was used here by artist Magda C in this new mural for the day of the International Climate Strike, though the paint does illuminate in the daytime and shine at night, she tells us.
Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Painted in conjunction with the decade running Urban Forms Foundation here in Łódź, Poland in the Teofilów neighborhood, draws inspiration from the city’s famous textile traditions and the traditional patterns that persevere in public consciousness. The artist says that she is also interested in drawing viewers of this surrealist illustration style graphic to an emerging civic concept called “Conscious Consumption” as pertains to our daily choices in food and, well, everything.
Embedding symbols and icons that refer to recycling, renewable energy sources, reduction of CO2, the mural “relates to the current condition of our planet, as well as its uncertain future,” she says.
Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
