All posts tagged: ±MaisMenos±

“Urban Revolution” Offers a Graff/Street Art Installation Survey in Lisbon

“Urban Revolution” Offers a Graff/Street Art Installation Survey in Lisbon

Urban Revolution. On view from July 21 / December 03. Lisbon, Portugal.

“Urban[R]Evolution: A Journey from Graffiti to Contemporary Art” is a large exhibition that marks the rise and popularity of urban art and features original installations by 18 renowned Portuguese and international artists. Curated by Pauline Foessel and Pedro Alonzo, this showcase takes place at Cordoaria Nacional in Lisbon, running from June 21st to December 3rd.

Nuno Viegas. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)

The historic and iconic building that once served as the National Rope Factory during the late 18th century, catering to the needs of the Portuguese Navy by producing ropes for naval purposes, is situated near the scenic Tagus River. With its imposing neoclassical and industrial design, the building stands as a testament to the city’s cultural heritage and is now a versatile venue for hosting events after its meticulous restoration. With free-standing booths carefully built not to endanger the historic structure, the flow of the exhibition offers a pod-like adventure to visitors to experience individual artists’ work and visions. Some utilize the spaces fully with installations, while others choose the homey quality of an artist’s studio with work in progress.

The exhibition brings together a lineup of artists whose work was featured in early graffiti images by photographer Martha Cooper, second-wave western street artists who have burnished their names in the commercial urban contemporary art milieu, and a collection of names more locally known – each with profound ties to the graffiti and street art scene. Among them are esteemed names such as Barry McGee, Futura, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Vhils, and Obey SKTR, to name a few. The curators thoughtfully selected these artists to narrate the fascinating development of urban art, tracing its origins from early tags, graffiti, and subway pieces to its current expression as street art and mural art.

Nuno Viegas. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Many of the artists are associated with previous projects of the curators and with one of Lisbon’s anchors of the street art scene, the artist and businessman Vhils. Aside from these connections and the common roots of early graffiti culture, it may be difficult for ticketed visitors to the show to discern the commonalities of the works on display. The connective tissue between the booths will be the many iconic photographs of North American photographer Martha Cooper, whose lens has captured the human experience in urban areas for about 50 years, immortalizing the origins and evolution of graffiti, street art, and urban art – when the scene was viewable directly on the train cars and streets of major cities like New York.

Nuno Viegas. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)

Another nerve center for the show is the installation by conceptual street artist ±MaisMenos± , known for his thought-provoking art pieces and street activations that sublimely challenge social norms and provoke critical thinking. Within this kinetic electronic display, a phalanx of screens emulates a bustling stock trading floor, listing street artists and graffiti artists and their market line charts bumping up and down alongside various commercial, academic, institutional, and cultural influencers and influences that have coalesced to foster their success.

Vhils. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)

In this exhibition’s composition of artistic expressions, each artist has the opportunity to tell their unique story through their installations and accompanying texts, reflecting on their journey from the streets to the contemporary art world. “Urban[R]Evolution” is a testament to the significance of Lisbon as a vital city for urban art, with the show embracing a dynamic mix of international pioneers and established/emerging talents from Portugal.

This major exhibition, presented by Everything is New and Underdogs Gallery, invites visitors on a dreamlike, poetic, and moving journey, oscillating between light and shadow, the humor and rancor of the street, expressing the heart of urban art’s evolution. It is an immersive experience into urban art’s origins and possible future, exemplifying a sample of the boundless creativity and diverse voices that have emerged from the graffiti and street art scene.

Our sincere thanks to exhibition participant and famed photographer Martha Cooper for sharing here her photos exclusively with Brooklyn Street Art, and to Vasco Vilhena, one of the exhibition’s official photographers.

Vhils. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
Futura in action preparing his booth. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Futura. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
Martha Cooper. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
Martha Cooper. Urban Revolution. (photo © Ana Pires & Fransica Capelo)
Revok fine tuning his machine. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Revok in action. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Revok. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
The multi-layered Akacorleone. Urban Revolution. (photo © Ana Pires & Francisca Capelo)
Akacorleone. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Lee Quinones perched atop a ladder at Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Lee Quinones. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
Add Fuel and assistant prepare a show local color and the reworking of traditions. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Add Fuel. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
Swoon continues her European tour with some greatest hits. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Swoon. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Swoon & Shepard Fairey discuss inside-outside theories and strategies. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Swoon shimmering gold. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
Barry McGee set up shop in his booth. Snacks anyone? Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Barry McGee. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
Shepard Fairey presented a dense and graphically satisfying survey inside – in addition to some outside installations. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Shepard Fairey. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
Shepard Fairey. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
As if the aesthetic energy could not be contained within the exhibition space, this outburst of rich colorplay and graphics exploded out the window. Shepard Fairey. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Felipe Pantone. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Felipe Pantone continues to explore inside the digital world, balancing on the trespass with the physical. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
Maya Hayuk. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Maya Hayuk. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Maya Hayuk. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
Lisbon king on the streets Obey SKTR talks about his new burners for the contemporary art fan. See an interview with him last year HERE. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Obey SKTR. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
±MaisMenos± Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)

The artist presented a video installation addressing the “market” for graffiti and street art, the intersection with art and commerce in a brilliant display.

“This took me to what is my thesis subject, where my work is the centerpiece of an eventual (or questionable) dichotomy between street art and the art market, the evolution from illegal, interventive and subversive work into a continuous institutionalization, mercantilization and commoditization, normalized with the (before pursued) but now consecrated and valuated (street) artists.

All of this materialized in an art industry (or market) of artist-companies, studios, galleries, festivals, fairs, museums, curators, collectors, political and media attention, touristic tours, financialization, etc, as so it is with the art world as a whole. Being this specific show, for its size, importance, where it is, its public, a realization of this “evolution”, or this stage of the urban arts. So I thought of an installation as a self-critique and self-awareness of this stage and present context of urban art (one of which myself and my work makes part), how capitalism kidnaps, agglutinates and transforms its (possible) critique and counter-culture, commodifying, massifying and selling it.”

±MaisMenos± Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
±MaisMenos± Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Curator Pauline Foessel stands by curator Pedro Alonzo as he describes the work of Wasted Rita during a tour. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Wasted Rita. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
Andre Saraiva. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Andre Saraiva. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
Andre Saraiva. Urban Revolution. (photo © Vasco Vilhena)
Tamara Alves. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Tamara Alves. Urban Revolution. (photo © Martha Cooper)
Urban Revolution. Lisbon, Portugal. (photo © Ana Pires & Francisca Capelo)

Artists include @maismenos [PT]; @addfuel [EN]; @akacorleone [PT]; @andresaraiva [SE-FR]; Barry McGee [US]; @felipepantone [AR-ES]; @futuradosmil [US]; @_revok_ [US]; @leequinones [PR-US]; @marthacoopergram [US]; @mayahayuk [US]; @nunoviegas.pt [PT]; @obey_sktr [PT]; @obeygiant [US]; @swoonhq [US]; @tamara_aalves [PT]; @vhils [PT]; @wastedrita [PT]

Read more
“Trashplant” with Forest Dump Et Al : The Completed Installations – Part III

“Trashplant” with Forest Dump Et Al : The Completed Installations – Part III

Here at the Trashplant festival in Tenerife, the performance artist and eco-artivist Forest Dump re-added foliage to this new tree that once was a telephone pole that once was a tree. Then he jumped down off the fence.

For those who have been on the fence about their responsibility to the earth and our natural resources, many people in this new generation are making that jump as well.

Forest Dump. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

“We have been building cities for years, replacing nature with concrete and steel,” he says in a recent Instagram post, “We tend to forget but our deepest roots are in Mother Nature and we truly need her to survive.”

Reminds us of all these online orders we’ve been placing lately for all kinds of household items, and the boxes that are piling high under the desk. Cardboard consumption had been reduced by manufacturers in recent years but now the world is consuming about 415 metric tons of paper and cardboard every year, and tons of water is involved in its production as well.

Forest Dump. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

 

Forest Dump. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

It’s something to think about when looking at the new Coruja owl that Montreal based artist Laurence Vallières has fashioned out of cardboard.

Laurence Vallières. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Beginning with a small clay sculpture that she made for reference that is closer in scale to the diminutive size of the actual owl (usually about 8 inches, or 20 centimeters tall) she brought this one to life over the course of a few days while gazing out the studio window at the ocean. The new sculpture joins a long line of animals that the artist has made in the last few years using this same technique and material, at once impressive because of the volume of the work, then by it’s relative fragility.

Laurence Vallières. WIP shot. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Laurence Vallières. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Portuguese artist Miguel Januário pokes at that corner of your consciousness that has stopped making connections through disuse. His new installations for Trashplant are in alignment with his ±MaisMenos± art project that is drawing attention to the connection between the natural internal environment and the natural external environment.

±MAISMENOS± Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

EMPHASEMA is translucently suspended in the air amidst a leafy wooded area that is always cleaning the air and aiding respiration. Similarly his intervention of the word CIRRHOSIS is afloat in the nearby surf where water brings to mind the role of your clean liver in all metabolic processes. As usual, the artist creates gently jarring messaged that may begin further inquisition and examination into our attitudes and behaviors.

±MAISMENOS± Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Trashplant as a project curated by Bordalo II is a potent reminder of the multiple functions that art can play in our daily intercourse and Street Arts’/Public Arts’ potential to reach larger cross sections of people who normally do not frequent galleries or museums. With the obvious, the subtle, and the conceptual at play, this festival takes a meaningful approach to the power of communication to a range of audiences.

Forest Dump has the last word here.

“No matter who you are, where you live, or what kind of life you lead, you remain linked to the natural world! Respect it before is too late!”


Our sincere thanks to photographer Luz Sosa for sharing these photos with BSA readers over the past three days of our coverage of Trashplant.


To learn more about Trashplant please go here: http://trashplantfestival.org/

±MAISMENOS± Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

±MAISMENOS± Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

±MAISMENOS± Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Forest Dump. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Forest Dump. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Bordalo II. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Catarina Glam. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Icy & Sot. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Icy & Sot. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Icy & Sot. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Diedel Klöver. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Diedel Klöver. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Diedel Klöver. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Diedel Klöver. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

 

 

Read more
“Trashplant” in Tenerife Corralls Trash and Welds New Life : Process – Part II

“Trashplant” in Tenerife Corralls Trash and Welds New Life : Process – Part II

It’s our second day of sharing scenes from Trashplant and here we see Icy and Sot are bobbing and diving inside a colorful unnatural environment of plastic trash that is being corralled into a fenced cube, and musician and welder Diedel Klöver is crafting fish fins from corrugated metal fence posts.

Icy & Sot. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

The German lawn sculptor from Varel on the North Sea is adding a blow-torched fish to his recent animal parade of a lion, a rhino, stingrays, and penguins. The Tenerife truckload of metal he selected at the scrapyard speed is being speed-welded in just four days, thanks to some help from his buddy Alex.

Icy & Sot. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Curator Bordalo II watches artist Catarina Glam from a safe distance as she wields a power saw to form the wood pieces of a creature that is coming together when he’s not out in the yard with João piecing together what looks like it may be a penguin from the recycled trash they have collected.

The fact that much of the work here at Trashplant in Tenerife is made from recycled refuse is central to the exhibition and one that is easier to understand when we have the opportunity to see how it actually comes together.

Icy & Sot. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Compound this with the realization that much of the human-made materials that we are using daily actually poison the water and air for these animals and of course our families… and you begin to think that the whole world is really just once enormous trash plant.

To learn more about Trashplant please go here: http://trashplantfestival.org/

Icy & Sot. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Diedel Klöver. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Diedel Klöver. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Catarina Glam. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Catarina Glam. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Catarina Glam. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Laurence Vallières. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Laurence Vallières. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

±MAISMENOS± Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

±MAISMENOS± Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Bordalo II. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Bordalo II. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Bordalo II. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

 

 

Read more
Artists + Trash as Activism at “Trashplant” in Tenerife: Process – Part I

Artists + Trash as Activism at “Trashplant” in Tenerife: Process – Part I

Art Activism (Artivism) in progress here this past weekend at the Trashplant Festival in San Cristobal de La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands. A dozen artists have formulated installations directly in response to environmental issues at the invitation of the one of Street Art’s main trashmen himself, the street sculptor Bordalo II.

Today we have first phase installation shots of the artists preparing their new pieces thanks to photographer Luz Sosa, who shares these images with BSA readers. Included are ±MaisMenos±, Bordalo II, Catarina Glam,  Diedel Klöver, Forest Dump, Icy & Sot, and Laurence Vallieres.

Icy & Sot. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

The garbage that we generate can also transform into art and the Trashplant Festival was born – an unparalleled event where a large group of the best plastic and urban artists from all over the world come together to carry out one of the greatest tasks of environmental awareness through art.

Icy & Sot. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Bordallo II tells us that the point is to draw attention to how we can reuse, recreate, and reflect on how we generate waste. It’s an obsession for many in this troupe of like minded artists, and guests observe and investigate their new figurative and conceptual pieces here while attending music concerts as well, hopefully “inoculating” them with awareness of the need for all us us to transform society to preserve the natural environment.

To learn more about Trashplant please go here: http://trashplantfestival.org/

Icy & Sot. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Icy & Sot. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Icy & Sot. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Forest Dump. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Forest Dump. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

 

Forest Dump. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Laurence Vallières. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Laurence Vallières. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Laurence Vallières. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Laurence Vallières. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Diedel Klöver. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Diedel Klöver. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Diedel Klöver. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Catarina Glam. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Catarina Glam. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

±MAISMENOS± Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

±MAISMENOS± Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

±MAISMENOS± Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Bordalo II. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Bordalo II. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Bordalo II. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

Bordalo II. Trashplant Festival. Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. June 2018. (photo © Luz Sosa)

 

Read more
The Many Faces of Lisbon on the Street

The Many Faces of Lisbon on the Street

A Scholarly Eye On Artistic Interventions in Public Space


The excitement that pours from city walls in Lisbon is palpable, an animated mix of graffiti, Street Art, murals, sculpture, and the traditional artisan tiles. Like the famous Bacalhau dish of Portuguese cuisine, it all can be mixed together almost a thousand different ways and each surprising recombination can be loved for its unique character.

To appreciate the varied elements playing into the Street Art scene here, you won’t find greater insight than by touring with Pedro Soares-Neves, and he’ll make sure you won’t leave without understanding the forty years that have contributed to the scene up to this point.

Park. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Most visitors are overtaken by the sweeping views, the heart of the old city in the valley, the winding Bairro Alto streets full of colorful illegal artworks, the ancient bricks, traditional azulejos tiled buildings, tiny streets, sloping topography, endless staircases and retro-style cable cars that are climbing impossible inclines – each slaughtered with colorful graffiti tags.

Unidentified artist. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Now an international destination for many Street Artists, the growing number of murals here is remarkable, if not outstanding. Soares-Neves can look at the huge variety of expressions on the street and explain why the art is here now and how it fits into a greater context of a historical city that has gradually embraced nearly all expressions of modern art-in-the-streets.

A self-described fan of urban history Pedro is one of the few scholars in the global urban art scene who calls graffiti writers “authors”, quite possibly because he was one himself in his early teens here during the city’s first stage of graffiti proliferation in the early 1990s.

“I am kind of an architectural urban history fanatic,” he says proudly but in a confessional tone. Completing his doctorate in Design and Urbanism this year he is also co-organizer of the Lisbon Street Art & Urban Creativity Conference and the Street Art & Urban Creativity Scientific Journal.


Lister. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

A lifelong Lisboan born at the same time the revolution from the dictatorship was born here in the mid 1970s, Soares-Neves tells the story of urban art as a progression of social movement, individual engagement, immigration, urban planning, importation of culture, commercial incursion and coalescing of local artists as a quasi-professional network.

As you ride in his 4-door family SUV-hybrid with kids toys and storybooks scattered across the back seat, you gaze along the historic spice trade waterfront and the Jerónimos monastery and museum row, swerving through the central “filet mignon” of the ornamented city to the outskirts, which he calls “the back-office”.

He gestures at the trains and wooded walls and areas where he once painted graffiti , to some of the current crop of throwups along the highway and to wall murals that have been commissioned by municipal, professional, and commercial interests. As the trip unfolds the story is not quite linear of course, and city history intertwines with personal history.

Telmo & Miel. Bairro Padre Cruz. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

As is its personality, art-in-the-streets shape-shifts and redefines itself, creating new alliances, reconfiguring the balance. For example, currently Lisbon city leaders are working with former vandals and art school professionals to create programs of large colorful murals on soaring public housing towers.

The adjacent neighborhood of older single family houses laid out like suburbs features Soare-Neves’ own curated walls done by more conceptual artists who play with ideas about public space as well as aesthetics. The Portuguese +MaisMenos– directly intervenes with stenciled words here, creating quizzical conundrums for passersby and the French experimenter Matthew Tremblin who brings an online poll results via bar charts posing an existential question about Street Art.

Matthew Tremblin. Bairro Padre Cruz. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

A truly unique insight into the rather omnibus experience of this urban academic, we actually get to look at two eras of Pedro’s own personal history as an artist are here as well, only blocks away from one another.

This IS a tour!

Pedro Soares-Neves. Bairro Padre Cruz. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

One Soares painting is on a low wall encircling a park. Part of a graffiti wall of fame (which he helped organize), it shows his 1990s affinity for character illustration and experimentation with letter styles. His more recent installation is a mixed media paint/land art derivation that converts disused construction materials and a habit-formed footpath leading up a grassy knoll to a numerical wall.

Again, the spirit of experimentation here is what is core to his art practice. Perhaps this is why his personal philosophies toward public space lean toward the organically Situationist act of creation, a practice that can be extended to all of the public and to the moment of inspiration.

Following are many images captured in Lisbon during our tour interspersed with this history of the last few decades courtesy Soares-Neves and our own research.

Corleone. Underdogs Gallery/Public Arts Program . Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

1980s-90s and Lisbon’s Dawn of Graffiti


Speaking with Pedro about the early graffiti of the 90s you capture a perspective on two important cultural factors that steered its direction.

The first is that through the lense of the liberators of the Carnation Revolution in the 1970s the style of aerosol bubble tags and characters recalled the earlier people-powered community murals and represented “freedom” in their minds, whereas cities elsewhere in Europe would have thought this painting indicated vandalism or a breakdown of the social fabric.

Suker. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Secondly, the fascination with graffiti was spurred by the children of African immigrants from former Portuguese territories of Angola, Mozambique and Capo Verde who moved to Lisbon after wars with them ended during the revolution. Now second generation teen immigrants from two cultures, they were looking for self-identity, according to Soares-Neves.

“They found resonance in this Afro-American and Latin American thing that was going on during the 80s so they connected with it and used it for language.”

Aire. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Quite possibly they were reacting to class and race prejudice and they identified with brothers and sisters in the music videos of American commercial hip hop culture. Seeing the exciting growth and the implied power of graffiti writers, musicians, and bboy movies like “Wild Style” in the 1980s, the expression of graffiti was alluring – a welcome visual art and anti-establishment practice that created identity, community, and newfound respect among a select peer group of cool kids.

“Actually it started with bboying culture in the mid 80s and then in the early 90s it started with a visual language of it,” he says, explaining the progression.

Unidentified Artist…speaking the truth. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

A Personal Introduction to Graff


His own teenage aestheticism extended to characters, and a fascination for punk or “rough” magazines and the illustration stylings of artists in the classic Chiclete com Banana magazines. “I had this relationship with drawing and cartoons and this kind of stuff – this popular culture sort of thing,” he says.

His talents as an artist were well prized among his peers until he was nearly outshone by a graffiti writer from Capo Verde, a classmate who threatened Pedro’s status as the school artist; a funny story he explains this way:

“At that time in my high school I was ‘The’ guy who was doing the best cartoons and all this kind of stuff,” he says, reflecting on his celebrity. “Suddenly he did a big piece on the wall! So I was the king of the ‘drawing thing’ and this motherf***er came here and did a big and colorful piece!”

Edis1. Bairro Padre Cruz. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA: ..and everyone knew about it of course.
Pedro: Yeah of course it was much more visible than what I did. So I started to interact with the guy.

Pedro’s personal history with graffiti began there and never stopped. After starting on walls and greatly enlarging his own illustrations and experimenting with letter styles, he and his peers grew to about 10 or 12 writers and the graffiti scene appeared to blow up from there.

A community of writers from many backgrounds spread across the city practicing one-upsmanship in technical skill and logistical daring, operating singularly, in small groups, or the occasional Wall of Fame project. Because there wasn’t a strict evolutionary lineage of style, many young artists developed their own in the laboratory of the street, not necessarily related to the hip hop culture but adapting from their own culture.

Cola. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

2000s and the Turn Toward Street Art


By the late 90s and early 00s he feels that the scene suffered a sort of malaise when purely commercial murals began to take parts of the wall inventory and change the character of some areas. It was a development he deeply disliked for its perversion of a freer art practice yet he appreciated it for the employment it provided to professional artists. The city also borrowed the vernacular of graffiti for public service announcements painted as murals.

The mid 2000s began to reflect the influences of artists like Banksy and a new sort of community comprised of artists from old school graffiti writers and new generation Street Artist began to coalesce in Lisbon he says. Additionally the later 2000s began an increasing flow of international Street Artists and graffiti writers who began avoiding Barcelona after that city started cracking down on their famed urban art scene.

RAM. Bairro Padre Cruz. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“They (artists) started to add a few other languages to try to surpass this previous period and also began dialoguing with the new things that were happening in Street Art,” he says of the witty skewering of pop culture iconography, introduction of fine art illustration styles and the use of newer art-making methods.

“It was starting to really have lots of people doing stencils and paste ups and this kind of stuff all around. It started to influence the younger generation and that put some pressure on the older generations, who started to do that themselves.”

 

Visual Street Performance and the Crono Project


A collective guild comprised of artists from both graffiti and Street Art like HBSR81, Hium, Klit, Mar, Ram, Time and Vhils joined together in the mid 2000s and called themselves Visual Street Performance (VSP). A professional/DIY effort, they began to organize large events and an annual exhibition through 2010 that expanded the vernacular to hybrids of fine art and elements of pop, character illustration, photo realism, surrealist fantasy, found object art, abstract expressionist, more traditional graffiti and graphic design.

Pang. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Pedro had been studying abroad in the Czech Republic and Rome for a few years, “And when I came back I noticed a different panorama. There were lots of younger kids with totally different skills and with that approach of making money out of it,” he says with a mixture of admiration and possibly concern at the professionalism entering the equation.

“They managed to invent themselves,” he says, “and also within the exhibitions the kids like Vhils were born from these,” he says as he talks about the commercial aspects of the cultural scene with connections to an aerosol art brand, print makers, and related clothing projects.

Kam Laurene. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

A notable commercial and marketing milestone that married Street Art and urban culture with the image of Lisbon itself took place in 2010-11 when the year long Crono project, curated by Soares-Neves, Angelo Milano (of Fame Festival), and local Street Artist Vhils (Alexandre Farto), brought rising stars of the moment to a high profile block-long series of ornate Art Nouveau and shuttered buildings along a heavily traveled strip in the city, Avenida Fontes Pereira de Melo.

Os Gemeos . Blu . Sam3 . Erica Il Cane. Crono Project. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The Internet’s volleying of fresh images of pieces by the Italian anti-corporate BLU, the hallucinatory dream illustration style of Brazilian graffiti twins Os Gemeos, and the lyrical storytelling of Spanish 2-D SAM3 alerted the Street Art worlds’ knowledge of Lisbon, and the project quickly became a destination for travellers.

Os Gemeos . Blu. Crono Project. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Soares-Neves sometimes speaks about the commercial appropriation of the street art vernacular in his academic work and in some ways it appears that the unexpected success of the Crono Project unsettled him as well. The curators had worked with the city to finance the project with an intention of giving opportunities to artists and fostering new aspects of the public art conversation, but according to Soares-Neves the high profile of the project undermined their own anti-establishment sentiments when city leaders recognized that a comparatively modest investment had ballooned into a successful city “branding” campaign.

Os Gemeos. Crono Project. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Possibly this is a cautionary tale that underscores the incremental dangers present when subculture crosses the rubicon into simply “culture”. There is always the fear that the original philosophies encoded in a subculture will be irreparably transformed, candy-coated, cheapened, or worse, excised.

Recently closed London-based Street Art print pioneers “Pictures On Walls” lamented in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way on their website in January when describing the evolution of their 15 year old business this way, “…inevitably disaster struck – and many of our artists became successful. Street Art was welcomed into mainstream culture with a benign shrug and the art we produced became another tradeable commodity.”

Borondo. Bairro Padre Cruz. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The City We See Today


The city seems like it is absorbing all of these changes well, and the variety of faces and styles of public artistic intervention that you see scattered throughout it feel vibrant and necessary. The city continues its 25 year heritage of organic graffiti and entertains international writers and has the occasional Walls of Fame. Elements of unsanctioned Street Art exists as well and neighborhoods are accented by the new generation of muralists with mad skillz.

Then there are those who are a little harder to categorize, like the subtle reworkings of traditional Portugues tiles with modern icons and patterns by Add Fuel and the prized sculptural pieces across the city by the trash-recycling animal naturalist Bordalo II, who just had a massive solo exhibition in November.

Bordalo II. In conjunction with his solo exhibition  ATTERO Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The contemporary urban artist and international Street Art star Vhils is a company at this point: operating a studio in a few cities, here running a gallery, a studio laboratory program for young artists, a street art tour business, and partnering with city art programming initiatives as well as brands. Somehow he still finds time to create artworks in the streets, including a recent portrait collaboration with Shepard Fairey in Lisbon and LA.

Shepard Fairey . VHILS. Underdogs Gallery/Public Arts Program . Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

At the end of our tour marathon Pedro Soares-Neves takes us to the Centro de Informação Urbana de Lisboa (Lisbon Urban Information Center) where we climb the stairs through the airy modernist foyer full of scholarly readers to discover a small scale maquette of the entire city that we have just been traversing.

Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Fanned out for you before the shiny blue Tagus River, perhaps 15 meters at its full expanse, the topographic features of the city are much less daunting when viewed from this perspective. As Pedro walks around the perimeter of the mini-city and points to neighborhoods, regions, the forest, the airport, the old city and the newly gentrifying areas of Lisboa he recounted stories of expansion, retrenchment, privatization, skullduggery and deliverance.

Thanks to him we appreciate graffiti/ Street Art/ urban art truly in its context of this city, its history, its people and the built environment like never before.

Lisbon. Pedro makes a point. December 2017. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

Bordalo II. In conjunction with his solo exhibition  ATTERO Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Borondo. Bairro Padre Cruz. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Vhils. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Vhils. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Shepard Fairey. Underdogs Gallery/Public Arts Program . Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Shepard Fairey . VHILS. Detail. Underdogs Gallery/Public Arts Program . Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Lister. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Crayon. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Andre Nada. Bairro Padre Cruz. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

 

Unidentified Artist. Amoreiras Wall Of Fame. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Slap. Amoreiras Wall Of Fame. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

RariOne. Amoreiras Wall Of Fame. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

±MAISMENOS± Bairro Padre Cruz. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Corleone. Bairro Padre Cruz. Underdogs Gallery/Public Arts Program . Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Utopia. Galeria De Arte Urbana. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Tags. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Blu. Lisbon. Crono Project. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Blu . Sam3 . Erica Il Cane. Crono Project. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Erica Il Cane . Lucy McLauchlan . M-Chat. Crono Project. Lisbon. December 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)


With gratitude to Pedro Soares Neves and to Raul Carvalho, General Manager of Underdogs Gallery for taking the time to talk to us, for sharing their knowledge and insights with us and for showing us around Lisbon.

BSA in Lisbon comes to you courtesy BSA in Partnership with Urban Nation (UN).

This is the first of two articles with BSA in Lisbon in collaboration with UN Berlin, it was originally published on the Urban Nation website, and the project is funded in part with the support of Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art (UN) in Berlin.

 

 

 

Read more
BSA Film Friday: 09.29.17 NUART 2017 Special

BSA Film Friday: 09.29.17 NUART 2017 Special

bsa-film-friday-JAN-2015

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

Now screening :
1. Nuart 2017 – Re-Cap Fifth Wall TV
2. Carrie Richardt. Nuart 2017. Fifth Wall TV
3. ±MAISMENOS± Nuart 2017. Fifth Wall TV
4. Bahia Shehab. Nuart 2017. Fifth Wall TV

bsa-film-friday-special-feature

BSA Special Feature: 4 Films from Nuart 2017

A glimpse inside the urban art/Street Art/graffiti/mural festival from earlier this month, which included a powerful collection of artists, interventionists, existentialists, activists, academics, and poets, this collection of NUART 2017 videos can only point to the individual aspects of the events. We start off with Doug Gillen’s brief overview and first impressions and feature three individual portraits of artists who took part in this years Street alt-fest.

Nuart 2017 – Re-Cap Fifth Wall TV

 

Carrie Richardt. Nuart 2017. Fifth Wall TV

“For me art is just the way that I express myself. I think that we need to use all means possible,” says artist, activist and global citizen Carrie Richardt. In her opinion, we should all be activists in service of one kind or another, and art in the streets is one of a myriad ways that people can effect positive change. In her text messages via tile around town, she offers pithy and profound bonmots like “Civil disobedience is not the problem. Civil obedience is the problem.”

 

±MAISMENOS± Nuart 2017. Fifth Wall TV

Portuguese artist Miguel Januário goes by ±MAISMENOS±, a sort of avatar of interventionism that presents a critical eye on models of our political, social, economic orders. By willfully rearranging signposts of accepted norms in the public space, his installations echo in their disunifying qualities and often comedic effects.

 

Bahia Shehab. Nuart 2017. Fifth Wall TV

“Art is wonderful. It inspires. But it does not push for action sometimes,” says Egyptian professor and Street Artist Bahia Shehab, whose international acclaim for speaking up against tyranny links the act of art with the struggle throughout the world for liberation.

 

Read more
Martyn Reed Calls Us to “Rise Up” for Nuart Festival 2017

Martyn Reed Calls Us to “Rise Up” for Nuart Festival 2017

The news out of Nuart 2017 is splendiforous and we are feeling celebratorious. These irregularly formed adjectives are in good company with the mismatched yet harmoniously woven characters who together have again selected and summoned artists, academics, kooks and cultural workers to Stavanger for a September synergy of Street Art, public art, and myriad interventionist ideas. It is a highly particular hybrid germinated, conjured, emancipated perhaps, by the free-form and analytical mind of its Founder and Director Martyn Reed. While sowing Nuart seeds spectacularly on the shores of Aberdeen earlier this spring, it is here in Stavanger where the new ideas germinate, are nurtured and given latitude. It is also where the tortoises of conventional thinking are happily rolled onto their backs, little webbed feet waving. We’re pleased today on BSA to publish Martyn’s new manifesto in preparation for Nuart’s festival this autumn in Norway so one might better appreciate the ruminations behind and development of this year’s theme.


RISE UP!

Nuart produces both temporary and long-term public artworks as well as facilitates dialogue and action between a global network of artists, academics, journalists and policy makers surrounding street art practice. Our core goal is to help redefine how we experience both contemporary and public art practice: to bring art out of museums, galleries and public institutions onto the city streets and to use emerging technologies, to activate a sense of public agency in the shaping of our cities.

Outside of Nuart Festival, our growing portfolio of projects represents an on-going art and education program that seeks to improve the conditions for, and skills to produce, new forms of public art both in Stavanger and further afield. For us, public spaces outside conventional arts venues offer one of the richest, most diverse and rewarding contexts in which this can happen.

Vermibus (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Our work is guided by our belief in the capacity for the arts to positively change, enhance and inform the way we think about and interact with each other and the City.

The Real Power of Street Art

Nuart festival presents an annual paradigm of hybridity in global sanctioned and unsanctioned street art practice. Through a series of large and human scale public artworks, murals, performances, art tours, workshops, academic debates, education programs, film screenings and urban interventions, supported by a month long exhibition of installations, Nuart explores the convergence points between art, public space and the emergent technologies that are giving voice and agency to a new and more creative civilian identity, an identity that exists somewhere between citizen, artist and activist.

The real power of “street art” is being played out daily on walls, buildings, ad shelters and city squares the world over, and it’s now obvious that state institutions can neither contain nor adequately represent the fluidity of this transgressive new movement. As the rest of the world begins to accept the multiplicity of new public art genres, it is becoming more apparent, that street art resists both classification and containment. The question is, not how can this inherently public art movement be modified or replicated to fit within the confines of a civic institutional or gallery model, but how can the current model for contemporary art museums, galleries and formulaic public art programs, be re-examined to conform with the energy of this revolutionary new movement in visual art practice.

John Fekner in Stavanger (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In the 1990’s, Situationist concepts developed by philosopher Guy Debord, surrounding the nature of “The City”, “Play” and the “Spectacle”, alongside sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s theories exploring the rights to shape our own public and mental space, came together to form an emergent adbusting “artivism”, which now forms the foundation of street art practice. Radical cultural geographer David Harvey has stated, “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources, it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city”.

It is here, at the intersection between philosophy, geography, architecture, sociology, politics and urbanism, that Nuart situates itself, it exists as a critique of the colonization of everyday life by commodity and consumerism, whilst recognizing that one of the only radical responses left, is to jettison the hegemonic, discursive and gated institutional response to capitalism, and engage it directly where it breeds and infects the most, in our urban centers.

Know Hope (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The challenge for a new and relevant public art isn’t to attempt to negate capitalisms neoliberal market logics with an ever more dominant liberal discourse, both are ultimately mired in a conflict that on the surface simply serves to feed the polarization and spectacle that we’re attempting to transcend. What we need is the active participation of citizens in the creation of their own holistically imagined environments, both physical and mental, a direct and collective response to space that leads to the shaping of place. A place in which the disengaged and passive citizens desired and ever more manipulated by market forces, are inspired to re-make themselves. Nuart proposes that the production of art in public spaces outside conventional arts venues offers the community, not only the most practical, but also the richest, most relevant and rewarding contexts in which this can happen.

It is in this “remaking” of self, this deep desire to engage with the world, to develop civic agency and purpose, that transcends identity, gender and class, and enables those locked out of the arts by a post-Adorno obscurant lexicon (eh?), that street art delivers. It offers an opportunity to reconnect, not only with art, but also with each other. Hundreds of people covering a vast swathe of demographics, from toddlers and single moms to refugees and property barons, on a street art tour conversing with each other, are testament to this.

 

±maismenos± (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

We believe that when you want to challenge the powerful, you must change the story, it’s this DIY narrative embedded within street art practice, that forms the bonding agent for stronger social cohesion between citizens from a multiplicity of cultures, as our lead artist for 2017, Bahia Shehab will attest. It is this narrative, that is acting as the catalytic agent towards street art becoming a vehicle capable of generating changes in politics as well as urban consciousness.

The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from what kind of person we want to be. The transformation of urban space creates changes in urban life, the transformation of one, being bound to the transformation of the other. What social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies, art and aesthetic values we desire, are closely linked to the spaces we inhabit. The “banalization” of current city space, combined with the numbing effect of digital devices that guide us from A to B, have rendered us passive. Consumer cows sucking at the teat of capital trapped in a dichotomy between left and right, instead of right and wrong. And for the most, the hegemonic islands of sanitised cultural dissent we call Art Institutions, are either unable or uninterested, in engaging with the general public in any meaningful way.

 

Ricky Lee Gordon (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In the early 2000’s, the evocative power of certain already existing and often crumbling industrial interzones, including that of Tou Scene, our main exhibition space, one that we were instrumental in establishing, gave rise to a new form of engagement with art in urban spaces that is only now being fully recognized and exploited. Street Art is at times of course co-opted and complicit with the “creative destruction” that the gentrification process engenders, but Capitalism’s continuous attempt to “instrumentalize” everything, including our relationship to art should be vigorously resisted. It is these “Stalker-esque” zones of poetic resistance, that initially gave shelter to one of the first truly democratic , non-hierarchical and anti-capitalist art forms, and unlike most cultural institutions, it is still, for the most, unafraid to voice this opinion, important in a time when even our art institutions are beginning to resemble houses of frenzied consumption. Street art exists to contest rather than bolster the prevailing status quo. As such, it is picking up as many enemies as friends within the field of public art.

By attempting to transform the city, street art attempts to transform life, and though by no means is all street art overtly political, it does, in it’s unsanctioned form at least, challenge norms and conventions regulating what is acceptable use of public space. In particular, it opposes commercial advertising’s dominion over urban surfaces, an area that Nuart are active in “taking over” throughout the year and in particular during the festival period. Our curating initiatives not only aim to encourage a re-evaluation of how we relate to our urban surroundings, but to also question our habitual modes of thinking and acting in those spaces. Street art is not just art using the streets as an artistic resource, but also an art that is questioning our habitual use of public space. Street art doesn’t simply take art out of the context of the museum, it does so whilst hacking spaces for art within our daily lives that encourage agency and direct participation from the public, “Everyone an artist” as Joseph Beuys would have it, and if it is accussed of being produced without academic rigour, we are reminded that he also asked, “Do we want a revolution without laughter?”.

Nuart’s programs are designed specifically to explore and silently challenge the mechanisms of power and politics in public space. Increasingly, we see the rights to the city falling into the hands of private and special interest groups, and yet, we have no real coherent opposition to the worst of it. The 20th Century was replete with radical Utopic manifestos calling for change, from Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto of 1909 to Murakami’s “Superflat” of 2000. Nuart’s annual academic symposium, Nuart Plus, acts as a platform for a resurgency in utopic thinking around both city development and public art practice, and whilst recognizing that street art is often co-opted and discredited by capital, it also recognises that even the most amateur work, is indispensable in stimulating debate and change in a Modern society that has developed bureaucracies resistant to seeing art, once more, as part of our everyday life.

As the Situationst graffiti scrawled on Parisian walls in 1968 stated, Beauty is in the streets, so Rise Up! and support those dedicated to unleashing one of the most powerful communicative practices known to mankind, there’s work for art to be done in the world amongst the living.

Martyn Reed, July 2017



Artists scheduled to participate in Nuart Festival 2017:
Ampparito (ES), Bahia Shehab (EG), Carrie Reichardt (UK), flyingleaps presents Derek Mawudoku (UK), Ian Strange (AU), John Fekner (US), Know Hope (IL), ±maismenos± (PT), Igor Ponosov (RU), Ricky Lee Gordon (ZA), Slava Ptrk (RU) and Vermibus (DE).

 

Read more
NUART 2014 Roundup : Activism, Muralism, Graffiti and Aesthetics

NUART 2014 Roundup : Activism, Muralism, Graffiti and Aesthetics

The Norwegian mural festival named Nuart took place last week with a marked tilt toward the conceptual and the interventionist, a direct debate about the relevance of activism amidst a rising tide of sanctioned murals, and Tilt leading us down a path toward traditional graffiti.

Ironically graffiti seemed a rather tame topic for once.

brooklyn-street-art-tilt-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-9-web

TILT. “Panic Room” Installation at TOU Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

“Urban interventionism is about not only making social commentary through artistic expression, but actually intervening in a public and social space in a poetic, unexpected or provocative way,” said architect and organizer Nicola Markhus when speaking to the local Stavangernews. Markhus may have been thinking about the Portuguese artist ±Maismenos±, who constructed a miniature oil tanker platform from found objects and installed it temporarily atop a sculpture honoring canning workers in Lervig Courtyard, by way of contrasting the past with the present.

brooklyn-street-art-mais-menos-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-web

±MaisMenos± NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

Or maybe she was thinking about the Madrid-based SpY, who painted a massive red-lettered “ERROR” on two sides of a brutal block long building in decay down by the waterside, an ironic judgment on the eyesores of unfortunate urban decay. Among the contextual social commentary as well were the oil-dripping sentiments of geologist/artist Andreco, who regaled the façade of a classic Norwegian building with his geometric interpretation of rocks found poking up from the soil, and the three dimensional mural of homeless people by Brooklyn-based Iranian brothers Icy & Sot only three blocks from an outdoor encampment of homeless travelers whom some locals call gypsies.

brooklyn-street-art-spy-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web

SpY. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

Such is one of the traditions of Street Art: social and political commentary that some call activism because of its advocacy, or at least its stubborn acknowledgement of imperfections in the human condition. This year’s Nuart fosters the spirit and intellectual pursuit associated with academic examination and in doing so again separates itself from the growing number of Street Art festivals who implicitly or explicitly censor the choices of the invited due to commercial or political pressures. Even during the painting this year there were conversations among artists about a high profile festival underway elsewhere that had just dis-invited certain Street Artists because of their “political” work in the past.

brooklyn-street-art-john-fekner-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web

John Fekner. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

As if to drive the point home, New York street and multimedia artist John Fekner, who created hundreds of environmental, social, political and conceptual works consisting of stenciled words in NYC beginning in the 1970s that highlighted failed urban planning and public policy, was invited to reprise his classic text based “False Promises” stencil here. The choice of Fekner was perhaps atypical and one that could be overlooked if Nuart founder Martyn Reed didn’t decide to champion the artists work in his mini-retrospective indoors.

And need we mention that his indoor installation space for Saturday’s gallery opening was shared by Fra.Biancoshock’s instantly controversial merging of the nazi flag with the Facebook logo? Moments after we posted an early image of the installation in progress, cheers and condemnation populated our social media feeds – a happy discord that Nuart isn’t traditionally spooked by.

brooklyn-street-art-fra-biancoshock-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web

Fra.Biancoshok. Installation at TOU Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

“This is a representation of two different iconic movements; the Nazis and the Facebook age,” says the Milan based Fra.Biancoshock who specializes in street interventions, not Street Art, per se. “I wanted to unite the two concepts in a unique logo as a way of describing two different ways to have control of the masses in two different ages. It is a provocative representation that is meant to say, ‘Imagine if these two things had met in the same period,’ ” he explains of the illuminated wheel of instantly recognizable letter f’s popping from a four alarm red background at the temporary gallery show in “tunnels” at Tou Scene.

“Obviously the story of the Nazis is very dramatic and heavy and Facebook is only social media but for me if it is not used in the right way it could result in some serious damage; in the areas of privacy, in having control (of people). So I wanted to make this interpretation of our contemporary situation of a certain totalitarianism in our communications today.”

brooklyn-street-art-dot-dot-dot-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web

DOT DOT DOT. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

Comparatively the graffiti writer on display this year is a relative lightweight! Toulous-based Tilt actually created one of the more visually compelling installations (and an instant hit) at the indoor gallery of Tou Scene entitled “Panic Bathroom”, which consists of a tiled men’s restroom evenly split between YMCA and CBGB. The untouched half is pristine and gleaming white while its brother across the line is slaughtered floor to ceiling by pugilistic color, swollen bubbles and drippy tags; all just out of reach of the velvet rope that holds guests back.

brooklyn-street-art-mais-menos-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web-4

±MaisMenos± NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

For the Norwegian born Street Artist named Strøk, Nuart this year is as much about aesthetics and the beauty of the moment as it is the intellectualizing that was on display here during the pub debate and two days of presentations for Nuart PLUS, organized by Eirik Sjåholm Knudsen. He shows us his rendering of figures casting long shadows across the wall on his glossy tablet and he talks about composition, negative space, and the serendipity of catching figures in motion.

brooklyn-street-art-strok-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web-1

Strøk. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

“I like watching people running around and seeing these movements, these frozen moments when they are heading somewhere but you don’t know exactly where – like a moment when time has frozen,” he says. “It’s a snapshot and you just happened to be there.”

Fortunately for many Nuart still knows how to produce a memorable shot of art in the public sphere, and we have some here for you to enjoy.

brooklyn-street-art-mais-menos-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web-1

±MaisMenos± created Norway/No Way as a commentary about joining the European Union. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-mais-menos-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web-3

±MaisMenos± Detail. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-mais-menos-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web-2

±MaisMenos± Installation at TOU Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

 

brooklyn-street-art-tilt-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web

TILT. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-andreco-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web-1

Andreco. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-andreco-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web-2

Andreco. Deatil. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-andreco-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-1-web

Andreco. Detail of his installation at TOU Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

 

brooklyn-street-art-spy-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-8-web

SPY. Installation at TOU Scene enabled you to see the “error” part of the word only when the black light revealed it. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

brooklyn-street-art-martin-whatson-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web

Martin Whatson. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-martin-whatson-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-4-web

Martin Whatson. Installation at TOU Scene.  NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

brooklyn-street-art-martin-whatson-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-web

Martin Whatson completed this new mural at the airport – after being stranded on top of the cherry picker for a few hours the first day because the balance was off. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

brooklyn-street-art-strok-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-web

Strøk’s new mural on the right and a large ground installation on the left by ±MaisMenos±. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Anders Gjennestad)

brooklyn-street-art-levalet-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-3-web

Levalet was one of many of the artists this year who made direct or indirect reference to the oil industry – the one that powers the economy in this town and much of the country. Installation at TOU Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

brooklyn-street-art-levalet-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web-1

Levalet. Installation at TOU Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

 

brooklyn-street-art-icy-sot-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web-2

Icy & Sot created this mammoth 3-D installation with wooden cut-out stencils rising above the edge of the the building. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-icy-sot-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web-1

Icy & Sot. Installation at Tou Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-hama-woods-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web

Not an official guest this year Hama Woods was one of a number of artists who autonomously brought work to put up during NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-etam-cru-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web

Etam Cru. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-mcity-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-7-web

M-City. Installation at TOU Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

brooklyn-street-art-borondo-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-2-web

Borondo. Installation at TOU Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

brooklyn-street-art-borondo-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web-2

Borondo. By scratching paint from the front of the glass and painting diagrams or symbols on the back, Borondo created a full illustration with shadow on the wall when illuminated correctly. Detail of the installation at TOU Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-borondo-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-3-web

Levalet’s outside installations. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

brooklyn-street-art-borondo-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-5-web

Levalet. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

brooklyn-street-art-mathieu-trembling-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-6-web-2brooklyn-street-art-mathieu-trembling-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-5-web-1

Mathieu Tremblin created an interactive piece that guests could participate in by photographing themselves before a bluescreen wall and sending the image to him. Installation at TOU Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

brooklyn-street-art-borondo-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-web

Due to torrential rains Borondo couldn’t complete this wall before we left for NYC. Here is a composite image of the wall in progress. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

BSA would like to extend special thanks to photographers Butterfly and Henrik Haven for sharing their work with BSA readers.

Our sincere thanks to Nuart director Martyn Reed and the entire staff of Nuart and Nuart PLUS, including all of the volunteers and organizers.

 

<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA

NUART 2014 Begins with “Broken Promises”

ETAM CRU AND NUART 2014 X BSA

NUART 2014 X BSA UPDATE 3

NUART 2014 X BSA UPDATE 4

NUART 2014 X BSA UPDATE 5

NUART 2014 X BSA UPDATE 6

 

 

<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA
 
Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
 
<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA

 

This article is also published in The Huffington Post 

 

 

Brooklyn-Street-Art-Huffpost-Nuart-2014-Screen-Shot-2014-09-10-at-11.05

 

Read more
NUART 2014 X BSA  UPDATE 6

NUART 2014 X BSA UPDATE 6

BSA-Nuart-2014-Banner-5

Now back in Nueva York but what a blast! Nuart 2014 and Nuart Plus and Numusic wound down to a screeching halt on Sunday as revelers from the opening at the scene the night before held their heads and spoke in gentle quiet tones while squinting through the misty grey day.

Actually Krystel Talv and her husband seemed surprisingly fresh under orange umbrellas as they led a small army of 200+ people on a tour through the streets to see the new walls, so apparently some people know the meaning of moderation. Also photographers Henrik Haven and Butterfly were pleasingly perched high in the bucket atop an extended cherry picker snapping the new Tilt grenade wall while academic/author Peter Bengtsen was crouched in his rain slicker, camera in hand, before the 3-D Icy & Sot wall.

As punctuation to a full week of murals, Street Art, lectures, movies, panels, pub debates, pizza, art and aerosol fumes, Dotmasters spontaneously brought a fresh stencil out to spray outside the Nuart temporary HQ (see below) bringing a stunning week to a perfect ending.  Stay tuned for a Nuart roundup!

brooklyn-street-art-icy-sot-ad-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-web

Coke adds life! Icy & Sot. Ad Take Over. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-icy-sot-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-web

Have a Coke and a smile! Icy & Sot. Ad take over. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Icy & Sot)

brooklyn-street-art-Icy Sot-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-web

Icy & Sot working late into the night drilling wood stencil silhouettes of homeless folks into their wall for NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-icy-sot-workshop-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-web

Icy & Sot managed to do a cool workshop with local Stavanger youth on Saturday in addition to their installations at Tou Scene and around town. Here is the result – a group photo of the students transformed into a large stencil. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-borondo-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-1-web

Borondo at work on his wall. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

brooklyn-street-art-borondo-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-2-web

Borondo at work on his wall. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

brooklyn-street-art-strok-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-web

Strøk at work on his wall. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Haven)

brooklyn-street-art-mais-menos-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-web

±MaisMenos± Detail of his installation at Tou Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-tilt-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-web

TILT working on his installation “Panic Bathroom” Friday night with assistant Vince at Tou Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-tilt-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-2-web

TILT at work on his wall. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Heaven)

brooklyn-street-art-tilt-henrik-haven-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-1-web

TILT up in a bucket while Vince teeters on the ladder. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Henrik Heaven)

brooklyn-street-art-tilt-butterfly-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-web

TILT at work on his wall. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Butterfly)

brooklyn-street-art-tilt-butterfly-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-1-web

TILT caught a couple bubbles while in Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Butterfly)

brooklyn-street-art-john-fekner-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-web

New York’s John Fekner. Detail of his installation in progress at Tou Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-levelet-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-1-web

The French Street Artist Levalet along the main tunnel wall at Tou Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-levelet-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-web

Levalet. Detail of his installation at Tou Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-dotmaster-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-web

We caught Dotmasters putting up a stencil in the backyard just before grabbing a taxi to the airport on the last day in Stavanger.  Dude had been tirelessly directing all the installation at Tou Scene all week, including the logistics and the stunning lighting. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-swoon-david-choe-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-08-web

David Choe making a sandwich with Swoon from a previous edition of NUART. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

NUART 2014 Begins with “Broken Promises”

ETAM CRU AND NUART 2014 X BSA

NUART 2014 X BSA UPDATE 3

NUART 2014 X BSA UPDATE 4

NUART 2014 X BSA UPDATE 5

 

 

<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA
 
Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
 
<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA
Read more
NUART 2014 x BSA Update 5 : Tou Scene Opens Tonight

NUART 2014 x BSA Update 5 : Tou Scene Opens Tonight

BSA-Nuart-2014-Banner-4

Beautiful weather here in Stavanger this week – perfect for riding bike all over to find artists walls and check out some hidden spots under bridges and abandoned lots. On a side note, this hotel has a gymnasium so you can keep in shape during your visit – which seems rather superfluous considering right behind the hotel the houses are built on a hill at a 70 degree angle! Just getting around town on this bicycle you will lose 7 pounds in a week. Then the Norwegian beer will add it back on.

Tou Scene, the former beer factory now music and art venue officially opens tonight for the public to hear  your favorite electronic music performer like Juan Maclean or Tôg or Hubbabubbaklubb and to of course see the installations by many of the artists invited to Nuart 2014. The morning edition of the Stavanger Aftenblad has arrived and they like the Brooklyn based Street Art brothers Icy and Sot piece for the cover of the Lokal & Kultur section understandably – but you know that the FraBiancoshok Facebook flag piece is going to raise eyebrows across social media with its references to, well, you take a look here below. We are fortunate to have interviewed the artist as he was setting this up so look forward to those comments in a coming post. Okay, gotta run and get ready for Day 2 of Nuart Plus and Icy and Sot teaching local youth how to cut stencils!

Brooklyn-Street-Art-FraBiancoshok-copyright-Steven-P-Harrington-Nuart-2014-Tou-Scene-L1150544-740

Fra.Biancoshock has completed his installation for the opening of Nuart’s Tou Scene tonight. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

Brooklyn-Street-Art-Icy-Sot-Newspaper-copyright-Steven-P-Harrington-Nuart-2014-IMG_3061-740

brooklyn-street-art-spy-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web-2

SPY. Detail of his installation in progress. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-spy-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web-1

SPY team pulling the strings. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-spy-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web-4

SPY. “ERROR” Detail of his installation in progress. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-martin-whatson-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web-1

Martin Whatson at work on his wall. A young photographer wants to get close to the action. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-martin-whatson-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web-2

Martin Whatson. Detail. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P.

brooklyn-street-art-maismenos-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web

±MaisMenos± cut a stencil out f the NUART Porgram. Contextual Baby. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-strok-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web-4

Strøk begins work on his wall. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-strok-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web-1

Strøk begins work on his wall. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-strok-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web-3

Strøk. Sketch of his wall. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-strok-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web-2

Strøk begins work on his wall. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-icy-sot-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web-1

Icy & Sot at work on their wall. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-icy-sot-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web-2

Icy & Sot. Detail of their installation faor Tou Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-Borondo-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web-2

Borondo works on a piece for his Tou Scene installation. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-Borondo-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-stavanger-norway-09-06-web-1

Borondo sketching ideas for his outdoor wall at the NUART Studio. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

 

Click HERE for NUART 2014 full schedule of events and details.

 

 

NUART 2014 Begins with “Broken Promises”

ETAM CRU AND NUART 2014 X BSA

NUART 2014 X BSA UPDATE 3

 
<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA
 
Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
 
<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA
Read more
NUART 2014 x BSA Update 3

NUART 2014 x BSA Update 3

BSA-Nuart-2014-Banner-2

On this third day at NUART we’d like to bring you a bit of the good humored craze that’s happening right now as some of the artists are finding their spots. We also wanted to give a sense of the existing Street Art scene flavor – with individual ad hoc pieces in hidden little spots along with some Nuart pieces still riding from previous years. The neighborhood is a quiet one (at least with New York ears), with cleanly rational homes built on steep angles going up hills of this former town of fishermen famous for their sardines and herring factories.

But you can feel the excitement rippling; Nuart and Numusic are concurrent festivals that bring a certain electricity and anticipatory activation to the streets here as summer turns to fall. Wandering on foot up and down hills with artists to see them preparing walls and having Thai takeout on a green picnic table or watching someone spraying their new stenciled piece in a window at Tou Scene, you will run into folks who have seen this activity before and would like to know the schedule of events.

The posters and banners are hung, the printed programs, postcard, the many stickers are all around town, artists are arriving, paint is allotted, and Kristal is ferrying guests swiftly in her car from one location to the next – offering history of the town, the festival, apple juice, and maybe piece of Norwegian chocolate if you like. Also Martin Whatson got stuck for an hour and a half fully extended up on a lift at the airport yesterday.

brooklyn-street-art-maismenos-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web

±MaisMenos± new word stencil at Tou Scene. Nuart 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

In this new piece ±MaisMenos± employs the double meaning that he typically uses in his communication on the street. A form of activism sometimes, but more accurately he considers it an initiation or continuance of a conversation on the street as well as his acknowledgement of the duality of most situations in life. In his new piece here ±MaisMenos± makes reference to the famous phrase from Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, where one longs for something. He offers hope, and at the same time he wonders about what are the resulting machinations in the act of offering hope – something not tangible

“I like people to have a double feeling about stuff. I do that a lot in my work. When there is a direct message you can always see another point of view. There are always two sides of a coin, another perspective,” says ±MaisMenos±, who will be giving a presentation on his work at the Activism Seminar Day Saturday for Nuart Plus.

brooklyn-street-art-strok-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web-2

Strøk has been invited back t0 Nuart 2014. This is an old piece from last year. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-strok-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web-1

Strøk has been invited back t0 Nuart 2014. This is an old piece from last year. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-icy-sot-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web

Icy & Sot. Nuart 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-icy-sot-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web-1

Icy & Sot working on their installation for Tou Scene. Nuart 2104. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-andreco-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web

Andreco working on his wall. Nuart 2104. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-dotmasters-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web-1

Dotmasters did a much larger version of this on a entire building side for a previous edition of Nuart. This one is a tiny hidden version with the bear about the size of a hand-span. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-dotmasters-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-web-2

Volunteers leaving Nuart Studio and an old but hugely dramatic Dotmasters stencil from a previous edition of Nuart hangs on the right. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-lionel-ritchie-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web

Missed Connections with Lionel Ritchie. Nuart 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-brooklyn-street-art-jps-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web

Jamie Paul Scanlon, alias JPS.  Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-jps-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web-2

Jamie Paul Scanlon, alias JPS.  Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-ernest-zacharevic-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web

A poster advertising an upcoming event and a piece by Ernest Sacharevic from last year’s editon of Nuart.  Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web

Posters advertising Reed Projects, NUART and NUMUSIC events are all over this part of town. NUART 2014.  Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-c215-hush-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web

A wall with a cluster of previous NUART alumni: C215, HUSH, Word To Mother and D*face. NUART 2014.  Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-dan-witz-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web

A Dan Witz  piece from a previous Nuart edition. NUART 2014.  Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-artist-unknown-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02--web-1

Artist Unknown. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-hama-wood-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web

Artist Hama Wood putting up a fresh stencil at Tou Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-aakash-nihalini-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web

Aakash Nihalani from a previous edition of Nuart. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-artist-unknown-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web-3

Artist Unknown. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-borondo-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web

Team Borondo working on the installation for Tou Scene. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-this-is-not-art-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web

This Is Not @rt. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

brooklyn-street-art-artist-unknown-steven-p-harrington-nuart2014-09-02-web-2

Artist Unknown. NUART 2014. Stavanger, Norway. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

Click HERE for NUART 2014 full schedule of events and details.

 

NUART 2014 Begins with “Broken Promises”

ETAM CRU AND NUART 2014 X BSA

 

 
<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA
 
Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!
 
<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA
Read more