Street Artists continue to bang up walls in the industrial play land by the sea in Brooklyn this week – minus a few days for full-on rain and flash flooding. Suddenly the wind is kicking up and everyone is cold and working as hard at being positive as they are at painting. Anyway, it all about the riotous color right now and here we have two boldly flourescent contributors to Coney Art Walls; London based textual talent Ben Eine style-checking the 70s and Brooklyn hometown gal Maya Hayuk sloshing knee deep through eye popping bands of plaid.
As press and photographers are starting to make the trip since the buzz is building, its becoming a bit of a mini-scene – and that’s just to see Martha Cooper! Newly arrived also are Miss Van and Lady Aiko – and there are more on the roster for the next two weeks so keep watching this space – or better yet come have a hotdog and soda and then throw it up on the Cyclone! Look out beloooooooooooooow.
Just because you are a spectator in Coney Island Shepard Fairey doesn’t want you to be a spectator at civic responsibility. His newly wheat-pasted Coney Art Wall is fashioned as a graphically designed advertisement skewering the excesses of mindless industrial development running unchecked and baked into a pleasingly twisted version of the once upwardly bound “middle class”.
Of course Fairey’s smart-mouthed wall seems at home floating here at this seaside all-American semi-permanent festival of oddity and diversion. And the theme of poisoning the natural world is as current as today’s headlines.
Fairey may have been thinking of the sooty and stinking oil spill lapping at the shores of his home state of California right now, or the BP oil spill that severely damaged animal and human life on the southernmost US Gulf , or even the medical waste that kept plaguing this Brighton Beach in the 1990s or the nations’ largest underground oil spill that still resides beneath the newly trendy Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint.
“A lot of my work deals with symbols of Americana, the symbols of success and the duality of a lot of those things – that what might be seen as a positive symbol in one realm actually has a dark side,” Fairey said in an interview last year called Obey This Film, a short piece directed by Brett Novak.
The collection of new walls going up this week for the month-long installation of murals is alive and kicking – sometimes in the head – for those who give it a thought, or those who know a little of the history of these artists.
Futura is taking his abstraction into a boldly minimal geometry, Lady Pink lays out the idealized romance of Coney’s yesteryear, and a dark horse entry – some members of the graff crew IRAK, fill a hulkingly rigid tag with hundreds of curvilinear hand-sprayed ones.
There has even appeared a painterly bit of satire that pokes fun at the storied history of the New York curator/showman who has jump-started this show in a piece entitled “Deitch Masters”. Here Jesse Edwards points to Jeffrey’s roles in fame-fueled NY art history amongst certain hi/low circles while appropriately tipping the hat to Breuckelen‘s Dutch roots and graffiti’s pivotal role in the development of street culture.
This weekend and next week promise more arriving artists and surprises for the whole family at Coney Art Walls.
Summer Just Got More Fun in NYC as Coney Reinvents Itself Again
You know the scene: Cotton candy, blasting music, bold fonted signs, city beach, sticky fingers, tattoos, carnival barkers, rollercoaster barfing, stolen kisses under the boardwalk, big bellied men with their shirts off, giggling girls in flipflops smelling like coconut sunscreen, garbage on the sand, mermaids, porta potties, stuffed animals, concrete, cigars, hot dogs, butts, boobs, lipstick, screaming, flashing old-timey light bulbs, kids passed out in strollers, boozy Romeos, sketchy snake oil salesmen, aerosol painted walls by New York’s old skool graff writers. That last part is now in effect, actually.
Instead of being hunted down for catching a tag or bubble lettered throw up, a couple dozen graffiti/street art painters are invited to hit up Coney Island this summer and since today is the inaugural Saturday of the first unofficial weekend of summer in New York, we’re bringing you the first three freshly completed pieces. Part of “Coney Art Walls”, the muralists began taking the train out to this seaside paved paradise that is re-inventing itself once again, this time courtesy of art curator Jeffrey Deitch.
This week while the sun was still struggling to get a handle on Summer, we captured the early crew hitting up the temporary two sided walls outside and inside the compound that will share space with food vendors, picnic tables and a stage for music performances. Some brought family while they worked and a few even took a ride on the Cyclone with Martha Cooper just to scream their heads off. The artist lineup is looking stellar, with golden names predominantly associated with New York’s 70s-80s graff heyday sprinkled with a few of the current street art contenders, but you never know what is popping up next, or who. It’s Coney Island after all.
Here are the first three completed murals with the Tats Cru twins How & Nosm leading the pace, followed by Crash and Daze.
Shout out to all the great Swoon fans we met last night during the artists talk with her. All the seats were filled so it was standing room only in the back but yet it felt so intimate. Ya’ll are stupendous and smart and handsome and beautiful and we were honored to be with you.
Shout out to the family of American blues institution BB King who passed on this week. His music and talent influenced so many. Sending love and condolences to his family and friends.
Let’s see what Jeffery Deitch has in store for Smorgasburg Coney Island starting this week in preparation for the Memorial Day weekend opening – published reports have the roster of street artists at 15 but we’re hearing closer to 25 will be hitting up temporary concrete walls in this outdoor gallery he is doing in partnership with a large real estate firm to promote the new Coney Island. Some names you’ll recognize are old skool 70s-80s train writers like Lee Quinones, Crash, Daze, Lady Pink, Futura, and new people he has been reaching out to from the 2000s and 2010s scene who we bring you regularly like How & Nosm, Skewville, Steve Powers, possibly even ROA . This list will surely grow as word gets out and artists besiege Mr. Deitch to participate. The full installation is to last a month and will be surely caught on film and timelapse video.
Meanwhile, here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Alexis Diaz, Alka Murat, Appleton, Marco Berta, Blaqk Blaqk, City Kitty, Creepy Creep, Dain, Dasic Fernandez, Duke A. Barnstable, Elsa Sauguet, Eva & Adele, Ever, Goldman Rats, Ines Maas, JR, Penny Gaff, Robert Janz, Sebastian Reinoso Salinas, Seikon Stav6, and Swoon.
” ‘头部 (The Head)’ is an art installation based on the analysis of Chinese Communist posters. When the posters represent the ‘idea’, people are always down the picture and the Mao Tse Tung portrait always floating in heaven, protecting that theory founded in the Russian winters. When they want to describe the pragmatics, Mao is cultivating flowers, going to visit schools, etc.
The idea with ‘The Head’ is to think why the “communist theory” fails in its application to reality, and this is because many times the idea has to be corresponded o taken through a body, a body that exercises the idea, that exercises power. That’s why, part of the installation that we present here, invites people to get into the head, so we all can have the feeling that we are not loyal to the theory; the idealization is as dangerous as it is obsessive.”
Murals sometimes need to be refreshed, and springtime is good time to do it before the weather in NYC gets too punishingly hot. We last showed you this wall in Williamsburg in 2011 when Tristan Eaton finished his piece next to How and Nosm. (Street Artist Tristan Eaton Goes Biblical)
For this “refresh” the guys decided to integrate their work entirely with one another rather than confine neighbor pieces to a color palette for continuity. The collaborative serpentine outcome is a densely patterned panoply of imagery and symbolisms that provide a multitude of departure points for your imagination. Here is an example of a meeting of styles that resulted in combustion!
Today we celebrate Mother’s Day in the USA and Mexico and about 70 other countries. Cheers and thank you to all the mothers of the world.
If only we would stop paying lip service to the foundational importance of motherhood; if millions of mothers would know that tomorrow they will have food to feed their children, that they could live without fear of violence, could take off time from work to care for their families, were paid a living wage equal to a that of a man, could feel loved, protected, supported, respected and cherished.
Let’s all work to make sure that more mothers experience love and a peace of mind. Even if your mother is not alive and here with us today, we can support someone’s who is.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring $howta, Anthony Lister, Brolga, City Rabbit, Gualicho, Hot Tea, JR, M*Code, Mr. Volpe, Nina Kunan, No More Lies, Pablo Harymbat, Phoebe New York, Pyramid Oracle, Swil, Tristan Eaton, and Willow.
We got half a Cyrcle in Brooklyn last week flying solo, but you know you are never never alone in this Street Art scene. The gents have had a lot of opportunity to travel since BSA first began presenting their work for you – primarily in Los Angeles, as far back as 2011. In the last couple of years their polished representative and text based works have taken them on adventures to Sweden, Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Vienna, Detroit, Montreal, London, Miami…and it has helped them to evolve their body of work and meet many new fans and collaborators. It was a great pleasure to get them this wall ans to see Cyrcle on the streets of Brooklyn, where of course we think everyone belongs eventually.
We’ve been seeing an increase in the number of politically charged pieces showing up in the street lately. It is no surprise given the rise in marches and demonstrations and discussions in our city and country about topics like racism, police brutality, and rising economic inequality. Street Art has a tradition of addressing socio-political topics, sometimes gently, sometimes yelling at the top of its lungs.
One could argue that all speech is political but you don’t recognize it when the message expresses views endorsed by the dominant culture; BP ads tell us that it is splendid to burn fossil fuels, CitiBank ads on bicycles tell us that bankers are nice community-minded people, and McDonalds ads tell us that eating meat is nutritious. Nothing political there right? Do you think the MTA would allow you to run an advertisement saying the opposite of any of those messages? Or would that suddenly be political?
The first few messages of this weeks walls are examples of speech, some of them political, some of them not. The streets will decide which get banned.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring 907 Crew, Adam Cost, Anthony Lister, Balu, bunny M, Cash 4, David Shillinglaw, Defs, Deeker, FWC Crew, HA3, Icy & Sot, JR, Kaws, London Kaye, Merve Berkman, Myth, Omen, R2, Rambo, ROA, Rubin 415, SEA, Smells, Sote, and Specter.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Bisser, Brolga, C3, D7606, JR, Kafka the Cat, Myth, Nineta, Right of Way NYC, and Urma.
Spring has broken out all over New York! It’s time to go topless on the Coney Island Beach! And in front of the Bowery Wall today where Ron English is putting up more Popaganda! He’s doing more painting on top of the wheat-pasted critique of consumerism that he began yesterday.
Also it’s time to try and spot those enigmatic little stiff stick men by Stikman that have been popping up in unexpected places. How does he continuously morph himself into new shapes and yet retain his sturdy character? Have a great sunny afternoon and go see the new wall and say hi to Martha for us. Oh, and Ron too of course. xo
This Sunday’s collection of images of the week presents a fair number of unknown artists alongside better known names such as Dennis McNett and Stikman expressing fantasies, fears, politics, geopolitics, economics, and existential matters… such is the nature of the street.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Clint Mario, Dennis McNett, Observer Obscura, Sean 9 Lugo, Sobr, Stikman, Taousuz, and Tona.
G. James Daichendt. Robbie Conal: Streetwise: 35 Years of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art. Schiffer, 2020. Reprinted from the original review. …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
