Summertime spray-cations are as popular for the jet-setting aerosol explorer as much as your local graffiti and Street Artist. Grabbing your bicycle, taking a bus, or simply hiking with a backpack full of cans, many writers make a full day of it, or decide to camp out at the abandoned factory, hanging with friends and listening to music.
For a photographer of Street Art and murals, its possibly just as much entertainment – just ask BSA contributor, Lluis Olive Bulbena. On vacation with his wife and grandkids between Lyon and Clemont Ferrant (about 250 km south of Paris) he discovered a compound filled with new paintings on the commune of lurcy-Lévis. Informally known as Street Art City, the project is the brainchild of Gilles Iniesta and features hundreds of works on facades out in the open and others in hidden locations – including many who have made the pilgrimage to leave their marks on the walls or inside the dilapidated rooms of Hotel 128 (more about the hotel tomorrow). .Thanks to some good crops of visiting artists this summer, it looks like rural France has a good selection of painting styles to choose from this season.
It is always interesting to go into the studio space of a Street Artist to see how their big public practice translates to their “fine art” commercial work. Here we have new works from a figurative painter and portrait maker Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada, who is preparing pieces for his upcoming “Fragments” series.
He says that the haunting and beckoning faces are painted upon textured surfaces that are at least 150 years old. How, exactly? “I have perfected a process that allows me to remove old interior wall paint surfaces from abandoned buildings to use as my canvases,” he says. The fragile cracked and flaking surfaces are stabilized and made whole so the new works can actually have an archival quality.
One
gazes at these beauties and considers the axiom, “beauty is only skin deep”,
meaning that a pleasing appearance is not a guide to character. Here,
Rodriguez-Gerada appears to adding character with old skin.
You
may think of them as architectural skin grafts newly preserved, or some form of
urban exfoliation. Seeing the process at play, you may also be reminded of
Italian preservationists “skinning” the first few centimeters of a façade to
remove a BLU piece in Bologna – later hung in a museum.
“While most walls surfaces touched by a restoration technique have some kind of tangible historic importance – frescos or murals, for example,” he says.
“I am giving importance to these commonplace textures for the intangible memory that they possess and the passage of time that they portray.” These fragments of memory and time are now merged with new spirit, enabling them to travel further into the future.
Spanish Street Artist Spider Tag continues to expand his medium far beyond the first string and nail sculptures that we first began giving his art exposure about a decade ago. Now it’s electrified, interactive, and controlled by remote!
Participating in the commercial franchise mural festival Pow!Wow! in cooperation with Worcester Business Development Corporation, the Federal Square Condo Association, and others this eye candy for the Massachussetts town will definitely be appreciated at night.
Thankfully, NYC is still gorgeous and hot and steamy and sticky this week – and so is a lot of the Street Art.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Adrian Wilson, Antennae, ASVP, Dee Dee, Giulio Vesprini, Jazz Guetta, Kyro, Maria Qamar, Muebon, NDA, Never Satisfied, Nevs, Nitzan Mintz, OverUnder, Sonny Sundancer, Subway Doodle, UFO 907, and Vexx
“What
I will be doing is eventually finding scars that resemble the shapes of borders
and creating a re-imagined map of The Israeli/Palestinian region and it
includes its participants – the only criterion is that they need to be people
who are living in the region.”
An Israeli Street Artist with an appreciable international collectors record for his illustrative metaphors of brokenness and healing, the artist is embarking on perhaps his most significant new body of work – and not surprisingly it is about the body, and the body politic that is intimately familiar with pain.
“It’s
a project called “A Human Atlas” which focuses on the
analogy between human scars and national borders,” he says as he illustrates on
a tilted wooden desktop and signals toward the small works pinned to the wall.
“So I have been collecting and documenting testimonials about scars and people
sharing the stories behind them; with different anecdotes and personal
reflections on them.”
Here in Brooklyn, one is far away from the Israeli/Palestinian rupture, yet often cheek-to-jowl with it. One owns the deli on the corner, the hat store across the street is owned by the other. In a city where 800 languages are spoken, the strife between just two factions is mollified inside a world collection of cultures and the daily roar of all these voices.
The sensitivity necessary to become an artist can be both a blessing and a curse, and often you can see it personified. A man of letters, his work on brick street walls and billboards has often been literary, if necessary, reflexively cryptic – coming from a part of the world so gripped by a continuous war that the air itself can feel thick with hostility. Intentionally or not, the wounds and the scars are always on display.
With the air conditioner rumbling as a low thunder around your conversation in this BedStuy brownstone, he tells you how the project is materializing as he studies the scars of others, perhaps comparing them to his own.
“I’ve been documenting and photographing the scars of people and collecting the stories. I still haven’t gotten around to figuring out how the artworks will actually be…” There are raised reliefs and pencil sketches floating beneath the text on the wall here at the BedStuy Residency. There are the tight and precise monochromatic illustrations using his now-familiar nomenclature of severed limbs, bodies contorted in a singular dance, white flags and doves and non-sequitorial glimpses of prose.
“I
made a conscious decision not to decide on what I wanted the project to be. I
just started by meeting people, which is still going on,” he says as he
describes the organic process that he is taking, letting the end game reveal
itself to him.
“With time I realize that it needs to be a book,” he says. “The information that is usually written in an atlas will be comprised
of the stories that they share. And there will be maps and different mediums.”
It occurs to you that just as Street Art is an external expression that reflects the psychological, emotional state of the society back to itself, the mapping of cities is a tour of our common internalities. Know Hope appears to be looking for a physical way to trace the ruptures in his region with a desire that in the process, he can bring common healing. But first, he is studying the topography of the region and the nature of the wounds.
BSA: Before you told me about this project, minutes ago, I was talking to you about how you have arranged the furniture and your art materials in this residency space and how this place was conceivably tracing a map inside your head and consciously or not you have arranged things because they matched the map. You were saying that you moved the table in a certain direction and distance because it “felt better”. You can’t quantify it. So when I think about the scars in the maps – scars or something that we want to be healed and maybe the process of tracing them – it’s like you are saying if that person could walk along that fissure, that wound, that rupture it might help heal, I don’t know.
Know Hope: Yeah and I think that there is something about wanting to take these separate scars and separate individual experiences and mend them together to create something collectively.
Know Hope: The idea is – the spark that is the initial metaphor – is that scars and borders share a lot of similar traits, common traits. They are both a product of circumstance – something happens to you or to a body or to the land. A war and a wound happe either by design or accident or an act of violence or through surgery.
At this moment it all comes together, this falling apart. You can see how Know Hope knows, and how the Atlas will become an important reference for our time.
“We
kind of develop this long-term relationship with the scar or the wound that
ends up becoming the scar.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Conor Harrington in Manhattan 2. Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada “Reflection” Spring 2019 3. Caratoes at Superchief Gallery in Miami 4. DALeast in Seattle
BSA Special Feature: Focus on Zane Meyer & Chop ’em Down Films
Chop ’em Down Films, a film production company based in LA and spearheaded by filmmaker Zane Meyer, has been capturing the scene incredibly as of late. Wherever we go, there he is – jetting from continent to continent to capture and document with video what’s happening in today’s world of street art and graffiti.
The killer detail for us? His soundtrack music choices. Unusual interludes from unsung heroes, sometimes funky and soulful, other times wistful, tilting on the precipice of morning, or mourning. Excerpted as they are from larger works that are somehow familiar, they might not stand on their own in their entirety in your playlist, but they pour layers of meaning and significance on action flying at you from the whirring eye in the sky.
Zane keeps these videos at one minute to meet Instagram limitations (and short attention spans) but he knows how to work within that time constraint to communicate the news and a great deal more; and capture the muscle, the sleek movement, the unwieldy testosterone, the simple song of the heart, the exquisite detail that assures you of mastery, and craft. You don’t know if you heard it or saw it or if it was simply implied; the rich palette of the towns, the stark expanse of the sky, the singing of the birds, the impatience of the cars, the clack and roar of the trains and the sweet action on the streets, plump with possibility, the locals beckoning. With his ability to alchemize, the art is always in context.
Here are four for your enjoyment. Offered without comment, may it please the court.
Conor Harrington in Manhattan
Conor Harrington in Manhattan. Organized by The L.I.S.A. Project NYC and shot by Zane Meyer from Chop ’em Down Films.
Now that corporate and global debt has surged to an all-time high, posing unprecedented risk to the value of all money, it’s a sweet and sour nostalgia that drives you into your purse or wallet to pluck out a thin colorful slice of that rumpled paper fiat currency to buy yourself a beer at your local pub.
Bitcoin may be coming, and plastic is fantastic but in some parts of the world, cash is still king. And it rules everything around you.
Icy & Sot. Last Supper Five Dollar Bill (photo courtesy of the curators)
Right now you can see a collection of these banknotes from around the world developed as a series of canvasses at London’s Saatchi Gallery – mutated and defaced and adorned by graffiti and Street Artists, along with a series by Iranian born Aida Wilde, who uses banknotes from Eritrea, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria.
Penny. Picasso Ten Pound Note (photo courtesy of the curators)
Cash is King II, a sequel to last years Cash is King – the brainchild book and exhibition of artists Robert Osborne and Carrie Reichardt, the show opened this week to an appreciative crowd who appeared to really enjoy seeing bills reimagined.
Jef Aerosol. Arts Can’t Buy Me Love (photo courtesy of the curators)
Curators Susan Hansen and Olly Walker share these images here with us and tell us they’re also happy that Ms. Wilde’s sales are going to benefit the Help Refugees organization so they are able to continue their work around the world. Not surprisingly perhaps, “Many of these banknotes represent some of the countries that have seen the highest numbers of people become refugees in recent years,” says Hansen.
Olly Walker. Process shot. (photo courtesy of the curators)Aida Wilde. And We Walk Eritrean. Process shot. (photo courtesy of the curators)Al Diaz. Samo Dollar (photo courtesy of the curators)1 UP Crew. Tag Dollar (photo courtesy of the curators)Anthony Lister. Zero To One Hundred Real Quick Dollar (photo courtesy of the curators)Bortusk Leer. Art Is Not Serious (photo courtesy of the curators)Caroline Caldwell. Oil Money Dollar (photo courtesy of the curators)John Fekner. Greed Dollar (photo courtesy of the curators)Cash Is King 2: Money Talks. Opening night. (photo courtesy of the curators)
Aida Wilde’s work will available for sale on the Saatchi website from 2pm on Tuesday the 20th of August. All proceeds will go to support Help Refugees’ work around the world.
Cash is King II: Money Talks features works of art executed on banknotes, an exhibition curated by Olly Walker of Ollystudio.
Cash Is King 2: Money Talks is currently on view at the Saatchi Gallery in London installed in the Prints and Originals space until September 8th. Otherwise, click HERE to view and purchase available works of art.
The resonance of Brooklyn/New York Street Arist Jean Michel Basquiat continues to amaze us, in his reach, in his relevance to people who he may have never imagined that he would inspire. Today we bring you 0907 in Beijing, who is telling us that he went on many spots throughout the city with his new cardboard composite work – a stencil that captures his feeling about an artist on the other side of the world who lived and died, perhaps before he was born. As an additional cultural mashup, he employs the vocabulary of a secondary Street Art, Shepard Fairey.
“One day I watched a movie called “Basquiat,” he tells us, “and another called is ‘Ridiculous Years’ I had some insight into the age of his life. So I made a poster which borrowed Obey’s style.and I posted these on my city. At that moment I felt I am the radiant child in my city.”
Painting with a holistic approach to life, the earth, the physical-psycho-social balance of humans in daily life – why not?
Nicola Alessandrini. Premio Antonio Giordano. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. August 2019. (photo courtesy of Premio Antonio Giordano)
talian painter Nicola Alessandrini has produced a somewhat surreal body of drawings and paintings during his relatively short career that appears to be turning the body, the animal world, and the plant world inside out to better understand the core systems that create balance and imbalance. In this new mural he just finished in Santa Croce di Magliano, you can see that again he is creating relationships between our corporeal systems and those of the earth.
“The artwork represents a human body connecting two different forms of life,
soil and lymphatic systems,” he says. He tells us that the two plants are
embraced by the body and that the woman’s floral dress is a fertile soil that
connects the two plants and gives energy and nutrition to the body.
Nicola Alessandrini. Premio Antonio Giordano. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. August 2019. (photo courtesy of Premio Antonio Giordano)
Completed as a the sixth edition of Premio Antonio Giordano, the artist consulted with public health initiative called AVIS (Association of Voluntary Italian Blood Donors) and hoped to develop a metaphorical way to represent their conversations.
“I like the idea that giving blood is not just something physical,” says
Allissandrini, “but it is also a mental
predisposition, a practice of giving and sharing.”
Nicola Alessandrini. Premio Antonio Giordano. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. August 2019. (photo courtesy of Premio Antonio Giordano)Nicola Alessandrini. Premio Antonio Giordano. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. August 2019. (photo courtesy of Premio Antonio Giordano)Nicola Alessandrini. Premio Antonio Giordano. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. August 2019. (photo courtesy of Premio Antonio Giordano)Nicola Alessandrini. Premio Antonio Giordano. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. August 2019. (photo courtesy of Premio Antonio Giordano)
Just below the Vienna U-Bahn, and above the street, there are two new archangels shielding their eyes from us, possibly looking into one another’s.
“The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do (with great artists); with artists like these we do really fly from star to
star.”
Italian Street Artist Bifido tells us that this quote is part of the inspiration for his new collaborative piece that spreads its wings below the rumbling of rolling wheels in this busy city. The other inspiration is drawn from the experience of working for the first time with his painting partner, the Danish artist Jacoba Niepoort who adds the extending wings to Bifidos photorealistic searching figures.
“When I saw Jacoba’s work for the first time, I thought, ‘I absolutely have to work with this artist,’ ” he tells us, remarking on the intensity that he rarely finds in the world of Street Art. “It’s not just something decorative; it digs deeper, touching the most intimate and emotional part of people.”
The pair met at the Calle Libre Festival in Vienna this summer and decided that their first project together would examine the intimacy of human relationships. The experience has enabled them both to look at the same scenario with each other’s eyes, he says, and now passersby in Vienna can as well.
Icy cold coquitos, sidewalk barbecues, walking for hours in Central Park, music booming from party boats on the East River, a birthday party with 30 on the roof. Who can resist New York in the summer? Yes everyone is warning about an economic crash that is coming and you’re still in debt even though you have three roommates and Trump is just making us all feel like we live in a big chaotic racist world.
But for this sunny summer afternoon, let’s just prove him wrong and get some beers and sit on the stoop saying hi to all our neighbors who walk by – asian, black, latino, Middle Eastern, Jewish, white, sihk, Polish, Nigerian, Mexican, muslim, Italian, Swedish. It don’t matter, bro. We’re all New Yorkers and we like it like that.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Broken Heartist, Budha Delight, City Kitty, Early Riser, Emma Gonzalez, Joe Iurato, Logan Hicks, Lunge Box, Mowcka, Ouch, Sara Lynne Leo, Skewville, and The Postman Art.
This summer New York has been crazily, sometimes chaotically overlaid with tons of graffiti, Street Art, and murals – a testament to the enduring passion of a public that wants to see this organic patterning of the city skin, and the unquenchable thirst that artists and writers in New York have for showing their work to the public without intervening forces. Some of it is illegal, some of it is legal – all of it is part of the New York conversation.
Additionally, and in concert with, this ongoing conversation is a private pop-up exhibition called “Beyond the Streets” that pulls back from this moment and looks at pertinent and fundamental slices of the first 50 years of art in the streets from the perspective of a handful of sharp-eyed curators who have done their homework.
Presented in the context of historians defining a view of the scene with an eye toward private collectors of contemporary art, the vast show features paintings, sculpture, photography, site-specific installations, commercially branded environments, a large gift shop, historical ephemera – and a 30th anniversary Shepard Fairey exhibition within the exhibition.
“Beyond the Streets” in Williamsburg, Brooklyn was originally a three-month show that ran through August, it has been extended to September 29th – as they say – by popular demand. In addition, to celebrate and thank the community for their support, BEYOND THE STREETS will host free admission day on Thursday August 29th.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
