Brooklyn Street Art | …loves you more every day.

BSA Film Friday 04.10.15

April 10, 2015 Artists

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :

1. The Reinvention of Normal: Dominic Wilcox
2. Rallitox: Chicken Murder on Williamsburg Street Corner
3. Abdel Maged Amara: LIES – The Street Walkers
4. Sbagliato in London Creates a False Hallway
5. Hitnes in Rome: Blind Eye Factory

The Reinvention of Normal: Dominic Wilcox

“By doing the ridiculous, something else might come of it,” says Dominic Wilcox, and we couldn’t agree more.

“Just off the wall. And that is what I’ve always encouraged in him.” says Dominic’s dad.

“I had this idea to come up with something creative every day for 30 days,” says the artist.

And this is how we all move forward.

Rallitox: Chicken Murder on Williamsburg Street Corner

Insert joke about hipsters here. Actually, this is Williamsburg – hipsters left a few years ago and only return to reminisce. Nonetheless this installation and the blasé reactions of the passive consumer class to Rallitox’s installation are illuminating. Please take your photo and move on.

Also interesting to note, Rallitox reports that a dead animal is cheaper than aerosol paint or markers for making art.

Abdel Maged Amara: LIES – The Street Walkers

Take a look at how to make a 3D Graffiti sculpture and then suspend it in what appears to be its natural environment.

Sbagliato in London Creates a False Hallway

Optical illusion is featured in this tease for upcoming Sbagliato project. Walk this way.

Hitnes in Rome: Blind Eye Factory

Cash For Your Warhol (CFYW) Says “No Questions Asked” in Philadelphia

April 9, 2015 Artists, Interview

“No Questions Asked” says Hargo of this slyly-named collection of Cash For Your Warhol pieces opening this week at a small gallery in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood. But you may want to ask a few questions of your own.

The large CFYW billboard outside Penn Station in Philadelphia is more than an appeal, and less. Cash For Your Warhol. Philadelphia, PA. April, 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

That’s the typical response that most viewers have when they see his printed plastic signs on telephone poles in desperate parts of town from Boston to New York to Miami to Los Angeles and many points in between. For six years the foxy Street Artist has been happily perplexing inquisitive and inquiring minds with evolving iterations of the sign he first placed on the lawn of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachussets at the height of the financial crisis.

“So it was in March of 2009, it was the bottom. It was also the time when the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis was having tremendous financial difficulty and they had announced that they were going to be selling their art collection.”

He says these are the sorts of signs that appear in the more desperate parts of town. Cash For Your Warhol. Philadelphia, PA. April, 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“It is one of the best university art collections in the country, and people went nuts,” Hargo explains in a lumberjacked-cuffed-denim-bearded-flannel-plaid-drip-coffee shop a couple of blocks away from the newly installed show.

“So the first sign that I installed was actually on their lawn,” he says with a certain glint in his eye. “That sign got taken down and it is currently in the Rose Museum in the employee lunchroom I’m told. ”

Image © Hargo

He knows his signs are collected directly off the street by all types of people – including a board member of the Warhol Foundation. Once the message catches the eye, certain people also feel compelled to call the number, which he eventually changed and connected to an answering machine. Listen to the messages on the phone installed at “No Questions Asked” and you’ll hear a randomized collection of the hundreds he’s collected so far. Sometimes they are simply confused, other times irate, or self aggrandizing. They warn him about vandalism or insult him for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes they inquire about selling art.

Cash For Your Warhol. Philadelphia, PA. April, 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“I think the Cash For Your Warhol thing is funny, and I think it’s okay for art to be funny. Sometimes people think that it has to be all serious and intellectual,” he says as he discusses the more surface emotional aspects of turning the low cost sales medium on its head – a continuous source of entertainment and education for the artist and those who follow his work. He doesn’t mind if people don’t get it or if they literally take the signs for themselves. He has amassed a collection of similar signs himself, and some of their designs are mashed together in a handful of one-of-a-kind pieces in the show as well.

BSA: What kind of signs do you collect and how many do you have?
Hargo: I have a couple hundred – I only want the ones that are plastic signs that are printed – and only those that have a phone number.

Cash For Your Warhol. Philadelphia, PA. April, 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: So even with those narrow parameters, it comes out to be 200 signs. That’s crazy.
Hargo: So wherever I travel – like I was in Florida and I collected a dozen of them. Before I go home I go to a UPS store and I mail them to myself. So I have “Cash for Your House’, “Cash for Your Junk Car”, um, but also “Tattoo Removal” is prominent. I have “Divorce $299”, “Insurance For Diabetics”, signs for Karate lessons, sports camps, dancing lessons.

BSA: Do the dancing lessons signs have a silhouette of a couple in a romantic embrace?
Hargo: Yeah, they’re like doing the tango or something.

BSA: So it is good that you are using these different signs to mash together in your own work.
Hargo: Yeah I think the last thing the people who made these signs expected was that someone would take this sign deliberately and blend it into one of these works.

Cash For Your Warhol. Philadelphia, PA. April, 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Part conceptual, part culture jamming, sociology and anthropology, many iterations of his signage is on display in this brief but tightly packed overview of the entire short career of CFYW – including the special new one in Spanish that features green and red ink referencing the Mexican flag.

“It’s sort of the full collection,” he says, “and I made the new Spanish sign, which is larger format than previously but two sided. Each side is slightly different because when you pull the screens the ink is slightly different.”

Cash For Your Warhol. Philadelphia, PA. April, 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“I think a lot of people in Philly are not familiar with his work but they are getting excited about this show,” says LMNL Gallery curator RJ Rushmore, who tells about a further irony where a deli in Fishtown saw one his signs on the street and sent out a tweet about it. Hargo saw the tweet and sent them a sign as a gift – which they promptly put in the front window.

“I just find it so surreal,” says Rushmore, “that an actual store is displaying it in their window display – an artwork that is an advertisement for an art show about a guy looking to buy art.”

Cash For Your Warhol. Philadelphia, PA. April, 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The longer he continues with the CFYW project, the greater the layers of irony and commentary, and the more fulsome is the tribute to the projects namesake Warhol, who became famous by appropriating and elevating the mundane for consideration as art.

“There are numerous ways in which the viewer could relate to CFYW,” he explains, “and I don’t want my views to narrow or shift that experience. It’s part prank, yes, but also part outsider art, part art as commodity, part commentary on the 1%, part performance, part interaction with the viewer, part parody, and, as you pointed out, part Warhol homage. It can be light and funny, or complex and serious – take your pick. I want the viewer’s experience to be open-ended.

“It’s a street art project in the literal sense, because it often goes on the street, but I deliberately don’t abide by traditional street art ‘rules’ because some of those are kinda silly, and I don’t feel I need to follow them in order for the project to succeed. Ideas around permission, fabrication, acceptable media, a gallery presence, hanging off a building with a roller – I feel that sorta stuff doesn’t apply to me because I’m not actually trying to be a street artist.”

Okay, if you say so. No questions asked.

Cash For Your Warhol. Philadelphia, PA. April, 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Cash For Your Warhol AKA CFYW “No Questions Asked” will open on April 10 at the LMNL Gallery in Philadelphia. Click HERE for further details.

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BSA Interviewed on VantagePoint Radio

April 8, 2015 Artists, Interview

Hear a New Interview with Brooklyn Street Art on VantagePoint Radio

James Bullough is an American abstract/photo realist mural painter out of DC-Baltimore and Tom “Auto64” Phillipson is a digital media producer and top-flight VJ originally from Australia.

Both guys are calling Berlin home right now and together they have co-created VantagePoint Radio, a bi-weekly interview show focused on Urban Contemporary art.

Jump-started by their association with Yasha Young and the Urban Nation, James and Tom have had the opportunity to polish their interviewing skills with some interesting players from street art, graffiti, contemporary and urban art: artists, graff writers, curators, gallerists, publishers, and scene makers in the last year and a half. Among them are Ben Eine, Dan Witz, Olek, Thinkspace’s Hosner, Jonathan Levine, Jef Aerosol, DalEast, Axel Void, Roland from VNA, Lush, Jaz …. a lot of names you’ve seen on BSA plus a handful that we’ve yet to meet.

Their impressive list keeps growing and the guys keep the format open and casual with James inquiring about the creative process and whatever interests him – with Tom keeping him on track and sounding crisp. They also invite guests to bring four of their own musical tracks to intersperse with the chatting to add some additional color.

While we were in Berlin recently James and Tom interviewed some of the PERSONS OF INTEREST artists in the guest rooms of the eclectic and very chill artists hotel, The Michelberger – including Gaia, Specter and Icy & Sot. It was our honor to speak with Vantage Point Radio as well, and today we want to share with you the audio from that interview.

We talked about Jay-Z, Bowie, Bushwick, the democratization of Street Art, cultural imperialism, the UN and what it is like to bust out a blog seven days a week and still keep your mind and heart open to discovery.

It’s a total adventure and we are glad that we met these two talented and genuine guys on the path!

Enjoy!

Be sure to subscribe on iTunes to keep up to date with VantagePoint Radio, and follow them on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, and Youtube to hear more about upcoming shows and to see extra content.

Yo man also listen to the show on either Mixcloud, Soundcloud or Spreaker

Dain and El Sol 25 on the Street in Berlin

April 7, 2015 Artists

When some of the artists were with us in Berlin for the BSA show “Persons of Interest” at Urban Nation, they also managed to hit up a few walls in the city. Not only did they plaster these in broad daylight, neither DAIN nor El Sol 25 even looked over their shoulder; folks welcome the new art work – often posing for selfies in front of it.

Dain (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dain busts three in a row. See another full body version below. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dain (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dain sidebusts a piece by Alessio B (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Solito Jibaro inside the future UN museum, currently referred to as the UN haus. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Sol 25 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Dont Fret : Spring Break In NYC

April 6, 2015 Artists

The talented comedic Chicago Street Artist is back! Ladies and germs, Dont Fret!

You may not have heard from Dont Fret in a little while probably because he’s been working on his sausage.

Literally.

Poking at the banality of everyday life and smacking you about the face with it till you laugh – that’s what keeps this Czech sausage fresh and savory. Not only did he design signage, packaging and related wheat-pasted illustrations for his collaboration with Publican Quality Meats (“Dont Fret Quality Meats”) he also managed a trip back east to hit the streets with some new humorous characters who look familiar to you.

Dont Fret (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Most notable of the new works is the large recreation of a typical NYC Sports Ball magazine/mint candy/hot chips/pork rinds street salesman at the ready to make a sale or chew the fat. “For all your commuting needs there is a friendly DF magazine kiosk near you,” he says on his Instagram. Many of the pieces were found in Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and the evolving-gentrifying-contested artist neighborhood of Bushwick – “where the prices are high and the standards are low,” he riffs.

Oddly, even though he was launching his sausage back in Chicago many of his works on NY streets reference veganism, so it’s sort of confusing but maybe he goes both ways. Whatever the case, most likely he has made you crack a smile recently.

Dont Fret (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dont Fret. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Dont Fret (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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BSA Images Of The Week: 04.05.15

April 5, 2015 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

ECB was back on the streets in Bushwick this week doing his portrait of a Moroccan street barber from his series of portraits in Morocco of traders whose trade is in danger of extinction. That is what BSA Images of the Week starts off with.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Caroatoes, ECB, Hendrick Beikirch, Icy & Sot, Jaye Moon, London Kaye, ROA, Scott Lickstein, SOBR, Ten Hundred, Trice, Wing, and X-O.

Top Image >> Hendrik Beikirch AKA ECB. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Hendrik Beikirch AKA ECB (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Scott Lickstein (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Icy & Sot (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Icy & Sot in Berlin. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

London Kaye (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Wing (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Amanda Marie. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Amanda Marie (photo © Jaime Rojo)

X-O (photo © Jaime Rojo)

SOBR in Berlin. It’s Time To Dance! (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Jaye Moon may have gone to see the On Kawarwa exhibition at the Guggenheim before hitting the street with this date. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

If I’ve asked you once I’ve asked you Trice. Quit clowning around. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ten Hundred (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Sketches from ROA’s cabinet of curiosities as he prepared this week for his new show at Jonathan Levine Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Artist Unknown (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Caratoes (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. Watcha looking at? Apple Store. SOHO, NYC. March 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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A Visit With ROA Readying for “Metazoa”

April 4, 2015 Artists, Interview

It’s unusual to capture a ROA inside. He is usually running free outdoors with the wildlife, climbing walls over multiple continents, perched within the industrialized margins of cities and rustling around the overgrown brush of rural regions.

ROA (photo © Jaime Rojo)

By his own account ROA favors the hard to cover pockmarked and scarred surfaces, preferably outside and large in scale when possible. But once in a while you will find his animal kingdom in the more rarified environs of the whitebox, if only briefly before he hops a plane to Denmark to paint a tower.

For his first solo show with New York’s Jonathan Levine Gallery, ROA has managed to domesticate himself for a few weeks to restrict his activities in a New Jersey studio with discarded cabinets, doors, metal shelves, and a stack of vinyl platters. The platters of course are for spinning on his improvised temporary sound station, newly discovered and freed from crates at music stores in New York.

ROA (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“I have filled a lot of holes in my collection,” he says as he scans this sudden new trove of vintage records that span genres across the last 50 years or so. They keep him great company. Of course he knows he’ll have to ship them home to Belgium, and they aren’t quite as light as mp3 files. At the base of the turntable he has them arranged in groupings: Rock, Blues and Jazz, Hip Hop and Reggae. Somehow it feels good to know that these new metazoan have come into existence while The Velvet Underground or Nina Simone or Screaming Jay Hawkins or Easy-E were laying down the soundtrack.

ROA (photo © Jaime Rojo)

This studio at Mana Contemporary has been a godsend and refuge during these freezing cold weeks – made more shocking since he had been in Honolulu just before flying here. But needless to say the lack of outdoor distractions has assisted the artist to focus on these new installations – 15 or more – that go on display at JLG.

With the help of a couple of fellow Street Artists ROA has been scouring Jersey City for discarded cabinets and scraps of wood to use as canvasses, or sculptures. The most successful find, he says, happened the first night where he ran across a cache of old office wooden cabinets that were all in a pile and ready to be trashed.

Within the spoils he found a very old wooden key cabinet with doors and brass hinges. That made him happy. Unfortunately the rest of the scavenging has been a bit tough due to the inclement weather – freezing temperatures and snow. Now that spring is emerging he paints with ease across the wooden assemblages and checks his original sketches as he goes.

ROA (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Finally they are ready to go, and ROA says he’s a little anxious as he packs up his new pets to be shipped the eight miles to the Chelsea gallery. Once they are gone he can make no more changes so he wants to make sure they are finished. There is also a slight chance that he may have grown attached to one or two of them as well. When they are carefully packed and picked up by the art handlers, ROA is relieved, glad they are out of his hands, hopefully to migrate into new worlds. Given the number of times we have featured and followed his work over the years, we’re confident that most of these animals will find homes soon.

Here are some shots that capture the moment when some of the larger pieces were getting packed, and only certain details of them. Enjoy.

ROA (photo © Jaime Rojo)

ROA “Metazoa” Opens April 4, 2015 at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery. Click HERE for details.

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BSA Film Friday 04.03.15 – SPECIAL “Persons of Interest” Videos Debut

April 3, 2015 Artists

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :

1. BSA PM/7 “Persons Of Interest” Documentation by Dario Jurilli, Urban Nation, Berlin.

SONG:
“Pipedream“ feat. Tok Tok by PARASITE SINGLE

2. Urban Nation Berlin and BSA: PM/7 “Persons Of Interest” by Talking Projects

Today we debut two videos on BSA Film Friday that have just been released in support of PERSONS OF INTEREST, our curated program for Urban Nation last month in Berlin. The Project M/7 was all about honoring the practice of cultural exchange between the borough of Brooklyn and the City of Berlin.

Artists from both cities have been collaborating and influencing each other for years and we were honored to work with such a talented and varied group of Brooklyn-based artists who each came at the project from very different perspectives. We follow a philosophy that says “honor the creative spirit in each person” first and great amazing things will follow.

While it is challenging the structures that have codified art through centuries, we deeply regard the art that took root on the streets as democratic and idiosyncratic and as something that is given to all of us. This movement doesn’t necessarily require or benefit from gatekeepers and exclusivity to prove its value to a culture – we see it every day.

And speaking of talent, our hats off to the driving forces behind these two videos which tell different stories about the same program. Our partners at Urban Nation augmented the program with ideas of their own and grew the scope of our original ideas further. We admire the point of view taken by the documentary style video that appears first because it captures the message and the atmosphere we had hoped to engender – one of mutual support and respect. PERSONS OF INTEREST honors the artist and the muse. As artists and directors we know that this kind of thinking actually goes a long way – and art can save lives and hearts and minds – we’ve been lucky to see it.

The second video is styled more as a music video, an atmospheric pastiche that plays on the second meaning associated with the words “Persons of Interest” – one where graffiti and Street Art overlap with the darker aspects of a subculture that is transgressive. Carefully not dipping into cliché territory, the stories woven here give a serious nod to the graffiti/skater/tattoo/BMX cultures – which among many other influencers are in the DNA of, have given birth to today’s art in the streets. Its a cool concept and it produces a few surprises.

We hope you dig both of these works.

Our sincerest thanks to the videographers, musicians, stylists, performers, technical experts, participants, administrators, artists, marketers, directors, poets, captains and dreamers who make this stuff happen.

URBAN NATION PROJECT M/7
“Persons of interest” curated by Jaime Rojo & Steven P. Harrington of Brooklyn Street Art

ARTISTS:
DAIN
GAIA
DON RIMX
SWOON
SPECTER
ESTEBAN DEL VALLE
CHRIS STAIN
NOHJCOLEY
CAKE
EL SOL 25
ICY&SOT
ONUR DINC
KKADE
NEVERCREW
DOT DOT DOT
ANDREAS ENGLUND

Basquiat Through The Eyes Of Fellow Artists on the Street

April 2, 2015 Artists

The response to our pieces on BSA and Huffpost yesterday has been sort of overwhelming – with people writing to us and commenting and sharing the article in large numbers on social media. Last nights pre-opening party at the museum was also enthusiastic, and although we don’t do the name-dropping thing much, we were gobsmacked to see members of his family at the dinner as well as many of the “Downtown” crowd from that era who were charming and celebratory as we listened to Director Arnold Lehman and the two curators describe the show and the process of putting it together.

Jeff Aerosol on a rooftop in Brooklyn. January 2010 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

If this personal and virtual traffic is any indication, the new Notebooks show is already a huge hit. Of course Jean-Michel Basquiat AKA ©SAMO AKA Basquiat continues to be an inspiration to a number of artists on the street as well. To mark the upcoming exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks officially opening tomorrow April 3rd, here we present you with a handful of images from our archives with tributes to the influential Brooklyn graffiti writer/ street artist / contemporary artist.

Zimad in Bushwick, Brooklyn. December 2014. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Tomoo Gokita on the streets of Brooklyn. April 2014 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

KOBRA on the streets of Brooklyn. October 2014 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Al Diaz remembers his writing partner as SAMO© at “21st Precinct”. Manhattan. August 2014. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Collectivo FX. Sassuolo, Italy. September 2013 (photo © Collectivo FX)

TYNK. Manhattan. March 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Basquiat’s Notebooks Open at The Brooklyn Museum

April 1, 2015 Artists, Interview

As lines continue to blur in fields of art and technology (and everything else) it is easier to see Street Art as an online/on-street diary, a forum for speech making, a laboratory for testing ideas, a publishing platform for the dispersing of truths and lies and theories and maxims and slogans and aphorisms. A timely new exhibition of personal notebooks by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat further affirms the direct relationship between the personal and the public voice of one New York expressionist, revealing lesser-known aspects of him as artist and individual.

A teenage poet on New York streets, Basquiat used his own brand of graffiti to pursue his own brand of fame. His text was intended in part as a visual element but unlike graffiti writers who produced ever more expressive tags during that heated moment in New York graffiti history, Basquiat also sought an audience who may be hip to his cerebral wordplay of poetry that puzzled and enticed – a foxy style of William Burroughs-inspired automatic writing he adapted for his own uses.

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, now running at The Brooklyn Museum until August 23rd, the genius of his fragmenting logic is revealed as a direct relationship between his private journals and his prolific and personally published aerosol missives on the streets of Manhattan’s Soho and Lower East Side neighborhoods in the late 1970s and 1980s.

These notebooks were for capturing ideas and concepts, preparing them, transmuting them, revising them, pounding them into refrains. In the same way his text (and glyphic) pieces on the street were not necessarily finished products each time; imparted on the run and often in haste, these unpolished missives didn’t require such preciousness.

Untitled. Circa 1987. Basquiat:The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The art collector Larry Warsh lends these eight notebooks that span 1981-1987, 160 pages in all, for you to scan and contemplate. New to most audiences, they also feel familiar. While they do not provide a play-by-play account of his daily affairs, they do provide insight into his state of mind, interests, and creative process. Knowing his reputation for being very aware of his public perception, you may wonder how private these were in his mind – if he was at least partially writing for a greater audience here sometimes as well.

But these are definitely his voice. Even in lengthier poetry pieces, Basquiats’ reductive approach to writing produces the same clipped cadences that appeared on walls and gallery paintings, a process of addition and subtraction that he could eventually pare down to one word that would command a canvas.

“Famous”.

Famous. 1982. Basquiat:The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

A two sided, free standing piece from 1982 midway through the gallery space gives a bittersweet focus to one of his aspirations, as well as to his application of photocopies of his own work in multiples on the canvas – a replication/repetition technique from commercial wildposting that was popularized on walls and lamp posts by graffiti writer/street artists like Revs and Cost in New York in the 90s.

“I think this show points out that the conceptual and poetic side of JMB’s work is central to and integrated with his more overtly visual and expressionistic paintings,” says Tricia Laughlin Bloom, who worked in collaboration with Dieter Bucchart, Guest Curator in organizing this exhibition. “He enjoyed exploring the play between text as visual sign or symbol and the layers of historical, sociological, personal meaning that words activate. Some of the very restrained word drawings and notebook entries are intensely expressionistic, for instance, without the use of gesture or color.”

The notebooks are part of a larger offering of paintings, drawings, and moving image in this well balanced show that keeps the focus on the writer and painter of text while placing it in the greater context of all his work. Included here are drawings of his fictional character Jimmy Best, for example, who appeared in early SAMO© street writings and elsewhere as an ongoing and developing narrative that hinted at his self image.

Most riveting for the new generation of writers may be the film clips shot in 1980-81 during the filming of New York Beat (released in 2000 as Downtown 81). Not true documentary footage, it nevertheless captures the artist outside mark-making in a determined, self-aware, sometimes hesitating manner across walls with letters and lines of simple black aerosol.

Moving into “the City” from his middle class Brooklyn home as a teenager in the late 70s, you have to wonder how or if his street practice with friend Al Diaz had been influenced by the students and workers who wrote slogans, epigrams, maxims, in black aerosol letters during the Paris uprisings of 1968. Quick passages on the street then like “Sous les paves, la plage” (under the paving stones, the beach) also played with text and sometimes cryptic meaning in ways similar to his on city walls and in these notebooks. Neatly penned, his was a deliberate meditation and experiment with words – a process that allowed you to see the deletions and additions, fully part of the finished product.

“We were presented with the rare opportunity to exhibit Basquiat’s notebooks, which offer fascinating access to his thoughts and process,” says Sharon Matt Atkins, Vice Director for Exhibitions and Collections Management, when talking about the decision to mount Notebooks.

Of course its not the first time Street Artists have been featured meaningfully here. Under the guidance of Director Arnold L. Lehman the Brooklyn Museum has shown a serious and committed interest in highlighting the contributions of artists whose practice comes directly from the streets of New York and its graffiti/Street Art traditions; including the huge Basquiat show a decade ago, the Graffiti show in 2006, the more recent Keith Haring show, Swoon’s Submerged Motherlands last year, Olek’s display at the annual Artist’s Ball, and the upcoming Faile exhibit this July, which will also feature their collaboration with Bäst. For Matt Atkins, this show is in perfect alignment.

“The Brooklyn Museum has had a commitment to showing artists whose work embraces contemporary culture. Basquiat seamlessly synthesized the world around him in his art, including elements culled from the streets, music, literature, history, and more,” she says.

It has been 27 years since Basquiat died at the age of 27. Somehow you can imagine that mathematical equation appearing here on one of the larger canvases; dense with symbols, sentence fragments, lists and formulas. Sifting through the tenuously connected word constellation it occurs to you that people like Basquiat and Burroughs and the Beats were forebears of the post-Gutenberg dislocation of text from its moorings – one that we all swim in – with passages and words and texts floating to us and past us from multiple screens of varying sizes throughout each day.

As this stream of messages blurs from the intensely personal to the public spheres, this show confirms how the art-making process for the street has always been rich with storytelling, even if not evident at first. A show of this moment, seeing these notebooks first hand will complete a cycle for many.

We had an opportunity to speak further with one of the curators, Tricia Laughlin Bloom, about Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks.

Brooklyn Street Art: Often we think of the work we see on the street as part of a continuum, a conversation back and forth between the artist and the passerby. How does this exhibition illustrate the continuum that extends from private neatly penned journals to public aerosol missives?
Tricia Laughlin Bloom: Going through the exhibition you find a lot of similarity between the voice he used in his street writing and in his notebooks, that also extends to his word paintings. Fragments of SAMO text recur in larger scale works that we have included, and many of his notebook passages read like they could have been SAMO texts.

Brooklyn Street Art: Can you describe the dynamic between yourself and the guest curator Dieter Buchhart and how it informed some of your joint decisions for presenting the work?
Tricia Laughlin Bloom: Dieter brought the initial checklist together as Guest Curator, and we shaped it together from there. We both felt it was important that the show be about the notebooks—that the paintings and drawings should be carefully selected to compliment the notebooks and not overwhelm, and to highlight Basquiat the poet and thinker AND visual artist. Getting the right number of works and the precise balance was a long process, and many conversations.

Brooklyn Street Art: How has preparing this exhibition changed or affected your perception of his work in the intervening ten years since the “Basquiat” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, if at all?
Tricia Laughlin Bloom: I was always a fan, and I loved the 2005 show, but I feel I understand him better and my admiration has deepened after the opportunity to work with the notebooks. It’s more intimate in scale and the whole experience feels more personal.

From left to right: Untitled (Crown) 1982. Tuxedo. 1982. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Photo taken from the video Downtown 81 Outtakes. 2001. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks. Brooklyn Museum. April 2015. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks is organized by Dieter Buchhart, Guest Curator, with Tricia Laughlin Bloom, former Associate Curator of Exhibitions, Brooklyn Museum and current Curator of American art at the Newark Museum.

With special thanks to Tricia Laughlin Bloom, Sharon Matt Atkins, and Sally Williams.

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks at the Brooklyn Museum opens on April 3, 2015 to the general public. Click HERE for further details.

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This article is also published on The Huffington Post

Young New Yorkers – A Preview of the Auction Benefitting NYC Youth

March 31, 2015 Artists

Don’t miss this cool auction of work by many of today’s Street Artists on the New York scene, and some other folks you might have heard of! Young New Yorkers works with 16 and 17 year-old kids who have been caught in the criminal justice system, giving them a second chance. This is your opportunity to support this non-profit organization that is doing good work for your neighbors and our neighborhoods and to add art to your collection.

Here are some brand new shots of pieces that will be available. For a full listing and to bid on the auction progress online, click here on Paddle8.

We had the opportunity to speak with Rachel Barnard, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Young New Yorkers about the event and their programs. We asked her to explain how the programs work.

“Art exercises in our programs are collapsed with restorative justice exercises and they give our participants a way of exploring the impact of their choices while empowering them to make wiser ones in the future. We work with photography, video, collage and illustration. More importantly, in the second half of the program art allows our participant’s to step into their own leadership and self expression,” she explains.

As the participants explore their creativity, they also examine it through a greater lens. “They explore a social issue that is important to them and develop a public art project around that. This is then presented at the final exhibition – one which the criminal court judges, acting district attorneys, social workers and other members of the criminal justice system, attend. It’s a way for everyone to re-meet our extraordinary participants as more than just their rap sheets. So in this way we use art to meet our main goal; which is to empower our young New Yorkers to transform the criminal justice system through their own creative voices.”

Here are some of the pieces that will be up for auction on April 1st.

Young New Yorkers provides arts-based programming to court-involved young people. The criminal court gives eligible defendants—all of whom are 16- and 17-year-olds and who in New York are tried as adults—the option to participate in Young New Yorkers rather than do jail time, community service, and have a lifelong criminal record. With the ultimate goal of empowering participants to transform the criminal justice system through their own creative voices, all of YNY’s programs culminate with a public exhibition where members of the Criminal Justice System are invited to re-meet the graduates as creative and empowered individuals. In most cases, upon successful completion of the program, the participants’ cases are sealed; so far, 100% of participants have graduated from YNY’s programs.

We look forward to seeing you at Joseph Gross Gallery on April 1 for the Silent Art Auction. Get your advance tickets for only $35 here.

FAILE & BÄST Come to Brooklyn Museum This July

March 30, 2015 Artists

FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds

BSA is pleased to announce this great event for fans of Brooklyn Street Artists FAILE as the Brooklyn Museum once again shows vision and unequivocal support for the artists who have made the streets of this city a foundational part of the contemporary Street Art scene. They will be showing both their TEMPLE and their DELUXX FLUXX ARCADE, a collaboration with another important player on New York streets, BÄST.

Both FAILE & BÄST hold important roles in the development of the scene on the streets and it is great to see a major cultural institution such as The Brooklyn Museum give such an important honor to them.

From the Press Release
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Brooklyn Museum Presents FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds, Including Two Major Installations by FAILE; Exhibition to Open July 10, 2015

The Brooklyn Museum will present

FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds, including two major installations by FAILE, collaboration between the Brooklyn-based artists Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, from July 10 through October 4, 2015. The exhibition includes Temple and The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade–two immersive environments that invite visitors to engage actively with the work, prompting viewers to ask questions about their relationship to consumer culture, religious traditions, and the urban environment.

Since 1999, McNeil and Miller have created multimedia installations, large-scale paintings, and sculptures that blur the lines between fine art, street art, and popular culture. The exhibition unites The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade and Temple, both from 2010, alongside new paintings and sculptures that highlight FAILE’s evolving practice. Drawing on a long art-historical tradition of appropriation, both as an homage to their sources and as subversions of stereotypes, these works are inspired by material as varied as American quilts, folk art, Native American art, religious architecture, pulp magazines of the mid-twentieth century, comic books, sci-fi movie posters, adult entertainment advertisements, and storefront typography.

The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade, created in collaboration with the Brooklyn artist Bäst, is an interactive installation that includes retrofitted video games, pinball machines, and foosball tables that are simultaneously sculptures and functioning games. A nostalgic nod to video arcades as well as to punk rock and graffiti culture, this is the fifth iteration of the project and the first time it will be installed in a museum context, following earlier versions in London, New York, Miami, and Edinburgh. Featuring the artists’ signature characters and imagery, these programmed games are twists on classic examples such as wrestling matches, road races, water-based challenges, tile-matching puzzles, and audio-visual manipulations.

FAILE’s Temple, originally installed in Praça dos Restauradores Square in Lisbon for the Portugal Arte 10 Festival, is reminiscent of religious architecture that has fallen into ruin. Temple is fabricated with components such as iron gating, ceramic relief work, and painted ceramics. Measuring 16½ feet high by 28¾ feet long by 16 feet wide, Temple will be installed in the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, a large rotunda space. The life-size work features FAILE’s customized prayer wheels inspired by Tibetan Buddhist structures, vernacular imagery culled from Brooklyn streets, and popular-culture sources. The interior imagery of Native American figures, borrowed from mid-twentieth-century movie and comic book sources, imagines a reaction against commercial development and consumer greed with a return to traditional values. Blurring the boundary between art and architecture, Temple amplifies the fluid integration of visual culture and the built environment in FAILE’s art.

For this exhibition, the artists have also created several new works. Among them are two triptychs, both mural-size paintings created in their “ripped canvas” style. Inspired by the gritty, worn layering of street posters, these canvases, with their surface gaps, simultaneously reveal and conceal subject and meaning.

FAILE is the Brooklyn-based artistic collaboration between Patrick McNeil (born in 1975 in Edmonton, Alberta) and Patrick Miller (born in 1976 in Minneapolis, Minnesota). After meeting as teenagers in Arizona, they attended Northern Arizona University. They later both studied graphic design–Miller at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and McNeil at Fashion Institute of Technology. In the late 1990s, the duo reconnected and joined with Aiko Nakagawa (born in 1975 in Tokyo, Japan) to form FAILE: the name is an anagram of their first project, A Life. In 2006, Nakagawa began making work on her own as “Lady Aiko,” while McNeil and Miller continued pushing the limits of their imagery. They have since worked in a wide range of materials and styles and are best known for their prints, paintings, and mixed-media installations, which have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions. They have also completed major commissions for the New York City Ballet’s Art Series (2013); and for the Mongolian Arts Council, in UlaanBaatar, Mongolia (2012); as well the Houston and Bowery Mural, New York (2011); and the first commissioned mural on the building façade of Tate Modern, London (2008). Inspired by the visual tapestry of their Brooklyn environs, their work is characterized by a vibrant weaving of abstraction, mass culture, and commercial typography.

Bäst has been creating work for the past decade, both on the street and for gallery exhibitions. His work borrows from a range of popular-culture references and incorporates collage elements, often resulting in seemingly whimsical characters that reveal more menacing layers.

FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds is organized by Sharon Matt Atkins, Vice Director of Exhibitions and Collections Management, Brooklyn Museum.

This exhibition is supported by Allouche Gallery, The Dean Collection, and Geoff Hargadon and Patricia LaValley.

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