Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “AfroGrafiteiras” featuring Andrea Bak 2. Magda Cwik / Hotel 128 / Street Art City in France. Via After Hours Project 3. INDECLINE Presents: The Bird Box 4. INDECLINE Presents: Trumpster Fire 5. Mura Masa – Deal Wiv It with slowthai
BSA Special Feature: “AfroGrafiteiras” featuring Andrea Bak
AfroGrafiteiras is an urban art training project focused on the expression and promotion of the leading role of Afro-Brazilian women in activity since 2015.
Here in Episode 6 we get to see the bright mind of Andrea Bak as she talks about this Rio-based program that examines identity, society, tradition, and empowerment through the aerosol can.
To learn more about the #AfroGrafiteiras project visit www.redenami.com
Magda Cwik / Hotel 128 / Street Art City in France. Via After Hours Project
Check into the abandoned Hotel
128 in Lurcy-Lévis, France and you’ll find a stunning array of portals to
worlds customized by Street Artists. Here’s the latest one, Room 108, painted
by Magda Cwik.
INDECLINE Presents: The Bird Box
A quick commercial or not? Hacking the consumer system by re-cycling a new scooter craze into something useful for the homeless, who are now legion in LA? Either way it’s INDECLINE, who will literally tell you anything as long as you keep watching.
INDECLINE Presents: Trumpster Fire
You see the dumpster with Trump’s face on it, and you know what’s next. Thank you for completing the visual allegory that many have imagined.
Mura Masa – Deal Wiv It with slowthai
And now something new from the “No-Hope” generation. Back with his friend Slowthai, it’s a pop-locky-pock-marked-futility-fueled screed leading us into the weekend. Also, there is hope here.
A children-friendly installation in a city that needs some love, the artist who began as a graffiti writer in 1989 here brings his famous faceless characters called the “Gouzou” to pop out of the box buildings and water the flowers of growth here.
JACE says he’s been painting this character since the early 90s and they are complex, despite their appearance. “The “Gouzou” is an anthropomorphic character, cheerful and endearing but not without a touch of malice,” says his bio, “Soft and delicate, he can be just as impertinent and teasing!”
This new community mural is in a housing estate in the district called “La Grande Borne”, or perhaps, “The Great Frontier”, but over time its reputation has become somewhat tarnished due to high unemployment, lack of economic opportunity, and probably systemic racism.
The Wiki entry says “Built as a 1960s social utopia with winding coloured buildings, it was intended to become an ideal dormitory town. With 11,000 inhabitants, it has become a by-word for poverty, drug dealing, arms trafficking, youth criminality and attacks on police, as well as arson attacks on public buildings.”
In a 2015 article in Le Parisien even the Socialist MP Malek Boutih has said about La Grande Borne, “A city where officials, including elected officials, make a pact with evil, thugs, offenders, corruption.” (translated with Google)
Maybe JACE’s Gouzou will bring a positive influence on the neighborhood?
At least that’s what the mural program “Wall Street Festival” has in mind.
“Bringing culture to working-class neighborhoods is like a duty for me,”
says organizer and founder Gautier Jourdain. “This is where the works are most
important.”
Dalek (James Marshall) and Buff Monster host
their second collaborative exhibition in as many years at GR Gallery in
Manhattan’s Lower East Side, sandwiched between the high art of the Bowery
Museum and the hungry and homeless people of the Bowery Street. A perfect
snapshot of inequality in modern New York, the neighborhood has not lost its
reputation in the last 10 years as a place for those desperate city folk with
no means – and those city folk who need to collect art for their homes.
Here we find the escapist vocabulary of cartoons in both artist’s collections. Character-driven avatars of the street/mural/canvas painters themselves, the true emotions and predilections of Dalek’s “Space Monkey” and Buff Monster’s “Melty Misfits” are hidden under the sugary gloss of pop and sharply defined graphic styles.
The influences are sometimes overlapping, but each takes their tips from slightly opposing signposts on the commercially cartooned metroscape – scenes of cosmic war and ice cream and cleverly digital labyrinths cavorting in the clouds floating around the many mansions of Murakami and Harajuku.
The 30 pieces, including paintings, works on
paper, site-specific installations, are an afternoon’s respite from the roar of
traffic and construction and grey particulate matter flying in the air outside,
a serene laboratory for experimenting with new creative impulses and fantastic
narratives, brightly lit. It is a combined wit, a shared attraction to a “Surface
Fetish.”
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Abe Lincoln Jr., Adam Fujita, Alexcia Panay, Anthony Lister, Below Key, BK Foxx, Bobby Hundreds, Downer Jones, Dragon Art, Hops Art, Maia Lorian, Mastro NYC, Muebon, Pricey Alex, Shiro, Sinclair the Vandal, VKrone, and Want.
Aerosol in pursuit of the “Masters” (Eurocentrically speaking) is a permutation of Street Art and the mural making tradition going back decades, including murals made directly by “Masters” (Latino-centrically speaking) like Rivera or, say, those of the Olmec civilization in the pre Hispanic period, for example. In the last decade Frenchman and Street Artist Julien de Casabianca has documented, printed, and wheatpasted large-scale reproductions from classical painting upon city walls as part of his “Outings Project” in multiple countries.
Today we see an Italian former graffiti writer who went to university to study fine arts in Milan take his aerosol spray technique to a wall in Corbeil-Essonnes, France (population 50,400). Painted as part of the ongoing “Wall Street Art Festival”, the new mural may inspire the next generation of artists here as well.
Andrea
“RAVO” Mattoni sings praise to a slice of Mona Lisa on this school building as
his reinterpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s original, which is much smaller, hanging
in the Louvre Museum about an hour’s drive north of here. The 38 year old
artist, who was born in Varese and comes from a family of artists, including
his father and grandfather, decided to leave the painting as an in-process “unfinished”
work that shows a grid pattern and da Vincis background color for educational
purposes.
“It
is a good teaching aid for the school’s teachers,” says the walls’ artistic
director, the gallerist Gautier Jourdain, “which they now use to explain the
process to their students.”
If Gautier had any doubts about Mattoni’s qualifications with the spraycan, he was likely persuaded by the artist’s Caravaggio reproduction on the side of the Gemelli Hospital in Rome two years ago. More recently, as part of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, the artist created 5 large paintings at the Château d’Amboise. So this is number 5.5 perhaps.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Paradox and CPT. OLF and Daredevilry in Berlin 2. The Tunnels. Nuart Festival 2019. A film by MZM Projects 3. Post-graffiti artist Jose Parla for ‘Isthmus’ in Instabul
BSA Special Feature: Paradox and CPT. OLF and Daredevilry in Berlin
In the videos featuring daredevilry, parkour and graffiti the Lengua Drona has been adding words to our visual vocabulary that were once reserved for extreme sporting, National Geographic docs, Crocodile Dundee and James Bond.
Now the pixação writer and urban climber, Paradox releases unprecedented adventure footage and editing from photographer CPT. Olf, and its sending shockwaves.
Somehow this is a new way to synthesize wall-climbing and train surfing; positioning it as a visual and audio symphony that almost makes you forget that these are graffiti vandals “fucking the system”, pushing their limits – and yours.
As you thrill to these evolving genre-combining aspects of Oleg Cricket, 1Up Crew, Berlin Kidz, and Ang Lee, it’s important to realize that these are real risks that people take that could result in serious injury, death, and rivers of grief if a miscalculation happens. So, yeah, we’re not endorsing the irresponsible risks or a mounting “arms race” of stunts, but we are endorsing the athleticism, imagination, and sheer slickness of this FPV drone mastery, which appears to have taken this stuff up another level.
Hold tight.
Currently Paradox is on exhibition at Urban Spree in Berlin, a show that we hope to see soon and pick up our own copy of “CPT.OLF 16-19”: The Photobook, published by Urban Spree Books in October 2019
The Tunnels. Nuart Festival 2019. A film by MZM Projects
A positioning in text, a re-strung manifesto for a moment from the past, now revisited in your Nuart or Nuart Aberdeen branded t-shirt. Here is the work in the tunnels of Tou Scene, unfolding before you by Ukranian directors and street scholars Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoshchuk. It’s a beehive of activity as participants in this years’ event in Stavanger, Norway create their installations in preparation for the big opening.
“This film is a journey,” explain the directors/authors/poets/narrators, “it is moving backward from the last 7th tunnel until the introductory Tunnel Zero in order to show the development of the movement with its modern variety of artistic practices and the parallels with the past.”
Brand New, You’re Retro, that 90s jam from Tricky, is presented here as a doorway to pass through to get to the 70s and then to return through to see the last moments of the 10s. Here is open rebellion against a system that suckers you in, gives you succor, sucks you, and regales you succulently with a promise. Sung by angry hopeful canaries in the coalmine, here are some winners and losers, as ever. Shout out to Yatharth Roy Vibhakar for a splendid soundtrack that is glitchy and timely, of this time.
Post-graffiti artist Jose Parla for ‘Isthmus’ in Instabul
Jose Parla is not a Street Artist. He’ll tell you that himself. Here he presents himself as a post-graffiti artist in Istanbul. You may also see possible labels of public artist, artist working in public space, muralist, studio artist, sculptor, contemporary artist, gestural abstractionist, pottery designer, decollagist a la Villeglé – taking posters from the street and applying to canvas. Here you follow him in the streets as he creates his “first-ever exhibition in Turkey, inspired by the word ‘ISTHMUS,” consisting of a new body of works on paper, paintings, sculptures and ceramics.”
Happy Halloween! It’s going to rain on all the Trick or Treaters in the streets in New York tonight. Nevertheless, ye olde drizzle and mist doesn’t really put a damper on the eerie festivities, including the East Village Halloween Parade, which is reliably a misshapen, humorous and frightening mess of creativity, imagination, psychiatric therapy, music, and theatrical spectacle; all of it careening through the sloppy streets for your pleasure.
This holiday used to be only for children and art-inclined weirdos, now its cosplay across the nation with children of all ages are in costume on the subway, on the bus, in line for pumpkin-spice latte.
In Baltimore Street Artist TOVEN has made plenty of preparations for you: cheerful and possibly unsettling skull wheatpastes for you to see out of the corner of your mask as you run door-to-door asking for candies.
Nothing to lose your head about, but you’ll be thrilled
to hear about the long-anticipated release of the new monograph by the
ingenious troublemaker and largely incognito Chicago Street Artist DONT FRET.
Emerging on the streets for a decade or so with painted wit and misshapen characters wheatpasted where you least expect them, he’s the sharp observer and human humorist whose work is as brilliant as your cousin Marlene, as funny as Johnny at the funeral home, as handsome as the guys behind the counter at Publican Quality Meats.
Well,
maybe not that handsome.
“This is place-based Street Art, a running commentary on life in this neighborhood that captures the off-the-wall imperfect nature of humans in a pock-marked and still proud American city after capital leaves it, slowly imploding, coasting on fumes, hopefully rallying, quickly stratifying into luxury lofts and the rest of us,” writes Steven P. Harrington in the foreword to this hefty chunk of comedic meat. Peering through these pages, the feeling is inescapable; Somehow you sense like you know DONT FRET’S people – probably because many of them came directly from these streets.
We wanted you to have an opportunity to take a quick look inside the massive quirky tome yourself, because it is as eclectic and disarmingly insightful as this sidewalk bard and documentarian, and to let you know the book release is in December. Also, DONT FRET’s got a special gig going for its release with a limited edition screenprint and original sketch with signature in the book.
“I think you have to live life like you are invincible,” says the artist on the back cover of Life Thus Far, “but I also think you have to live life understanding that that sort of thinking is a result of a serious psychological disorder.”
We’ll talk to
you more about this in a few weeks, and with the artist, and we’ll find out
about his circuitous route to the streets of working class Chicago, how a fish
rots from the head, the significance of the original Billy Goat on lower
Wacker, and why Studs Terkel is more relevant today than ever.
DONT FRET “LIFE THUS FAR” Schiffer Publishing, Atglen, PA. 2019
Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)
No spray paint was used here by artist Magda C in this new mural for the day of the International Climate Strike, though the paint does illuminate in the daytime and shine at night, she tells us.
Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Painted in conjunction with the decade running Urban Forms Foundation here in Łódź, Poland in the Teofilów neighborhood, draws inspiration from the city’s famous textile traditions and the traditional patterns that persevere in public consciousness. The artist says that she is also interested in drawing viewers of this surrealist illustration style graphic to an emerging civic concept called “Conscious Consumption” as pertains to our daily choices in food and, well, everything.
Embedding symbols and icons that refer to recycling, renewable energy sources, reduction of CO2, the mural “relates to the current condition of our planet, as well as its uncertain future,” she says.
Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)Magda Cwik. “Children and Fish should be heard”. Urban Forms Foundation. Łódź, Poland. 2019. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Ali Six, Anthony Lister, Chris Stain, Cogitaro, Gixy Gal, Hans Haacke, I Heart Graffiti, Jimmy C, JR, Laszlo, Lizzo, Pay to Pray, Rano, and X Vandals.
A retrospective at Brooklyn Museum currently showcases the photographic works and public projects envisioned and created by French Street Artist JR. Covering roughly two decades of work, JR: Chronicles dedicates an in-depth examination into his practices and personal philosophies when creating – as evidenced by this collection of his murals, photographs, videos, films, dioramas, and archival materials.
His most recent and one of his most original ideas has been to use the techniques of professional film compositing to impart a permanent, living aura for what may otherwise be static collaged works. With high res digital works working in concert, the life of the subject takes on an additional dimension, juxtaposed as it is with other figures they may or may not have ever interacted with.
Often in these recent projects you have the opportunity to see and/or hear personal recordings of the person through interviews for the piece. The centerpiece and partial namesake of this show is the new large-scale mural of more than one thousand New Yorkers whom he chose to feature, accompanied by audio recordings of each person’s story as told to him and his team.
Many of these concepts and philosophical observations, including sociopolitical commentary on a number of hot-button issues of the day, may feel familiar to fans and Street Artists around the world – particularly over the last decade and a half. Here you can see that with the number of resources and teams that he can amass, JR is able to create the ideas with a sense of largesse and garner greater audiences, putting many of his works before many more.
Epic is a word often used to describe the projects, and when you see the JR: Chronicles exhibition you can understand why.
We spoke with the curators of the exhibition Sharon Matt Atkins and Drew
Sawyer about their experience with this exhibition and how JR is defining new
areas of photography with his use of it in public space.
Brooklyn Street Art:JR created a new digital collage for this exhibition featuring a thousand or so people individually interviewed and photographed. Can you tell us about what criterion he used for selecting his subjects? Sharon Matt Atkins: JR’s main focus was on capturing the rich diversity of New York City. As such, he photographed people in all five boroughs of the city, including many neighborhoods that were new to him. While he did invite some guests to participate, most of the people were passersby, or business owners and workers of local stores.
Brooklyn Street Art:It may be that there has been a return to
black and white photography in
the last decade – so much so that one may not register the significance
that JR employs it for expression almost exclusively. How do you think
the limited palette aids his work in telling his narratives? Drew Sawyer: In
many ways, JR’s use of black and white photographs is in direct
opposition to contemporary photojournalism and the digital circulation
is images. His close-up portraits may recall the work of earlier
documentarians, such as Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange in the United
States, but JR’s decision to print them on inexpensive paper and paste
them nearby counters they ways in which images often circulate in the
global media far away from the places where his collaborators live. Also,
the monochromatic images certainly stand out against the colorful built
environments in which JR typically installs them.
Brooklyn Street Art:As you deeply analyzed his career and its
various phases, what would you
say is one of the through-lines that you see in his practice as it
evolved? Sharon Matt Atkins:
Our show is centered on his projects that have been created in
collaboration with communities. From his earliest photographs
documenting his graffiti writer friends to Inside Out with more
than 400,000 participants in 141 countries to his most recent mural The
Chronicles of New York City, JR has sought to give visibility to those
often underrepresented or misrepresented.
Brooklyn Street Art: How has JR used his work in a new way that may prove to be inspiring to photographers and fans of photography? Drew Sawyer: For JR, photography is just one part of his collaborative process. His work is really about bringing people together, lifting the voices of others who rarely have control over their own representation, countering narratives in the global media, and shifting the discourse around specific issues and events. He started his practice before there were social media apps like Instagram, which now provide platforms for many people to do the same in a digital form. Since then, JR has explored how new technologies can help him tell and share more stories. I hope his process inspires other artists to use photography in similar and new ways.
“Since 2017 JR has been creating participatory murals inspired by the work of the Mexican painter Diego Rivera in the first half of the twentieth century. In the summer of 2018, JR and his team spent a month roaming all five boroughs of New York City, parking their 53- foot-long trailer truck in numerous locations and taking photographs of passersby who wished to participate. Each was photographed in front of a green screen, and then the images were collaged into a New York City setting featuring architectural landmarks. More than a thousand people were photographed for the resulting mural, The Chronicles of New York City. The participants chose how they personally wanted to be represented and were asked to share their stories, which are now available on a free mobile app.”
“In January 2009 JR carried out another iteration of Women Are Heroes in Kibera, Kenya, one of the largest slums in Africa. Following close dialogue with the community, JR covered rooftops with water-resistant vinyl printed with photographs of the eyes and faces of local women. The images both transformed the landscape and provided protection from the rain.
The train that ran along the Kibera line was also covered with photographs of the eyes of women who lived directly below, and images of the lower halves of their faces were pasted on the slope beneath the tracks so that as the train passed, their faces were completed for a few seconds. The idea was to celebrate, or at the very least to acknowledge their presence. Of his projects, JR has said, ‘I search with my art to install the work in improbable places, to create with the communities projects that promote questioning. . . and to offer alternative images to those of the global media.’ ”
“On October 8, 2017, for the last day of the Kikito installation at the U.S.-Mexico border, JR organized a gigantic picnic on both sides of the wall. Kikito, his family, and dozens of guests came from the United States and Mexico to share a meal. People at both sides of the border gathered around the eyes of Mayra, a ‘Dreamer,’ eating the same food, sharing the same water, and enjoying the same live music (with half the band’s musicians playing on either side). “
JR: Chronicles is curated by Sharon Matt Atkins, Director of Exhibitions and Strategic Initiatives, and Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator, Photography, Brooklyn Museum. This exhibition is now open to the public. Click HERE for dates, times and directions.
Image Description A (see earlier in article) “As the first photograph in what would become JR’s Portrait of a Generation, this image launched his career. The series was initiated when Ladj Ly, a filmmaker, and resident of Cité des Bosquets (called “Les Bosquets”), a public housing complex in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, invited JR to collaborate on a project in the neighborhood.
JR said of the image: ‘I took this picture when I was eighteen. It was the first time I went to Les Bosquets. If you look carefully in the back, you can see small posters from Expo 2 Rue—and I wrote ‘Expo D Boske.’ The kids asked me if I could take a picture of them. This photo of Ladj Ly filming me was the first one on the roll of film, and I felt something special had happened. This image is very emblematic of my work and of the message of this project with Ladj.’
This photograph was also the first large-scale image that JR and his friends wheat-pasted in the neighborhood prior to the riots there in 2005. It appeared as the backdrop in photographs accompanying newspaper articles and television footage about the uprising, thereby becoming JR’s first published work. “
– text courtesy Brooklyn Museum
Image Description B (see earlier in article) “In 2013 JR learned that the housing towers in Les Bosquets were going to be demolished, so he revisited the Portrait of a Generation project. Using images from the original series, he and a team pasted portraits in the building before it was destroyed. He recalled, ‘We couldn’t get authorization to paste inside. So we got plans from the former inhabitants, and we entered at night, twenty-five of us, and spread out over all the different floors. We pasted eyes in someone’s kitchen, a nose in someone else’s bathroom, and a mouth in a living room. . . . When we came down, the police arrested us, but they couldn’t understand why we had just spent hours in this building that was about to be destroyed. The pastings were so big that they couldn’t see what they were. The next day, when workers started the demolition, the portraits were revealed, little by little, while the cranes were ‘eating’ the building. Only the people who were in the neighborhood that day witnessed the gigantic spectacle unfold.’ “
“It is less easy to sensitize people to the respect of nature,”
says Italian Street Artist Gola Hundun, and you understand his entire oeuvre
during the last decade.
With
“Sentiero”, his latest ode to pyramidic peaks that soar above the earth in
Napoli for the Xenia Community Festival.
Speaking of community, Gola opened up the creative process to school children to aesthetically explore some of the themes he is most influenced by – nature, spirituality, our encounters with both. He is so moved by the collaborative drawing made by two boys named Enrico and Salvatore that he writes today to tell BSA readers about the work and the affect it had on his multi-story mural.
He shares with us the original artwork by them that he chose the sketch among many others because of its inner meaning, which he thinks is very close to own research.
“The path is represented as a thin red line, as the pathway every man should walk to reach the Knowledge shown as a golden mountain. Beside each single man there’s nature, seen as an obstacle, but is actually part of himself,” Gola tells us.
“A rich variety of vegetation dominates the lower part of the wall, creating a multi-layer prospective effect. What is very interesting is also the chromatic scale and the way the artist uses it: simple, elementary colors, to let the pure shape of the elements to come out on a very neutral background. Gold means divine value of the nature and so the mountain becomes a golden idol in the middle of the jungle of life. The contrast between the golden mountain and the cold tones of the leaves emphasizes the allegorial message beyond it.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
