Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk at MZM Projects bring us an exemplary profile of the French public art/street artist/fine artist Eltono. A former graffiti writer and semi-professional lounger, Eltono is always experimenting with his own process, hoping sometimes to “facilitate some kind of accident,” say the directors. “He often relies on the roll of a dice, the act that provides the possibility to lose absolute control over the final look of an artwork.”
To continue with MZM Project’s focus on post-graffiti, it is fascinating to imagine this former graffiti writer’s route to get here. Most likely, it was many routes, given his penchant for experimentation.
“Eltono is an amazing narrator, he’s so genuine and true. You just want to listen to it over and over again,” says Borhes.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. The Laughing Heart – by Bradley Bell, Charles Bukowski, Tom Waits, and Grizzly Bear 2. METAL LOVERS via Spray Daily 3. HELLO FROM BERLIN – AGAIN – CTM.IOC CREWS via I Love Graffiti
BSA Special Feature: The Laughing Heart – Bradley Bell, Charles Bukowski, Tom Waits, and Grizzly Bear
It makes us very happy to share this animated short film by Bradley Bell, “The Laughing Heart”, based on a poem by Charles Bukowski, as we publish the first edition of BSA Film Friday for 2023. We believe that your life and the choices you make determine what makes you unique and who you are. Stay honest and authentic with yourself; the mistakes that you will make will be as valuable as the victories you will celebrate.
METAL LOVERS via Spray Daily
From whole cars to whole trains, the Metal Lovers Crew staked their claim in ’21 and ’22. The choice of dramatic music here makes it extra impressive.
HELLO FROM BERLIN – AGAIN – CTM.IOC CREWS via I Love Graffiti
A quick look today at the Street Art for Rights Festival in Rome, Settecamini (IT), where this years theme was centered around the 17 goals of the UN 2030 agenda. It is not the only street art related effort that has chosen these goals as worthwhile to push, with the assumption that organizations like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, neither of them an elected body, have our best interests in mind.
For artist Fabio Petani, himself an Italian and a climate activist with his work, his new mural is naturally in support of Goal 13: Climate Action.
“The graphic composition recalls an hourglass where the passage of time is marked by the inexorable melting of the ice,” he tells us, “which also modifies the climate of desert areas.”
“Fabio Petani is an artist who has always fought for this cause, and in this wall he has decided to talk about it by representing a glacier that is melting and transforming into its opposite: a desert,” organizers say on their Instagram page.
“The disappearance of glaciers and desertification is an ever closer reality if we don’t change something.”
For French street artist Tuco Wallace, making and placing street art is a familial-friendly dialogue, unlike the traditional stereotype of the rebel graffiti writer or a street artist whose driving force is anti-social in nature. With his newest installation, he asked his closest relations to add their voice to the piece, which he calls Dream, Always Dream.
Tuco tells us that the themes touched upon relate to “dreams, astronauts’ helmets, pajamas, dreams, wooden boxes, lights, and clouds.”
Remember when Charles Wallace couldn’t taste the food offered by the man with the red eyes because he had completely shut his mind to him in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time? The food was made of sand but Meg and Calvin had opened their minds to the man’s control and he made their brains think the food was a tasty turkey dinner.
Now in 2023 the Portuguese Illustrator/UX-UI designer/street artist SEBS tells us that soon we will be able to 3-D print our food from insect flour. Anything you want – a juicy burger for example.
Craving a true Valencian paella – chewy, crunchy, caramelized with shrimp, calamari, mussels, and bright green veggies? Dial it up.
How about a steaming bowl of Caldo verde with potatoes, chorizo and kale on a cold day? Enter the code.
SEBS – Lisbon, Portugal. (photo courtesy from the artist)
An elegant filet mignon steak with fork-tender texture and mild flavor or a Thanksgiving turkey dinner with gravy and mashed potatoes? Just open your mind!
“It is a parody of television cooking shows that project false expectations of refined cuisine that is accessible to all the viewers,” SEBS tells us. “The only ingredients needed to create one of several gastronomic dishes are insect flour and water,” he says “Insect flour is there as a pseudo source of protein, or not.”
Bom apetite!
SEBS – Lisbon, Portugal. (photo courtesy from the artist)SEBS – Lisbon, Portugal. (photo courtesy from the artist)
Approximately 5,000 photos, 250,000 words, 5 continents, 365 postings, 2,000 artists, and you. It is our honor to be able to share with BSA readers what we see, hear, think, and feel on the streets, in museums, in studio, in the galleries, and online. Have a look at the year we just finished here at BSA.
Our sincere thanks and very best wishes to the community, friends, the artists, writers, leaders, followers, documentarians, archivists, historians, museums, galleries, peers, family, partners on projects, dreamers, lovers, poets, and BSA Readers.
Happy Holidays! We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA readers, friends, and family for all of your support in 2022. We have selected some of our favorite shots by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and we’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
The eye has been blinking at us throughout art history, Western and Eastern, high and low. Whether intended to ward off evil, illustrate anatomy, or be a window into the soul, the artist has opened our perceptions with the image of an eye for centuries. Here we see the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat on display in New York this year to remind us of our responsibility to see each other, to safeguard individual liberty, and to provide witness to injustice, corruption, and suffering.
Today of course, we wonder what kind of life awaits us as we have allowed technology to trace our faces and eyes and every action, transaction, reaction, and inaction we have – an electronic eye, if you will. We are reminded of this regularly by images that appear on the street.
Let’s vow this year to keep an eye on each other like a community, a family, or a loved one.
Happy Holidays! We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA readers, friends, and family for all of your support in 2022. We have selected some of our favorite shots by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and we’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
Do you believe that the only way to make an impact with art on the street is to paint multi-story murals of cute kittens, mysterious women, or zestful geometrics?
Try this tiny little red chair suspended under the U-Bahn elevated train tracks.
Floating perilously close to the seam of your imagination, this crimson seat has remained suspended in our minds most of this year – returning us to Jaime Rojo’s photo again periodically. Does it have a special meaning? Is it part of a set of other furniture? Is this simply one of the hundreds floating throughout the city that we didn’t spot?
The lesson we decided to learn is that one cannot underestimate the impact that their artwork may have.
Happy Holidays! We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA readers, friends, and family for all of your support in 2022. We have selected some of our favorite shots by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and we’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
She is the kind of artist whom you would also like as a babysitter. Entertaining and playfully absurd, her installation art is imaginative and within reach of a daydream. Here is a polar bear behind an executive’s desk with his legs crossed and hands folded behind his head; here is a huge plane – a skewered readymade if you will; the rotating Piper Seneca rolling forward slowly above people’s heads in the middle of a midtown sidewalk.
This summer Paola Pivi’s You know who I am presented a large-scale cast bronze replica of the Statue of Liberty on the Highline wearing a series of cartoon-like masks that were changed over the course of the installation. She described the characters as “stylized portraits of individuals whose personal experiences of freedom are directly connected to the United States.”
We don’t know who this kid is, but he looks familiar. Perhaps the idea is that the Statue of Liberty could have been anyone – we all want and need the same things.
Happy Holidays! We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA readers, friends, and family for all of your support in 2022. We have selected some of our favorite shots by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and we’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
In the terminology of our pop hagiography, there can be no doubt which portrait appears in the most murals throughout our borough – Christopher George Latore Wallace, better known by his stage names the Notorious B.I.G., Biggie Smalls, or simply Biggie. 25 years after his death, you see Biggie all over Brooklyn, and he truly is a king.
Happy Holidays! We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA readers, friends, and family for all of your support in 2022. We have selected some of our favorite shots by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and we’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
Calla lilies remind us of Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist who used them often in his paintings. We think of the Mexican mural movement, of painters such as José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros – and their connection to the community murals of today. This year we see these calla lilies, and we think of Maria Esther, with all our love.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
