End of January, beginning of looking forward to spring. With warmer, wetter weather than we’ve had in years, we also have some plants popping up from the soil that we wouldn’t expect till March or April. This week has been a good show for street art and graffiti, though.
Unfortunately, demonstrations against police brutality have begun here again due to the public release of body cam and surveillance footage in Memphis, Tennesee, on Friday that document police restraining, pepper spraying, tazing, kicking, and punching a young black guy, a citizen, at a suburban intersection. The scene is stomach-turning, devastating to his family, and psychologically damaging to the body politic. Demonstrations in Times Square Friday night were followed by demonstrations in Washington Square Park last night.
Meanwhile, we want to show you some new graffiti and murals and street art from this moment in NYC.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: You Go Girl, Rero, Huetek, DEK, Leaf, Vojtech Trocha, ZROC, DOLE, Manuel Alejandro/The Creator, Jaye Moon, CNO, Atelier Wand Art, BORU, and BOOG.
In its 10th iteration, the New York City Ballet Art Series continues to deepen and broaden its foundation in the Millenial/Gen Z cultural landscape – this year with a varied program that engages the 20 and 30-somethings with a sincere dedication to reflecting modern culture while respecting the proud heritage of the art form. The Art Series program inaugurated with Brooklyn street art duo Faile a decade ago with great fanfare and some shock for the traditionalists. That relevancy with street culture and a youthful vibe still resonate even as the offerings broaden. Low has always pushed High, as you know, and it was plainly evident Friday night viewing guests and their great variety of fashions and international street flavors – and the drop of pretense in general.
On a cold and grey January Friday night, after a tough week personally, we weren’t even sure if we could leave the apartment and the comfort of cocktails and playlists and pizza or maybe dumplings to celebrate the Lunar New Year. With the promise that art always heals and even has the possibility of transforming you, we headed to Lincoln Center to see the old, the new, and probably the future.
They’ve given up on trying to stop the kids from taking pictures in the grand and sparkling theater, although there are scolding ushers ready to pounce at first sight of a glowing phone screen during the performance. It’s only right since there are about 50 people on the stage vying for your attention after years of preparation – and the glare of a phone in the corner of other people’s periphery is thoughtless. But the varied gauntlet of people in their 20s and 30s in all manner of fashions, skin colors, gait, and body types trouncing up and down the aisles during pauses and intermissions reflected our city today. The trends and the eccentricities on parade were somehow greater than many Manhattan/Brooklyn homogenous rooftop clubs that you’ve seen in recent years, so the NYCB is doing something well to engage with such an audience.
Sure there are the old guard with their annual season passes, and there are a number of red-faced stuffed shirts and power coifs in the offing, but they are just one more costume to add to the New York menagerie around you. The performers on the stage don’t quite reflect the diversity of this audience, but there has been some improvement – a sprinkling of non-white skin tones under the lights. In this respect, the pace of catching up with the new generation is a bit adagio, if you will.
Onstage the traditional elegant played its tale with the futuristic and spare, with curtain calls in between. If you couldn’t find something to love with these ballet dancers and their gorgeous gifts, you are just bitter. The piece de you-know-what of this program that literally startled many was the curtain rising on an actual Marc Chagall the size of the proscenium, or a football field, or your imagination. The darkness lifted the heavy velvet doors to slowly lighten upon the Russian painters’ Firebird without announcement (unless you are one of those people who read the program). There was an audible gasp in the multilayered boxes and across the orchestra seats. Was this an actual Chagall?
The curtain for Igor Stravinky’s The Firebird, by Marc Chagall.
Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird is more than 110 years old, and this curtain, set, and costume experience debuted in New York’s Metropolitan Opera House in 1945, but clearly, Chagall is timeless in his surreal inventiveness. We’ve legalized pot, and people are now talking about magic mushrooms, and Chagall offers his own fantastical imagery that requires neither to enjoy how untethered one can be to this reality, our constructed one.
He created over 80 costumes, including trippy animals and monsters in thickly rich hues, fabrics, appliqué, and embroidery. The scenes were unveiled with such sweet and creaming dollops that before you knew it, everyone was submerged and swimming in dripping colors, swept along by the diaphanous pageant, the ever-elegant movements and unpredictable treasures buoying this dream. The final scene could easily be from an anime adventure, a metaverse convention, or a CGI-filled cinematic melding of real and conjured. Was this old, or was this leading us into a cosplayed future?
Teresa Reichlen and dancers of NYCB in a previous production of “Firebird.” Photo by Paul Kolnik, Courtesy NYCB.
The afterparty played further with perceptions; the ballet audience poured into the Phillip Johnson-designed lobby with open walkways surrounding it multiple stories into the air, anchored by the amorphous lovers, Elie Nadelman’s two nudes. With bourbons and beers in hand, the bobbing light fixtures dabbed down and up from their cages above us like so many sea creatures at organic intervals. At the same time, DJ Gaspar Muniz playfully danced while lording the turntables and flooding the cavernous space with Brazilian, African, Hip-hoppian, and funktastic clouds of color.
Interrupting the DJ’s sonic reverie briefly, NYC Ballet solo pianists Elaine Chelton and Alan Moverman performed Philip Glass’ Les Enfants Terrible: Elizabeth Chooses a Career on facing pianos. They played in a circle of rapt, appreciative attendees who were buffeted by outer layers of the excited cocktail chatter. The rhythmic, almost hypnotic tones helped us ground ourselves while opening an understanding of the Shylights that were plunging and gently bouncing through space just above our heads. The large-scale installation by Artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta of Amsterdam-based art duo called DRIFT permanently altered the sense of reality that had already been dislodged within the theater, and the booze made sure we never did quite connect with the quotidian worries of the week again.
The final act was a burger and french fries at a glaringly bright and bustling New York diner closer to Columbus Circle. Even then, the lemon meringue pie, coconut cream pie, carrot cake, and five-layered chocolate cake beckoned to passersby like the year 1955. From the rotating rack behind the glass, the desserts’ seductive promised sweetness made us drowsy with dreams of monsters and ballerinas.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria: EPISODE 1: TERRITORY 2. Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria: EPISODE 2: MEMORY 3. Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria: EPISODE 3: RESISTANCE
BSA Special Feature: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria
Whitney Museum of American Art. “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria” is organized to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria—a high-end Category 4 storm that hit Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017.
The exhibition explores how artists have responded to the transformative years since that event by bringing together more than fifty artworks made over the last five years by an intergenerational group of more than fifteen artists from Puerto Rico and the diaspora.
The following films, organized into three episodes, explore the art and the artists in the exhibition “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria”.
EPISODE 1: TERRITORY
EPISODE 2: MEMORY.
EPISODE 3: RESISTANCE
“no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria” On view now – April 23, 2023. Whitney Museum of American Art. Click HERE for more details, schedules, tickets, etc.
A very long stream of books replaced the cars here in the Netherlands, thanks to Luzinterruptus, the Madrid-based anonymous collective who have been spreading light and activism for 15 years in cities.
“We used more than 11,000 books,” they tell us of this 10-day trip and installation last fall. The books were donated and in turn, were re-donated to anyone who saw them in the street during the installation.
Pushing the cars aside, the books took the main thoroughfare here, with hundreds of people looking down to peruse the prose, taking a moment to be in the moment. Any remaining books were given to thrift stores.
“We used these books to create a very long stream which was open to the public during the entire day,” say organizers. “When night came, we made ways inside of it so that people could enter the piece and have access to the books to leaf through them and choose those they liked the most to take back home.”
Layer Cake: THE VERSUS PROJECT III / Museum of Graffiti / Miami
The German art duo Layer Cake (aka Patrick Hartl and Christian “C100” Hundertmark) are splashing into Miami next week with a new show at the Museum of Graffiti.
After two successful exhibitions with Urban Nation Museum of Urban Contemporary Art in Berlin, the two former graff writers from Munich are bringing a brand new collection of canvases they have completed with graffiti and street artists from all over the world.
The unique show relies on unspoken communication, with no words exchanged, an aesthetic call and response that pushes each participant to dig deep and rely on their own courage to collaborate. “In this creative, non-verbal dialogue, painterly mosaics of different ideas, styles and working methods were thus created in an associative manner,’ says the press release.
The project is called “Versus” and both Hartl and Hundertmark will attend in Miami Thursday night. New canvases will be on view for the first time. Artists include Layer Cake (Patrick Hartl and Christian Hundertmark aka C100), Akue, Raws, Flying Förtress, Various&Gould, Bond Truluv, ThierryFurger/Buffed Paintings, Arnaud Liard, Rocco & his brothers, Hera & MadC.
BSA will also be there to help launch this exhibition! As ambassadors for Urban Nation, we’re proud to see these collaborations in person and to join museum director Alan Ket and the team to welcome Layer Cake.
In a demonstration of people power and the role of street artists as activists, we look today at a neighborhood called Poblenou in Barcelona, whose residents have been gripped in a struggle with real estate developers. The developers have tried to destroy the buildings, the history, and the culture of the area, the local citizen’s group says, and they intend to dissuade them. According to Poblenou neighbors, the large real estate company has attempted to persuade the local city board to purchase a cluster of buildings, including houses with great historical and emotional value, to replace them with offices and high-end residential buildings.
After about five years, the battle rages, with locals saying that the Poblenou neighborhood stands as a symbol of struggle and resistance for the working-class people who built it and that people are proud of what the area has accomplished over time. It is a familiar refrain, this gentrification brought by investors – often these days aided and abetted by the “beautification” of the neighborhood by artists.
In this case, the artists are lending their skills to help the fight for the neighborhood instead. The number includes artist Tim Marsh who lives here. Today we see the wall he and like-minded creatives created, focusing in many cases on people who live here, in “the Passage” of Poblenou.
We thank photographer Lluis Olive Bulbena for sharing his photos of some of the artists and their murals with BSA Readers.
Preferring to work with cardboard, wood, and paper, Polish sculptor Vojtěch Trocha knew he should go hard here in Brooklyn. His wall-mounted style can be geometric, minimalist, and, perhaps because of the medium, brutal.
The raised patterns and shapes mimic those we may see on the sides of industrial buildings, so the viewer could be forgiven if they fail to comprehend that these are instead sculptures placed among other works of street art. The Prague-based artist in his early 30s may not even draw attention to himself as he wheels his laundry cart filled with concrete slabs past you on the sidewalk.
What may catch your eye instead is his other illustrative reliefs of recognizable figures and forms. One we caught last week is a pure 3D concrete jungle, with a scene from the street recorded and placed back in the street in a cleverly self-referential way. A former student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw Trocha somehow knew how to bring Brooklyn street life to Brooklyn with this one.
Just chilling in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with these new meditations on the richness of everyday life in the city, Vojtěch Trocha, knows how to make his mark more permanently than many on the street.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Happy Lunar New Year 2023! Year of the Rabbit.
新年快乐！
Collabos, crew tributes, nationalist heroes, laborious illustrators, truck pieces, raised reliefs, refined extinguisher tags, absurdist collages, and a range of evolving letter styles, New York is a juggernaut of graffiti and street art every week. It’s an embarrassment of riches from a wide variety of creative talents on our streets, and we’re thankful to catch just a part of it and share it here with you.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: City Kitty, Chris RWK, Smells, Rambo, BK Foxx, Gane, Trace, Ollin, Rold, BK Ackler, HOPS, GULA SOR, Clepto, Hof Crew, 2 Mycg Gane, Zas, BAG HAS, Faile, JG Toonation, Drones, Nails, and Sanije.
Famed graffiti and street art photographers Martha Cooper and Nika Kramer took to Jacó, Costa Rica, during the winter holidays in December, proving that they knew where to go when the weather up North is turning inclement and wintry. Naturally, they located some great walls to shoot as well.
A tourist destination since at least the 1920s, Jacó really took off in the 1970s when the first hotel opened here and, during the remainder of the century, transformed into a destination for vacation-residential development like the renowned Punta Leona just north.
Upscale accommodations, bachelor parties, party boats, and ex-pats in high supply, the town still retains connections to local culture thanks to its overwhelming natural beauty, hiking, surfing, and the mural program called Artify Jacó. Launched in 2016, its co-creator, Steward Invierno, also has owned a gallery/gift shop for the last decade that offers more traditional art-making workshops and sells canvasses by local and international artists.
Gravitating to broad themes relating to nature, love, community, and hope, the annual festival has been transforming the city with art and in some cases, has been likened to the neighborhood of Wynwood in Miami. Having spent a lot of time in that town as well during Art Basel, both Martha and Nika felt quite at home shooting the murals here at Artify Jacó.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Marina Capdevila. Los Pajaritos. Granada, Spain 2. Marina Capdevila. Shine Festival. St. Petersburg, Florida 3. Marina Capdevila. Curitiba, Brazil 4. Marina Capdevila. The Raw Project. Art Basel Miami 2019
BSA Special Feature: Marina Capdevila
Like many of her peers in the street art world, the Spanish muralist now likes to be considered a contemporary painter – it has so much more cachet. She traveled a lot this year in Spain, according to a year-end newsletter we received- Valencia, Granada, and Barcelona for example. She also was in Florida and Manhattan for her projects, which included murals, prints, and commercial gigs with brands. We’ve always appreciated her artistry, sociological approach to her characters and figures, and her sense of humor. May she never lose it.
This week we feature a handful of more recent projects by Marina Capdevila.
Marina Capdevila. Los Pajaritos. Granada, Spain.
Marina Capdevila. Shine Festival. St. Petersburg, Florida
Marina Capdevila. Curitiba, Brazil.
Marina Capdevila. The Raw Project. Art Basel Miami 2019
Street artist Sticker Maul doesn’t need a large canvas to create art that makes an impact on the street. A recent piece we found in the Lower East Side of Manhattan keeps us thinking…
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, is a book by Chris Hedges, where he argues that war seduces society and creates the fiction needed to gain its support.
“In the beginning, war looks and feels like love. But unlike love, it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war’s grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb.”
― Chris Hedges
__________________
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” ― Albert Einstein
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According to The Watson Institute at Brown University, which conducted a project to determine the costs of war post 9/11 called Costs of War Project:
At least 929,000 people have died due to direct war violence, including armed forces on all sides of the conflicts, contractors, civilians, journalists, and humanitarian workers.
Many times more have died indirectly in these wars, due to ripple effects like malnutrition, damaged infrastructure, and environmental degradation.
Over 387,000 civilians have been killed in direct violence by all parties to these conflicts.
The cost of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere totals about $8 trillion. This does not include future interest costs on borrowing for the wars.
The traditional architecture in the Medina Atiga may be what attracts you initially, but it is the 150 street artists who will keep you wandering through the maze of tiny streets. The outdoor curation of Djerba by Mehdi Ben Cheikh, a bi-national with a gallery in Paris, happened over the last decade among the sun-blasted domes, arches, and towers here.
Djerbahood 2. Albin Michel – Galerie Itinerrance
“Djerba was exceptionally well placed for an operation with worldwide impact.” says the visionary Cheihk in the newly released Part 2 of Djerbahood, “On this, the southernmost island of the Mediterranean, the climate is pleasant and temperate for more than half the year.”
In this village of Erriadh on the Tunisian island of Djerba, you are twenty-five kilometers from the airport, adjacent to a long shoreline of fine white sand, and officially walking inside a UNESCO World Heritage site. It also helps that here you’ll find palm trees, olive trees, figs, pomegranate, carob, apple, and apricot trees, crystal clear water, and a fairly mild climate.
Djerbahood 2. Albin Michel – Galerie Itinerrance
“From my very first contact with the village and its inhabitants, I was persuaded that I was in the ideal place to launch an operation of this kind,” he says. “…The Djerbahood adventure had just begun.”
But aside from the hundreds of artworks in this outdoor museum, the new faces coming here also have infused the traditional community, businesses, and small industries. Mr. Cheihk spends some time detailing a tile business that has recreated itself with interesting new patterns and motifs and speaks of the newly engaged folks from the neighborhood who are proud of the artworks and ask for more when the originals have deteriorated.
It is an unusual project bringing street artists and muralists from 30 countries around the world, and the results have been enriching in culture and relationships. The unique atmosphere encourages unconventional artistic experiences, he says, stretching and blending new influences with the traditions of the area. It has become a laboratory of sorts where international meets contemporary.
Add Fuel. Djerbahood 2. Albin Michel – Galerie ItinerranceArdif. Djerbahood 2. Albin Michel – Galerie ItinerranceArdif. Djerbahood 2. Albin Michel – Galerie ItinerranceBToy. Djerbahood 2. Albin Michel – Galerie ItinerranceCryptik. Djerbahood 2. Albin Michel – Galerie ItinerranceDavid De La Mano. Djerbahood 2. Albin Michel – Galerie ItinerranceInvader. Djerbahood 2. Albin Michel – Galerie ItinerranceM-City. Djerbahood 2. Albin Michel – Galerie ItinerranceMohaned L’Gacham. Djerbahood 2. Albin Michel – Galerie ItinerranceTeuthis. Djerbahood 2. Albin Michel – Galerie ItinerranceShepard Fairey. Djerbahood 2. Albin Michel – Galerie Itinerrance
Street art welcomes all manner of materials and methods, typically deployed without permission and without apology. This hand-formed wire piece …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
