We take this moment to wish you and your family and friends a Happy Thanksgiving today.
Thanksgiving is an American holiday, yet as a practice in life, everyone eventually knows that it is necessary to find gratitude, a way to see and appreciate those people, events, lessons that have led and guided, and cared for us.
It’s a short life, and we are thankful to BSA readers throughout the world for your support over the years.
“Nature, colors, spirituality, self-knowledge, beauty and the power of black women and ancestral matrix cultures,” says Criola about the things that inspire her.
The Brazilian muralist is in downtown Las Vegas to paint a bold diptych called “Black Girl Magic,” for the 3-day Life is Beautiful Festival.
She says she’s happy to pursue aesthetically pleasing projects while being aware that there is always the burden of the past that has formed this Afro Brazilian woman from “a matriarchal family of black women who were forced to be strong and resistant because of structural racism since the colonization of my country.” The portrait that looms above people walking through town here is elegant and proud and full of splendid ideas that pop around her head, like so many cosmically exploding afro-puffs.
Criola says she gravitates toward painting black women “to exalt and represent, in a positive way, an aesthetic that should be positioned in a place of honor and appreciation. It also means being a protagonist in the evolution process of my individual consciousness, and collective consciousness, which involves the use of my power and artistic exploration games to deconstruct systems of oppression that are still very much present in Brazil.”
Criola is invited to Life is Beautiful by the women-led curator group Justkids.
Miami awakens from a Covid-19 stupor this year with a bonified Art Week, featuring associated fairs and events like Wynwood Walls that are activated by the Art Basel behemoth. Some of the high-profile organizers of yesteryear may be on the ropes this time but you are sure to see many of your favorite and familiar art dealers, drug dealers, street artists, graffiti writers, djs, taco sellers, and lucite stiletto slide-ons. Cold weather birds love to fly here for the art fairs and a quick suntan and a Pina Colada just after Thanksgiving every year – it’s equal parts breezily laid back and sketchy and only slightly hedonistic, the gritty-glam blocks of Wynwood know how to keep it real, unless it was silicone to start with.
We’ve heard some solid talents are going to be in the neighborhood, of their own volition or by invitation, as is usually the case. Wynwood Walls is offering 11 artists painting the outdoor space and the Brooklyn art duo Faile mounting a large indoor exhibition of new works that are sure to shock and thrill new fans and those who have watched them from street to museum in and elsewhere in between in their 22 years as visual alchemists. We’re also interviewing them live onstage at Wynwood Walls Wednesday December 1st at 7 pm. We’d love to see you there and talk with you so please stop by and say hello!
With a theme of “Agents of Change” Wynwood Walls is bringing AIKO (Japan), Diogo “Addfuel” Machado (Portugal), Bordalo ii (Portugal), David Flores (United States), Scott Froschauer (United States), Joe Iurato (United States), KAI (United States), Kayla Mahaffey (United States), Mantra (France), Ernesto Maranje (Cuba), Greg Mike (United States), Farid Rueda (Mexico), and for the first time, Wynwood Walls will open one wall to a local artist in an “Open Call” competition.
Wynwood Walls/Goldman Properties Event Schedule to Date
Every time you hear “artificial intelligence” you think of Becky Thompson from you 9th –grade Earth Science class. Admit it.
But this is an entirely different interpretation of artificial intelligence from SpY.
Madrid public artist appears to be on a winning streak this fall, thanks perhaps to so many detailed plans he laid during lockdown with COVID. This night light show called “DATA”, which he did for the International Festival of Light called LUZMADRID this fall maximizes a slim slice of the urban nighttime view, and he intends it to be an immersive audio-visual experience.
We’re excited to hear about Spain’s first light festival – and we have a little friendly advice: Don’t let the advertisers take it over the curatorial decisions because before you know it they’ll be project toothpaste tubes up this alley. No one will listen to us, but we feel better saying it.
DATA, says SpY, “offers a reflection on the rapid and widespread inclusion of algorithms in numerous aspects of our lives. In this audio-visual work, digital abstraction is used to explore and interpret how predictive tools operated through algorithms and artificial intelligence are highly beneficial in terms of aspects such as communication, research, and medicine, but can also lead us to lose some of our freedoms if they are not used ethically.”
Which was precisely what you would have guessed, right?
SpY tells us that he wanted to explore new tools like holographic fabrics to alter the graphics, saying that they somehow appeared “weightless”. He created a 15-meter high screen made from this fabric and installed it in one of the smaller streets, embuing the experience with something magic, and possibly otherworldly for the audience on the street.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Coming up Thursday is Thanksgiving. What are you thankful for? We’re thankful for you and the indomitable spirit of New York.
It looks like many New Yorkers who abandoned us last year are thankful to be moving back into our fabulous and gritty city. You see, we knew you would all come crawling back. Real New Yorkers, on the other hand, stayed right here and persevered alongside one another, showing solidarity in hard times, because we may be a little too loud or cantankerous, but we can handle shit. Also, for those of us who are poor or low income, we didn’t have the option of going anywhere else, frankly – we were just trying to get by day by day as we lost jobs, lost family members, lost our homes, listened to ambulances speeding past our windows every hour. We largely stayed indoors for months – except when we were marching for equal rights and justice for all. So, welcome back to the fair-weather New Yorkers. Sadly, a certain number of people in our real estate industry are taking advantage, jacking up rents – in some cases by 70%.
This week we saw Norwegian artist Dot Dot Dot putting up new work in a number of spots around the city – and we have some shots of his new work. One, in particular, seemed prescient in view of further polarization caused by the verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case on Thursday. He uses the power of words – lifted from the Pledge of Allegiance that school kids across the country say. It’s always great to see how artists evolve personally and develop their practice, skills, and vocabulary.
It was also great to go to celebrate the monograph book release of photographer Janette Beckman (Rebel: From Punk to Dior (Drago)) this week at Fotografiska New York. Celebrated for her excellent timing on the subcultural scenes of punk in the early 1980s and the burgeoning Hip Hop scene of the 1980s and 1990s, her photographs are the first images that spring to mind for many when you say names like LL Cool J, Salt N Pepa, Public Enemy, Andre 3000. Run DMC, Boy George, the Clash, the Sex Pistols. Celebrity-driven photography that also captured rebels before they mainstreamed, her images are sincerely stylish without preening, enormous stars before they exploded – a few shades closer to documentary work than strictly for the style pages. It was great to see her being celebrated by a room full of New York/London homies from music (Def Jam, Tommy Boy), publishing (Paper, The Face) – as well as graffiti specifically, Hip-Hop culture more generally. Fun times!
Our interview with the street today includes Adam Fujita, Billy Barnacles, DotDotDot, and Mok.
We’re pleased today to show you the new article about our exhibition and book “Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures” at Urban Nation – this one from the German Monopol magazine.
“Her voice on the phone is friendly and warm. But Martha Cooper, this is clear, does not want to be bored. Naturally not,” begins journalist Silke Hohmann in her article for Monopol.
“Otherwise she would not have climbed on a motorcycle in 1965 to ride from Thailand to England at the age of 22. Otherwise, she would not have moved to Tokyo as a young woman to explore and photograph a legendary and discrete tattoo scene and one of its masters at work. Otherwise, she would not become the first female photographer at the New York Post in the 1970s where she photographed life in the urban wasteland. Cooper’s photographs of Breakdancers from the 1980s are the first published pictures of a then still unknown dance form, essential for the emergence of Hip Hop culture.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening:
1. Monumental Shadows: Rethinking Colonial Heritage
2. Os Gemeos: Secrets – Ep. 03
Last month we covered this Berlin-based project addressing the staining effect of colonialism and racism on everything we see and the structures that we interact with and are formed by today in so-called Western culture. To see the documentary progression of the project and hear the voices of those who executed it is powerful – and instructive.
“We have to deal with people who feel entitled to exclude other people from participation, from conversation, from civil rights, from society, from history,” say Various and Gould.
Brilliant pieces and campaigns like this that require so much time and energy and resources are carefully planned and considered, and quietly have the opportunity and potential to change hearts and minds – even to alter the course of history.
Read more about the project here: Various & Gould Tackle Racism and Colonialism in Berlin with “Monumental Shadows”
OSGEMEOS: SEGREDOS – Ep. 3
“It’s nice that the story isn’t made from one point of view. There are many accounts, and from various elements,” says artist Soberana Ziza, and you suddenly realize that this is the very dynamic that makes this series by OSGEMEOS about Hip Hop so ardently insistent on grabbing your attention, and communicating the steely core of a culture born from our common streets.
There are many voices that make a scene, and not only the loudest ones, and that is an important quality that gives such resonance to this scene over time, wherever it grows. Here we get a brief look at the inherent misogyny evidenced in society generally, and therefore in the culture of Hip Hop specifically.
Are we surprised? “What place is not hostile to women,?” asks Soberana Ziza.
Wading and wandering through the late autumn sunlight dappling the graffiti and street art near Alexanderplatz in Berlin, we noticed periodic dotting of the wall above the chaotic visual fray at eye level.
The four dots are a clear, crisp distillation of color that every graphic designer since the print age is well familiar with: CMYK. Expressed in 3-D sculpture dots with a variety of techniques and glued to the wall above us, we were reminded foften during our walk that all colors are a combination of these four.
A one-person mission by Berlin graffiti writer and street artist OKSE 126, the CMYK Dots campaign has traveled across many German and European cities and actually has a map for you to track them down. In addition to prodigious dots on the street, he’s started a line of clothing and art products and has shown his work in galleries like Berlin’s Urban Spree and this month at Hamburg’s Urban Shit Gallery “URBAN ART EDITION 2021” group show. The street art project, which OKSE 126 refers to as a modern technique of pointillism, has exceeded his goals, totaling 1,113 dots, 104 cities, and 16 countries.
Street art naturalist, educator, and land artist Gola Hundun is setting new goals for himself and evolving yet again, this time examining out roots. His one month residency in Kufa in Esch (Luxembourg ) resulted in many large iron and wicker roots poking up through the ground, pushing back into the skin of the city.
The installation group, “is part of my research path called ‘Habitat’,” he explains, “a project that started with the abandoned buildings that were being recolonized by the rest of nature. Now I am approaching living cities, with nature taking back some of their space.”
Working 11 hour days with 4 assistants, Hundun created new sculptures to organically weave themselves into the city and into this cultural centre called Kulturfabrik Esch-sur-Alzette (KuFa), located in a former slaughterhouse in the city of Esch-sur-Alzette in Luxembourg. Their own version of a street art festival encourages artists to think outside the established perimeters of publicly created artworks when necessary, utilizing the program and their work as a platform for sustainable development. The energizing Hudun is the perfect foil of such a challenge.
“Inside each root, there is a plant pot in which ivy plants will grow on the wicker structure,” he tells us, “and through time they will symbolize the flag of our ideal.”
The installations are around town, hopefully opening minds and stimulating conversation – each a group of sculptures to be installed in the train station of Esch sur Alzette.
To avoid any misunderstanding of his intended meaning, Gola Hundun has created a long title for the program: “Economic power must redefine its parasitic position about the world. We need to become a choral system of small self-sufficient centers that collaborate as the roots of a tree contribute to shape a trunk. Respect for other forms of life! Superior Love or extinction now!”
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The artist would like to thank @ciglesch, the partner in production and logistic with Kufa and @villeesch, CFL – “and all the magical lovely people that made it possible”.
SpY describes his new public art project “Earth,” as “a luminous red sphere caged inside a structure.” You may wonder what this structure made from building-site scaffolding represents, especially when he says “the sphere is caged within it”. Gaseous fumes? Global Oligarchs? Free-trade agreements? K-Pop fans? We asked him:
BSA: Is the earth the color red because it is on fire, in pain, in a state of emergency, or perhaps in love?
SpY: The red earth in a cage has different meanings.
Having the earth in red is an obvious statement about our behavior as human beings in relation to our home where everything is connected as if were a living creature.
The cage represents the way we are caging ourselves in with fewer possibilities of survival because of human activity.
All of this it’s not about a virus or an economic war, what we want to highlight is the plight of the next generations. Will they have the educational tools, and will they be conscientious enough to grasp the importance of taking small, individual steps to feel a shared responsibility to improve the conditions of the planet?
This sphere in a cube is radiating outward in Plaza de Colón in Madrid is of a grand scale, and rather overpowers the people who walk through, day and night.
At 25 meters high, this glowing red orb is meant to draw our attention to the matters of our home planet, not the other red one you may be familiar with.
According to his press release, “SpY asks us to reflect on the way in which our home makes up a whole of which we form part, and in which everything is connected as if it were a living creature.”
Curated by Anna Dimitrova of Nobuloart.
In this charming and historic little village in northern Italy called Isola de Cevo, a new art installation of placards in the streets must have townspeople a little puzzled.
If there were any people here to see it.
According to most accounts, this town’s population has dwindled to zero; a fate that many Italian towns have been victim of in the last two decades due to changing demographics and economics. If government initiatives are not successful at encouraging outsiders to repopulate, many of these viilages are destined to become ghost towns.
“During the installation we saw only two cars go by on the road,” says Elfo of the new installation he did with The Wa. They call the selection of opinions and bromides on sign posts, “THANK YOU ALL” – an absurdist act that may make you think of the former residents, the lives that once made this a village. “Me and The Wa had this idea that we wanted to search for an abandoned place for our ironic protest,” he says, and it is true that it makes little sense on the face of it.
An Italian and a Berlinian mounting a protest with no protesters in a place with no audience carrying messages with basically no message?
“Nonsense wins!” says Elfo.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! We’re thrilled to see you – you look marvelous!
The blustery cold snap outside today follows the mercurial mashup of winds, rains, thunder, and hail that shook our streets and darkened our skies yesterday – denting some cars, pummelling leaves downward. Ah fall; it feels like you are a couch and someone is taking out your stuffing.
The art of the street is indicative of the surreality of our times – a compression of days that also stretch like pumpkin taffy, wrapping around street lamps and fresh new Christmas light displays in Brooklyn. Everything, it would appear, is a dreamland of crisis; the economy, the environment, the bond crisis, the supply chain crisis, growing inflation, an impending food crisis, our faltering belief in institutions, our increasing distrust of each other, the police, the government, corporations, our currency, the medical profession, the church, and certainly our banks, the stock market, and Wall Street – these all define our times. Thankfully we have each other, friends.
Thank God for street art – the tea leaves of our time. Here’s a jolly mix-up of recent work found on the streets of two of our favorite cities – New York and Berlin.
Our interview with the street today includes Chris Jarosz, David Flores, Early Riser NYC, El Toro 215, Kiez Mie, Niko, ONI, Praxis VGZ, Rabea Senftenberg, RAMBO, Sara Lynne Leo, T.B.O.N.S., and Tianoo the Cat.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY