A big deal has been made about the so-called virtual experience of Street Art – made possible by ever more sophisticated phones and digital platforms and technology – producing a pulsating river of visually pleasing delicacies to view across every device at a rapid speed, and then forget.
Sit on the city bus or in a laundromat next to someone reviewing their Instagram/RSS/Facebook feed and you’ll witness a hurried and jerky scrolling with the index finger of images flying by with momentary pauses for absorbing, or perhaps “liking”. The greatest number of “likes” are always for the best eye candy, the most poppy, and the most commercially viable. It’s a sort of visual image consumption gluttony that can be as satisfying as a daily bag of orange colored cheese puffs.
This is probably not what art on the street is meant for. At least, not all of it.
As we have been observing here and in front of audiences for a few years now, the 2000s and 2010s have brought a New Guard and a new style and approach to work in the street that we refer to as the work of storytellers. These artists are doing it slowly, with great purpose, and without the same goals that once characterized graffiti and street art.
While there has been the dual development of a certain digital life during the last decade, these street works are eschewing the shallowness that our electronic behaviors are embracing. Even though the digitization of society has pushed boundaries of speed and eliminated geography almost entirely, it is creating an artificial intelligence of a different kind. In other words there really is still no substitute for being there to see this work, to being present in the moment while cars drive by and chattering pedestrians march up the sidewalk.
Setting aside the recent abundance of large commissioned/permissioned murals and the duplication/repetition practice of spreading identical images on wheatpasted posters and stickers that demark the 1990s and early 2000s in the Street Art continuum, today we wanted to briefly spotlight some of the one of a kind, hand crafted, hand painted, illegally placed art on the streets.
The materials, styles and placements are as varied as the artists themselves: Yarn characters attached to fences, tiles glued to walls, acrylic and oil hand painted wheat pastes on a myriad of surfaces, ink, lead and marker illustrations, carved linotype ink prints, clay sculptures, lego sculptures, intricate hand-cut paper, and hand rendered drawings have slowly appeared on bus shelters, walls, doorways, even tree branches.
They all have a few things in common: The artists didn’t ask for permission to place these labor-intensive pieces on the streets, they are usually one of a kind, and frequently they are linked to personal stories.
We’ve been educating ourselves about these stories and will be sharing some of them with you at the Brooklyn Museum in April, so maybe that’s why we have been thinking about this so much. There is a quality to these works that reflect a sense of personal urgency and a revelation about their uniqueness at the same time.
If the placement of them is hurried the making of them it is not. The themes can be as varied as the materials but in many cases the artist informs the art by his or her autobiography or aspiration. And once again BSA is seeing a steady and genuine growth in storytelling and activism as two of the many themes that we see as we walk the streets of the city.
Meanwhile the small idiosyncratic hand-made pieces are starting to show up again in New York after a relative quiet that was enforced by the cold and snow, which both have melted. Oh, wait, another storm is coming tonight. (!) If we find that ground hog he is going to get a smack.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Ainac, DOA, EC13, Geppetto, Lambros, Mr. Toll, Olek, Richard Serra, and Tripel.
It was such a short affair, just one of those things.
Italian Street Artist Bifido has the last word on street about the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics with two guys in Pussy Riot ski masks and boots, and nothing else. This one is in Naples, Italy.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Roti “To the New Ukraine” 2. Getting “GREASY” with Narcelio Grud
3. Mr. Toll from DEGA Films 4. NDA from DEGA Films
5. “I Can See You” in Iraq
6. Experimenting with Projection Mapping
BSA Special Feature:Roti “To the New Ukraine”
From Chris Cunnigham comes this short version of a documentary that follows French Grafiti artist ‘Roti’ as he works on his most ambitious project to date, we get a glimpse of an untold side story in Ukraine’s revolutionary struggle.”
From the man who showed us how to paint with discarded fruits and vegetables, we see a sweetly crude painting with the one thing that is keeping the world running while simultaneously killing it. Narcelio takes on the sticky stuff and gets greasy.
Mr. Toll from DEGA Films
In a category all his own, Mr. Toll sculpts with his fingers the ironic and the naturally beautific (warning: may not be a word). Over the last 3 or 4 years, you could say prolific. The 3-D is a welcome variation, and surprisingly easy to overlook as a possible adornment deliberately placed there by a building owner.
N’DA from DEGA Films
Hard won street cred can sometimes be achieved one character at a time, no matter how brutishly plain or comically pequeno. What a character N’DA is! Painter, wheatpaster, illustrator, idiosyncratic outside artist – don’t underestimate and don’t overlook this one.
“I Can See You” in Iraq – A film by Sajjad Abbas
Translated as “I can see you” the giant eye placed on the top of this building is a way that was Street Artist Sajjad Abbas wanted to keep Iraqi politics on their best behavior. Even though he got permission from the government to install it, soon enough it had to come down because some people thought it had to do with the Freemasons. Here he offers an unvarnished direct recording of the installation and de-installation, less documentary than document.
Experimenting with Projection Mapping
From computational designer Lukas Z here is a fun example how much you can do with projection mapping and some pin tape these days on the street. Our forays into the projection world over the last 5 years tell us that this is one small example of the possible, but this is well realized.
A big spoon full of sugar – that’s what keeps the sweetness in the appearance of these two public art bus stop pieces from MP5 in Italy. Once assessed, you may see the bitter critique of modern norms that are portrayed in festive sunny tones.
First is the frantic anxiety ridden magpie who is waiting nervously for the bus, so terrorized by time, so worried of missing the worm, so fearful of being pecked by an angry bird boss.
Below is the second pleasantly bright and flat scene of the mask-wearing role-playing go-getting company man. Sadly, he is so conditioned to react to reward that unless he dons his fake façade and dangles his own carrot he cannot rapidly chase those highly valued results.
And what are those results, exactly?
MP5 says the title of the the project is TEMPUS FUGIT, which is meant to reflect on the precariousness of our lives, liberty and the meaning we give to time.
Afghanistan is not the first place you think of when someone says Street Art scene and Kabul would certainly be sort of low on your list of urban art festivals to check out, but surprisingly it has both. These are a couple of the revelations we had earlier this month when BSA welcomed three 20-something artists to tour the streets of Brooklyn – and meet one of our own homegrown Street Art duos in their studio.
Abul Qasem Foushanji, Ommolbanin Samshia Hassani, and Sayed Mohebullah Ramin Naqshbandi were all good sports despite the brutishly cold February day – in fact Sayed had a fairly light jacket on because he said it gets as cold or colder back home in Mazar-i Sharif where he is a painter and student who has tried his hand at stencil work.
Qasem and Samshia both grew up in Iran, so it made sense that they were excited when we began the tour by checking out the large mural done by Iranian émigrés and brothers Icy & Sot, who now live in Brooklyn. While Arthur, our astutely amiable co-host from the State Department, helped keep the mini-van warm and free of parking tickets, their escort/interpreter Mr. Aziz walked up and over the snowbanks with us while we checked out works by a number of graffiti and Street Artists all around the North Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint.
The Central Asian country of Afghanistan has historically eschewed modern art as being unacceptable and much art was destroyed by the Taliban in the last few decades for being un-Islamic.
With such a restrictive atmosphere it was good to learn that Qasem plays bass in a thrash metal band, does sound installations and has experimented with abstract expressionism – something that would have been unheard of in the 90s. “In the early 2000s when the Taliban left the country, there was nothing,” he says as he observes a gradual building of hope in the creative community.
As the sun went down we were welcomed into the vast office and studio of Patrick Miller and Patrick McNeal, who together comprise the Brooklyn based Street Art collective better known as Faile. Having just walked the same streets where the Patricks began many of their experiments at the turn of the century, it was a great opportunity for the guests to see what a world-class art making studio looks like, to ask questions, and to share some stories about how the scenes on streets of Brooklyn and Kabul differ.
Speaking about their early days of illicit art posting, McNeal explains “You’d go out and you get to the wall and it’s quick,” he says with a snap of the fingers. “You’re not taking the time, necessarily, to think. And then you finish it up and get away from it and you came back to see it the next day. There was something loose in it, where now everything gets very tight and refined,” he says as he gestures to the large artworks in progress across the tables and the floor of the studio.
“Yeah, it’s changed a lot over time,” says Miller about the street art scene, especially in the area of Williamsburg that has become a high-rent playground for professionals and well-heeled college kids. “Real estate, gentrification, a lot of those things have played into it in a lot of places like here and Barcelona where you used to see a lot more things on the street, it doesn’t really exist.”
One thing we learned is that Shamsia doesn’t even usually feel that she can go on the street in Kabul to create her work because she fears berating words, insults and possibly worse from people who don’t think a woman should be doing such a thing. And would never go out after dark. “It’s for the boys to go out at night. I wish to do so also but I am a girl. It is dangerous,” she says with regret, but is determined to use her art to advocate for the rights of girls and women in whatever way that she can.
One project she calls “Graffiti Dreams” is comprised entirely in her imagination and on her computer – where she creates virtual street art scenes on buildings she has photographed as a way to at least paint walls in her mind. “That’s nothing, but for me it is everything because I can do graffiti somehow.” She took out her iPad to show McNeal some of her renderings.
After British graffiti artist Chu held a one-week graffiti workshop for nine artists in Kabul in 2010 where the concept of graffiti and street art was introduced from a Western perspective, Shamsia and other young artists took the art form to heart.
She has traveled internationally in the last few years meeting other artists and sometimes collaborating with them like Tika from Zürich, Berlin’s Klub 7, and the well known Los Angelelino Street Artist El Mac, with whom she did two collaborations now on display in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and in Brisbane, Australia.
McNeal asked Samshia, “How did you get exposed to graffiti?,” and Samshia talked about the workshop with Chu and how it affected her.
“I thought if I did graffiti then I could introduce art to the people,” she says, “Because no one goes to exhibitions and galleries – only some very important people are invited to exhibits. And I thought that I could put art in the street for all people and maybe they have never seen that there is this art.”
“How do you get spray paint there?” he followed up.
“There are very bad quality spray paint there,” she replies with a smile. “These are just for color to put somewhere. It’s not really for painting. The color drops a lot, and I’m not changing the size of the caps. Sometimes I do the small details with small brushes because the spray can is not able to do very thin lines.”
“That’s cool though,” McNeal encouraged, “ because that will inform your style and the way that you work.”
As one of the first graffiti artists in Kabul, Shamsia is also unusual because most practicing artists of any discipline are men – and women face resistance to their participation in many roles, including as an artist on the street. Now an associate professor at Kabul University where she leads workshops to teach students how to use aerosol spray to create art, Ms. Hassani created a festival this December to highlight graffiti and Street Art as an art practice.
Her own work features stylized women in blue burqas, fish, and calligraphy that references poetry. As often happens, the definition of graffiti and street art are slightly different in Afghanistan than they would be in western cities like London and New York, often closer to what might be called murals or community walls.
For now she is planning a new program when she returns to Kabul University in the spring.
“Another graffiti workshop is coming too for some children who have no parents. They are often very small girls and they have no parents and I want to help them and have a workshop for them,” she explains about her desire to provide restorative healing through art in a city torn by war. “I will start to teach a new subject, making characters, because there is nothing like that right now. I would like to add characters, because everyone likes characters. I would like to teach some technical steps, some secrets of how to make them.”
The night ends with tea, cookies, and conversation in a warm living room and the artists talk about some of their projects, internet service, social media, and other ways that society is evolving and what they hope for art in Afghanistan. As he describes his work future projects Sayed says would like to create politically themed messages for the street. Qasem talks about a culture-jamming project creating a false college course advertisement that may also be humorous. Then in a flash, the visit is over, numbers and emails are exchanged and they get ready to go back out in the cold.
In 2012 Shamsia collaborated with Los Angeles based Street Artist El Mac on two murals in Sai Gon, Vietnam. The first mural was painted in September of 2012 in front of Sàn Art, an artist non-profit contemporary art organization in Sai Gon. The second mural, also painted in Sai Gon was unveiled in Brisbane, Australia at the Asia Pacific Triennial in December 2012.
The figure in the center is a portrait of Shamsia by El Mac from photographs that he took of her. The writing that surrounds the portrait is a poem by Ms. Hassani which she integrated with her own designs. The poem reads:
پرنده های بی وطن ،همه اسیرن مثل من ،صدای خواندن ندارن
Birds of no nation
Are all captive
Like me
With no voice for singing
Today we jump right in to the warm Honolulu waters for a swim before padding barefoot up to the painted walls of Pow! Wow! where photographer Martha Cooper is waiting camera in hand and looking for a fly swatter to smack down a camera drone that is buzzing around her head and getting in the way of her shots.
Here’s part deux of some of Ms. Cooper’s pics from PW 2014, beginning with an aquatic version of the sort of poker-playing canines popularized by illustrationist and painter Cassius Marcellus Coolidge about a hundred years ago that still persist in the offices of law firms and investment banks today. This large scale variation is by street humorist Ron English.
“Ron English painted marine animals playing poker. His brother-in-law who lives in Hawaii (I think) had been begging for this wall for a long time so Ron finally did it,” says Martha.
“One of the craziest things I saw was the use of camera drones operated by remote control. There were a couple and they could fly high or swoop down to shoot.” -MC
Photographer Martha Cooper just returned to New York from Hawaiian paradise and the 5th Pow! Wow! Festival, which this year featured an unprecedented number of artist that some estimate at 100.
Naturally with a herd that big, you’d have to be a regular cattle hand with a camera to capture all of the action, but the fast moving Cooper collected a number of images that we can share here with BSA readers over the next couple of days, along with her notes on the experience.
Kaka’ako is the name of the neighborhood where most of the murals are located and Ms. Cooper compares it to the Miami site that also has hosted a large number of legal walls for the last few years. “It’s a Wynwood-type neighborhood but with a longer, more esteemed history,” she says, and “Like Wynwood it’s slated for development.” For example a library that many of the local Hawaiian artists painted will soon be torn down to make space for condos. Good thing Street Artist Gaia and Vhils were there to bring some of the local historical and mythological elements, including portraits of Hawaiian royalty.
An interesting aspect of this event, and there were many, was the pairing of many artists on walls to combine and merge their styles to create new works. “There were a surprising number of unusual collaborations at Pow! Wow!,” says Martha. “Some were odd mashups like Tatiana Suarez and Woes, and Buff Monster and Nychos seemed like a good match. I think it must have been challenging for the artists. Cope & Indie also asked Buff Monster and 123Klan to collaborate on their wall.”
Another trend this year: Elvis. “Elvis is big in Hawaii,” Martha remarks, and she says it is because of his celluloid records in addition to his vinyl ones. “He made three movies in Hawaii,” and she mentions the Elvis mask that Wayne White made as a good example of Presley magic on the tropical island of Honolulu. “I especially liked the way Madsteez incorporated existing graffiti into his wall because he made good use of the corrugated iron surface which was difficult to paint on but it had a nice patina when finished.” Interestingly, Madsteez gave his blue Elvis an eye patch that mimics the artist’s own worldview.
Insa is one of the first GIFFITTI artists – and his wall with ROID for Pow! Wow” recalls the typography and graphic style of commercial 1980s TV shows like Miami Vice and the New Wave as interpreted by MTV. The resulting GIF is a funny simple animation that somehow brings the nostalgia alive. Looks like paradise from here!
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring 1up, Bishop203, Bradley Theodore, Cash4, Deekers, El Sol 25, Hiss Keeley, Kevin Cyr, King Amsterdam, Ludo, Mosco Clandestino, Not Art, ROA, Royce Bannon, Smells, Sweet Toof, Trap Art, and Zimer.
Joereal in Los Angeles likes to paint up on his roof and think about yoga and the spiritual life. He sends this brief video for you to contemplate many such things as you travel through this Saturday.
“This ia a southwest inspired Earth spirit,” he tells us. ” The spirit is holding a burning sage , and in the place of smoke a rainbow is emerging. It is said when we burn sage, cedar, sweetgrass etcetra, it gives shape and color to our prayers and intentions. This is an Earth prayer made with vapors and raw energy under an intriguing Los Angeles sky.”
We’ve got the bundle of sagebrush smoking already and it is turning the whole building into once clerestory of peace. Happy Saturday everybody.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. TOOFLY in Miami 2. 8 Artists, One Day in La Perla
3. UNO in Bolonga, Italy 4. Phlegm / Run / Christiaan Nagel in London
5. Surplus Candy
BSA Special Feature: TOOFLY in Miami
“There is a different dynamic that takes place when women get together and paint or build or create something,” explains Queens born Toofly as she scales the ladder in Miami during Art Basel this year. The short by Alexandra Henry gives voice to the artist, designer and organizer as she describes coming up in the 1990s wall painting surrounded primarily by dudes. Now as she moves to a different stage and embraces her Ecuadorean roots, Toofly is joined by a new generation of women who are laying claim to the street and adding their voices to the conversation.
8 Artists, One Day in La Perla
An overcast day in Old San Juan is still better than a sunny one inside an office cubicle, ya herd? Here’s a gently rolling survey of a community called La Perla, who in one day received new gifts bestowed from Alexis Diaz, Faith47, Axel Void, Filio, Inti, Conor Harrington, Poteleche, and Franco Jaz. Captured by Tost Fims, it is free of so many of the video making conventions of Street Art film-making that it may be pulling the genre in a new direction.
UNO in Bolonga, Italy
UNO and Matteo Talone take wheatpasting to a new very long expanse in Bologna, hand coloring meters and meters of pop inspired black and white image/text patterning for the Cheap Festival.
Phlegm / Run / Christiaan Nagel in London
A teaser for a series of films (Last Breath) that will be made documenting the beautification of soon-to-be demolished buildings in London. Touring the remains of structural decrepitude is not new, but doing so artfully like this is.
Surplus Candy
A new video from Nick Heller features a tour from the recent abandoned house takeover on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
The outdoor gallery is the one we visit most and NYC is always front and center in our heart even as we branched out to about 100 other cities and towns last year. Outdoor Gallery – New York City is also the name of the brand new book by photographer and writer Yoav Litvin, who has spent the last couple of years shooting New York streets and meeting many of the artists who make the painting and wheat pasting that characterizes the class of 2014.
Outdoor Gallery – New York City by Yoav Litvin. Art by Chris Stain.
Published by Ginko Press, the large 235 page hardcover features nearly 50 street artists / graffiti artists whose work you see here regularly (with the exception of two or three) along with comments and observations from the artists about their practice, their experiences, and the current Street Art scene primarily in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
When Yoav told us of his hope to publish a book last year we offered whatever advice we could – but primarily we advised him to stick to his vision and not to let anyone discourage him. A true fan of the scene, he has worked tirelessly to do just that and now he can share with you a personal survey and record of many of the artists who are getting up today in New York.
Outdoor Gallery. New York City by Yoav Litvin. Art by Joe Iurato.
“Outdoor Gallery – New York City grew organically to embody my process of exploration and discovery on the streets of New York City. It is a creation that was born out of love for New York City streets and their people, and focuses on artists as leaders with a unique and necessary role in a society that aspires for freedom and change,” says Litvin in his introduction, and throughout the book you can sense the respect he has for the art and the dedication he has put into this project.
Careful to let the artists speak for themselves, he presents their work without commentary and with ample space given for expression. Using primarily his own photos, it is carefully edited and presented as an uncluttered and measured overview of each artists work.
Outdoor Gallery – New York City by Yoav Litvin. Art by Jilly Ballistic.
For us it is a proud moment to see someone’s dream realized after so much effort and dogged determination – especially in a scene whose challenges we are well familiar with. No one knows how hard it is to make something happen unless they do it themselves. So congratulations to Yoav for sticking to his vision and having the fortitude to finish this and thanks to him on the behalf of the artists whom he is helping to receive recognition for their work as well.
To that end, you are invited to the big launch party this Saturday at 17 Frost in Williamsburg. We’ll be there and we hope you can make it out for a great New York Street Art family reunion. You can’t miss the entrance, it’s been newly smashed by El Sol 25, Bishop 203, Royce and some other people we can’t remember right now but who will remind us as soon as this goes up ; ) .
Outdoor Gallery – New York City by Yoav Litvin. Art by Gilf!
You can find out more about it on the Facebook Event Page, but we understand there will be a newly debuted video from Dega Films, a special tribute to Army of One, and a full show of new works from many of the artists in the book, including;
Adam Dare, Alice Mizrachi, Army of One / JC2, Astrodub, ASVP, Billy Mode, Bisho203, Bunny M, Cern, Chris RWK, Chris Stain, Cope2, Dain, Dirty Bandits, El Sol 25, Elle Deadsex, Enzo and Nio, Free5, Fumero, Gaia, Gilf!, Hellbent, Icy and Sot, Indie 184, Jilly Ballistic, Joe Iurato, Kram, Lillian Lorraine, LNY (Lunar New Year), Miyok, ND’A, OCMC, OverUnder, Phetus88, QRST, Russell King, Shin Shin, Shiro, Sofia Maldonaldo, The Yok, Toofly, and Veng RWK.
Outdoor Gallery – New York City by Yoav Litvin. Art by Icy & Sot.
Outdoor Gallery – New York City by Yoav Litvin. Art by Hellbent.
Outdoor Gallery – New York City by Yoav Litvin. Art by QRST.
Outdoor Gallery – New York City by Yoav Litvin. Front and back cover art by Bishop203, LNY, Alice Mizrachi, QRST, Gilf!, Cern and Icy & Sot.
Below is a look at behind-the-scenes of the making of the mural for the cover of the book.
Outdoor Gallery – New York City will be launched in conjunction with an art exhibition this Saturday, February 22nd at 17 Frost Art Space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Click HERE for more details.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
