A painter of paradoxes, usually on wood or canvas, Liliwen has painted on walls in Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin and Buenos Aires, among others. She has taken three years off of wall painting since having a child, she tells us, and this is her first since then. As part of an event called “Vannes et sa street” in a walled town city of about 50,000 in the Brittany region of northwest France.
The mural of the nude woman is meant to speak to the fragility of humans as well as purity. She places the skull of a dove on the figure’s head and an olive branch in the hand. “It’s a poetic artwork and political at the same time, as everyday we lose a little bit more of our fragile liberty,” she says. “Some are waiting for an awakening of consciousness.”
The Street Art community donates time and art to a program that keeps teens out of jail in New York. An annual auction overflows with work by today’s Street Artists.
With the precision indicative of her architect training Rachel Barnard describes the art/criminal justice project for youth that she founded five years ago – which keeps growing thanks to artists’ help, community involvement, and an evermore engaged criminal justice system.
“Alternative Diversion,” she calls it, this court-mandated art program that prosecutors can offer to New York teens as a sentencing option instead of incarceration or doing community service.
“What we’re talking about here are 16 and 17 year-olds in Brooklyn who have been arrested for things like jumping the (subway) turnstyle or having a small amount of marijuana on them or petty larceny,” Barnard explains in a new video for YNY.
“Say you get a misdemeanor record at 16,” she says “What that means is that you’re less likely to get employment, even though you are more likely to be poor and need employment more than most other 16 year-olds.”
Each year the programs called Young New Yorkers (YNY), which Barnard founded, work directly with these youth to redirect their route in life, to provide guidance, foster self-analyzation and to set productive goals for the future.
To some observers it may sound ironic that Street Artists, many of whom have done illegal artworks on walls throughout New York City, are the principal artists pool who are donating their time and talent here to the fundraising auction in lower Manhattan.
With high profile names like Shepard Fairey, Daze, Dan Witz, the Guerrilla Girls and Kara Walker on this years list of artists donating to the auction, the program boasts a cross section of established and emerging Street Artists, graffiti artists, culture jammers and truth tellers who heartily support this program that since 2012 has given more than 400 city youth a second chance.
But then we think more about the history and psychological/anthropological makeup of the Street Art scene and it makes perfect sense: What segment of the arts community has such a rich history of activism, self-directed industry, challenging the norms of society, using public space for intervention – and a penchant for consciousness-raising?
Even after 50 plus years of youth culture in love with graffiti and Street Art these artists and their practice are seen as outside the proper curriculum of many universities with art programs and museums have arduous internal debates about supporting exhibitions that are dedicated to Street Art and graffiti specifically.
This is precisely the kind of marginalized movement/ subculture that has necessarily thrived often with little encouragement or funding – overcoming the barriers to success that more institutionally recognized art movements don’t encounter. In fact, many have gone to jail for what they do.
Uniquely, Young New Yorkers continues to build its partnerships with artists, teachers, lawyers, volunteers and several agencies within the criminal justice system, including criminal and community courts, the District Attorney’s Office and the Legal Aid Society. The program’s art shows mounted by graduates are frequently attended by members of the justice system as well and art becomes a facilitator of strengthened community ties.
BSA has supported YNY every year since its first auction benefit and this year is no exception. Please go to Paddle 8 to see the items for sale or better yet, go to the auction in person. We stopped by while they were hanging the show yesterday and we were able to take a few shots for you to see what’s up for grabs.
Young New Yorkers Silent Art Auction Honoring Actor and Activist Michael K. Williams
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
548 West 28th Street
New York, NY
6:00 VIP hour with Michael K. Williams (Star and Super Star Tickets)
7:00–10:00 party (Regular tickets)
The appearance of a new mural by Banksy in Dover, England caught the attention of many followers on his Instagram account and the mass media folks quickly reported on the new piece that comments on the current state of the EU.
10 months since the Brexit vote, the anonymous artist has created a thoughtful piece marking the crack in the European Union, depicting a white male worker on a ladder chipping away one of the stars on the EU flag, a fissure produced by the action reaching upwards and outwards toward the others.
The new mural by the Banksy team reminds us of a 2014 version of the EU flag done by the Portuguese Street Artist MaisMenos, who used his rendition as a comment about Norway’s position in relation to joining the EU, namely ‘No way’. It may have been a preliminary Street Art indicator of the rising sentiments against the union which leads us to this new one. A participant of the Nuart Festival in Stavanger that year, MaisMenos smartly employed a smokestack above the mural, placing Norway’s star outside the circle, far to the north.
For the new Banksy piece, some thought the unveiling was timed to coincide with the French elections on Sunday – but the outcome of that election wouldn’t contribute further to the dissolution of the EU, rather the opposite if Mr. Macron is to continue that countries membership. Perhaps it is just a visual realization that Brexit appears to be irreversible and Mrs. May will continue to withdraw her country from the economic arrangements.
And thumbs up to Don Stone of From Here to Fame Publishing for reminding us of BLU’s shot at the EU flag in 2012, which depicts the yellow star symbols of each nation member as barbs on a wire fence that points to the xenophobic elements that influence national debates.
That circular fence in this case is being used to keep people out of the EU and it would be a reasonable reading of the piece that they are refugees seeking safety and asylum. They’re all blue (or blu) but you can also guess that the masses outside the fence are brown and beige and black skinned folks from countries under siege by economic and oil wars.
Watching how far those cracks reach throughout Europe… Banksy. Dover, England. Detail Photo @banksy Instagram
Please note: This article was updated to include information on BLU after the original published post.
If your house is destroyed and you are chased from your neighborhood by bombs, anything that recalls normalcy is welcomed. Street Artist Karl Addison tells us a recent project with two other artists where he hopes their painting gave residents a sense of hope for their future.
Based in an abandoned textile factory in Thessaloniki, Greece, the individual tented rooms are in rows on large open floors with common areas created for kitchens and space for children to play. Outside in the parking lot Karl smashed the walls with an ocean of blues over the course of six days – something comforting and reassuring perhaps.
“We were creating the artwork with the objective to make the place feel more like a home than an old factory,” Karl says, and she says that he invited people to be a part of the process of art making “hoping to inspire or provide some sort of normalcy to their lives.”
Mostly families from Aleppo, Syria, many of these families were previously in other camps and “have been split up along the journey and/or the war from their homes,” he says.
“I wanted to paint some of the kids from the home and only managed to do two portraits. For the rest of the canvas, we engaged the kids to put the theory of Abstract painting into practice. Inspiring them with contemporary painters like Rothko, Pollock & Cy Twombly. The movement and mark of paint becoming their expression.” An unusual exposure to 20th century painting, no doubt, and one that some of the kids got to participate in as well.
The project is sponsored and organized by apART, an organization that brings arts into places like the Elpida Refugee Home. Karl would like to thank Sam from apART, as well as give a shout out to the two other artists who were working at the camp with him, Billy (*http://www.billycolours.com/), and David Shillinglaw (*http://davidshillinglaw.co.uk/).
“I can only hope that during the time we were there, there was a difference made. If it’s a particular painting, phrase, or text from the beautiful artworks,” he says, his intention was to show “empathy for other humans in need – involvement through compassion.”
Whether by design or organically grown, we have always gravitated to what we call “Magnet Walls” – those graffiti/Street Art gardens in a town or city that are an open canvas for artists to get up, try out new ideas, experiment with materials, implement a strategy. These walls play an important role in the ecosystem of what we call Street Art or Urban Art. They’re not always explicitly illegal because their reputation draws 10s or 100s of artists to pile on year after year without interruption. The building owners could be allowing the expressions to take place for charitable reasons, more likely just neglect.
The role of these magnet walls is important …and so we are happy to see that while some walls have ceased to exist in some New York neighborhoods in recent years, mostly due to the voracious appetite of developers and the dulling effects of gentrification – “the shack” in Bushwick, the candy factory in Soho to mention just two of them – others are flourishing elsewhere. Today we have many images from a block known as the Great Wall of Savas in Queens.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring: Aito Katazaki, A Cool55, Amanda Marie, bunnyM, Dirt Cobain, Hektad, JerkFace, Key Detail, Martian Code Art, Pat Perry, Stikman, Thrashbird, What Will You Leave Behind, and WhisBe.
A small poem in the corner reads, “Email me your heart. Then in the morning while we watch the sun rise, kneeling down by the river, the blood drips freely as we wash our hands clean”
Maybe it’s because we just saw Mark Mothersbaugh interviewed live onstage at NYU by Carlo McCormick, but when we saw this mechanically growing text it reminded us of DEVO and Kraftwerk and possibly Dadaist collage. And Russian Constructivists and the Bauhaus.
Ding Ding Ding! We knew if we kept guessing we were bound to get it right, right? Patricia and Luis, of the art collective BYG, tell us that their new piece for the 12 + 1 project ”is a tribute that BYG wants to do to Rodchenko and Russian Constructivism.” Made with paper and plastic paint on a wall in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, the renowned illustrators are passionate about collage and have done a number of street interventions using the technique, as well as legally in spanish art festivals like Asalto in Zaragoza, Open Walls in Barcelona or Poliniza in Valencia.
The constructed environment becomes the norm through repetition, so it is refreshing, sometimes jarringly so, to see deconstruction. Says BYG about their new wall,”Collage is what unites and what separates, it is the encounter, the surprise, it is to subvert and decontextualize, it is discovery.” Go Go Go!
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Stick to It, Episode 1 : Sticky Community
2. Ella & Pitr / Frappés Pinpins 3. Herakut. Nuart Aberdeen. 4. 12 + 1 Oriol Vlat.
BSA Special Feature: Stick to It, Episode 1 : Sticky Community via Juxtapoz
“People had the same idea I had; ‘I wanna make stickers,’ I wanna put characters on stickers, not necessarily all graffiti, and we’re just gonna trade and we’re gonna put your stickers up in my city and you’re gonna put my stickers up in your city,” says artist El Toro.
“Right now it’s just like a storm.”
Running concurrently while graffiti and Street Art get most of the attention, the sticker slap game may turn out to be the portable protest that may get the most mileage in the end. Once a sly critique of the methodology of brainwashing that advertisers use, in the case of Shepard Fairey’s initial OBEY campaigns, today advertisers mix their messages in with the organic scene as a way to market to fans of it and to burnish their “street” bonafides.
As it turns out, we’ve learned that graffiti and Street Artists use the same methods of repetition and branding to get their name out and the ease and mobility of the sticker practice also means that small voices get into the mix quickly. Keeping it up depends on your industry – and many times your resources. This video highlights the organic artist culture that gave birth to and continues to grows around the stickering practice with guys like Roycer and Chris from Robots Will Kill, and naturally it slips in clothing and lifestyle brands seamlessly to sell you their products and strengthen their name.
Ella & Pitr / Frappés Pinpins
The French duo Ella + Pitr here revel in the simplicity of the gestural act of a full-body full-bucket splash of black paint.
Carnal, visceral, overlaid with psychographical information, the motion of splashing inky pigment across a white quadrilateral is an act of defiance and a release of the inner chaos – instantly recognizable as chaos elsewhere in the world.
The uncontrollable quality, especially when purveyed within an atmosphere of prim control, provokes amplified emotions in some. Fear, liberation, rage, release. Which ones will you experience?
Herakut. Nuart Aberdeen. Via Fifth Wall TV
“Don’t hide, because you are that light,” a quick summary of Herakut’s singular message in their mural at Nuart Aberdeen. Be a lighthouse bro.
12 + 1 Oriol Vlat.
A simple and clean presentation of Oriol Vlat’s new wall for the 12 + 1 project in Barcelona by video director Alex Miró.
It may look like a gold medallion doorbell, or a fingerprint scanning ID validator, or an icon to poke to open up a celestial app, but Amsterdam Street Artist Skount says it is about accessing cosmic currents of energy.
That may feel a little esoteric for a Thursday, but then you are painting on a roof above Antiek tattoo studios, and it seems like a good time to reflect upon the Tibetan estoteric master Djwhal Khul. This fresh piece is part of a series of murals inspired by the meditations of the Seven cosmic currents of energy, according to the artist.
“This wall depicts the Golden Ray,” he tells us, and explains that it is a good idea to call upon this energy when there “are groups of children that must be calmed down so they can understand more easily the subject that they are studying.”
Thinking of taking this idea to the local public school up the block here in Brooklyn, because these kids are going crazy due to the fact that it is May and they are more interested in the spring breezes blowing past the windows outside than anything the teacher is saying. But Skount says the flame of the Golden Ray can help. “When you need to reach a Spiritual state of mind and feel ready to receive more special instruction, invoke this Flame and Great Instructors and Divine Intelligences will escort you.”
There is a lot you can do in Mong Kok, one of the most commercial and bustling neighborhoods in the Kowloon section of Hong Kong. There’s the Ladies’ Market with more than 100 vendors offering bargains on clothing and accessories, Sneakers Street, which will have you swimming in pumped up kicks, and don’t forget the Bird market – where you find old guys “walking” their birds in cages and see someone feeding live crickets to others.
Surprisingly left out of most tourist guides however is this hidden patch of organic graffiti that just grows wild in a relatively quiet haven that is actually within this chaotic neighborhood.
Wild Style. Tags. Throwups. Bubble tags. Burners. The occasional burnout.
All is here today gone tomorrow, regularly replenished, some seriously styled. Local names are here, but so are a lot of international names so you know its a go-to spot for traveling vandals. Hidden from the main hustle of the streets and underneath a major viaduct lies a secret alley bursting with color…and trash…and homeless people and art. Some furtive lovers come here to steal a kiss or two.
On the day we went the sweet smell of weed hung in the air as if being blown from some secret pipe to keep the residents of this monstrous city chilled…Some tags we recognize, many other we don’t or simply can’t read.
“I didn’t get invited to paint anywhere this winter so I made my own street art trip,” says Labrona of his new wheat-pastes in Portugal. “It’s sort of a throw back to before mural festivals, when we just did stuff on the streets.”
A clear distinction is made thusly, between the multitude of public-private-commercial mural initiatives that artists are participating in these days and the practice of creating Street Art, which is necessarily self initiated, without permission, an autonomous performance or intervention in public space. To merge these terms and practices is to disregard the significance of the distinction between.
Furthermore, this is not new. There just happen to be a lot of mural festivals right now and organizers sometimes misappropriate the term “street art” when in describing events. We can help.
But we’ve digressed a little from Labrona and DB, who took a trip to Lisbon and set up shop. “We rented a place and turned it into a studio for 10 days and made a bunch of wheatpastes,” Labrona says. The figurative, character-driven painted pieces began to appear in this city that is known today as much for its Street Art as it is for its hills.
A painter with a studio practice, DB hadn’t done Street Art previously, says Labrona, so it is interesting to see what choices DB makes for his work here in the public realm where it suffers the indignities of abuse and neglect. As ever, we are also interested whether the placement has a particular contextual component or whether he uses the existing architecture as a framing device.
It is also significant to some observers how choices are made for the new wheatpastes to interact with pre-existing graffiti – sometimes in tandem, to the side of or sometimes directly pasted upon it, possibly angering the graff writer, maybe not. Because of the temporary quality of wheatpasted paper, the aerosol work will probably outlive it anyway. Sometimes a big bubble tag seems like an intentional background or co-actor. Other times a quickly dashed tag looks like it is not considered at all.
These are all metrics and filtering devices, and subjective ones at that. How an aesthetic expression hits an individual in that moment of discovery is as real as it gets.
Their dual experiments ended after 10 days and Labrona says he carried on solo for the rest of his trip, with some pieces appearing to have been drawn directly on the walls or doors – which rather lessens the distance between studio practice and street practice.
Just in time for May 1st, International Workers Day, we find a young member of the Hopi nation planting in his grandfather’s cornfield, thanks to this new project just completed by photographer/street artist Jetsonorama.
18 year old Hawthorne Hill has learned the traditional Hopi farming technique called “dry farming” from his mom, according to Jetsonorama, and he places seeds in shallow holes, while his sister Metzli creates rows of wind blocks using nearby brush.
The photos are taken on Second Mesa on the Hopi nation, but the artist brings them here to Santa Fe as part of a project he’s doing with Biocultura Santa Fe.
A project originally conceived of as part of Earth Day, with a focus on where our food comes from and traditional farming methods, its good to think of who works to bring food to your table.
“Resistance is here to stay, welcome to your 100th day” – said people in Climate Marches across the country yesterday to President Exxon-Lockheed. God, has it only been 100 days? It feels like 1,000. Nevertheless, there are a lot of new politically themed pieces popping up on the street regularly, along with completely apolitical and humorous ones. Either way, we always dig the conversation on the street.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring: Adam Fujita, Brolga, Carlos Colp, Jaune, Legend, Lost Hills, Lunge Box, Myth, Raf Urban, Taco, and Tatyana Fazlalizadeh.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
