West Coast graffiti superstar RISK, bomber of freeway overpasses, designer of graffiti-inspired clothing, regaler of rap and rock videos; a self-aware sage-like lion-maned merging of Rick Rubins, Greg Allman, and a Norse Yggdrasil, now brings you the psychedelic slaughter of a Cleveland façade.
“We had crowds come every day to watch us paint,” he says of the technicolor splashfest he did along with Nashville artist Chris Zidek. The mural wraps the entire venue, a nonprofit that raises money to provide educational scholarships to youth who can use them – among other missions. With his distinctive style of saturated striped washes flooding the entire block Risk foregoes the letterform on the outside, but ventured in to catch a wild styled tag.
About this new full-spectrum piece that ties together his nearly forty years of graffiti practice along with his contemporary art practice, the muralist says, “I call it beautifully destroyed.”
As we enter into the languid sweaty city summer of your dreams and the cloud of concrete dust and carbon dioxide kicked up by passing cars settles onto your dewey skin, it’s time to spend a few hours with aerosol cans on a wall.
“It’s been busy lately,” says Overunder, who is relishing an extended tour through select cities this summer and he’s already on his way now to Baton Rouge at the Museum of Public Art for a mural program with young adults.
But here we bring you his latest interactions with fluid geometric forms, pulldown gates, planes and poppies. Yes, bright red poppies. May they provide an opiatic reverie to thee in your lawn chair and your bare feet as you mop your brow and enjoy an icy can of cola.
OverUnder is swinging through Cleveland with his flying pull down gates, upside downy paper birds, bolts of bending flat energy, and circling blue DNA balls of cytosine. The visual dictionary that OU consults regularly for his street symbols varies and grows but often it pops with these metal gates that you’ll find throughout commercial strip malls and city streets after business closes.
For him they are a magnet – and his dream state must be swirling with these ubiquitous rolling metal gates that seem to invite some artists and writers to hit them up with tags and throwies and scraps of poetry and other little bits of mark-making. Ironically perhaps, the same metal gates have also been used to protect Banksy pieces. By recreating them with their original art or markings, he is preserving them and copying that piece of urban visual language into another neighborhood, even another city.
These new walls are part of Zoetic Walls – a project that Pawn Works has been intermittently and quietly facilitating for muralists around forgotten areas of Cleveland for a little over a year. “We have had the honor of curating our own little world of murals free of hype, thus far,” says Nick Marzullo of Pawn Works.
“We have started our 2014 Cleveland work with OverUnder. By leaving the existing brick to be used as the fill for his iconic paper birds, OverUnder created this high concept piece in Cleveland’s Historic Ohio City neighborhood,” he says.
New stuff from Cleveland today gives us a look at a project in the Waterloo District called Zoetic Walls that includes Street Artists LNY, Nanook, RAE and Gaia.
Organizer Nick Marzullo explains the new piece by Nanook that is firmly rooted in local history and politics.
“Nanook worked closely with the neighborhood on the development of his piece depicting a portrait of Carl Stokes, the former Cleveland Mayor and first Black mayor of any major city in US,” says Nick. Other symbols include the hand of city planning practitioner Norman Krumholz as he guides a car along a modernized highway system, something Krumholz is credited with bringing through the City of Cleveland.
Gaia’s barbershop pieces came out great and Mike from the barbershop is pretty psyched for the facelift in an old-skool airbrush style. Now if they can just fix that canopy, the 10th anniversary of Mike n Syd’s will be officially slammin’!
hygienic dress league (HDL) recently gold-plated an entire boarded up and neglected building in the Collinwood section of Cleveland as part of their ongoing conceptual branding art project. In the process, the destitute structure transformed into a solid block of bling.
Part Street Art, part culture jammer that brings to mind the Billboard Liberation Front, HDL plays with the nomenclature of consumerism and the corporate manipulation of culture. Just look at this shiny edifice! Don’t you want to buy something? A facemask? A bird, maybe?
Steve Coy, co-founders of the project with his wife Dorota, says HDL is actually a registered corporation and they do advertise, but “hygienic dress league does not manufacture any consumer service or product.”
Street Artist EVER was in Cleveland with Nick Marzullo from Pawn Works as Nick visited his hometown neighborhood of Collinwood a few weeks ago. While there the native Argentinian did this huge colorful and compelling mural in his surrealist style – perhaps it is a scene depicting a master of industry controlling the tools of technology while a mass of workers is in tumult below him. But just what does he see with those blue streams flowing from his eyes? Whatever the backstory is for his works, the talent and imagination are clear wherEVER he goes.
Nick wants to give a shout out to Amy Callahan of Arts Collinwood. Special thanks to Nick for these images.
1. Occupy Wall Street This Weekend (Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs, Repeat)
2. The London Police at Opera Gallery
3. “Fresh Kills” Anonymous Gallery Opens in Mexico City
4. “Groundbreak” behind CBGB’s in the Alley Tomorrow
5. “Paperboys” at Pandemic Saturday (BK)
6. POSE and KC Ortiz show “White Wash” at Known Gallery
7. Sixeart at N2 Galeria in Barcelona, Spain
8. “Dissidents” A group show at West Berlin Gallery
9. “SelfEst” at Kind of – Gallery.
10. Bask solo show “Box of Fun” at William Rupnik Gallery
11. VIDEO PREMIERE! TEEBS by Brock Brake in Chicago
12. JM Rizzi “Day Dreaming Under Streetlights” (VIDEO)
13. Nuria Mora”2 Estrellas” (VIDEO)
14. New from Snyder : “Carlsbad Toreador” (VIDEO)
Occupy Wall Street This Weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Repeat)
Yesterday was the two month mark for this nascent people’s movement and the signs on the Street are bigger and clearer than ever. One of our new favorites is the addition of projection art, which has a powerful effect on the facade of iconic architectural structures, or non-descript ones. Dedicated projection art on the street simply takes a graphic, a hand truck, a projector, and a car battery. It is also non-damaging to property. In these new days of unbridled creativity set free on the street, you can’t beat a good D.I.Y. idea. Look ma, no cans!
“Who Cares Wins” opens to the public today, minus the Dandy Warhols singing songs about dogs like they did last night at the opening. The large show solidifies TLP’s place in Manhattan and the technical tightness belies a deep belief in the power of the fun, friendship, graffiti, architecture, and the imagination. Arrive in a playful mood and you’ll dig it.
“Fresh Kills” Anonymous Gallery Opens in Mexico City
A downtown staple of inquisitive exploration, Anonymous Gallery is opening “Fresh Kills”, a group exhibition today in D.F., featuring their customary mixing of artists to create an ever more potent cocktail. The organizing principal for this show is the huge dump we have on Staten Island that will one day be a beautiful park for dogs to catch frisbees and teenagers to smoke pot in. NO LITTERING!
Artists include Richard Prince, Tom Sachs, Aaron Young, Agathe Snow, Hanna Liden,Swoon, Barry McGee, David Ellis, and Greg Lamarche.
For further information regarding this show click here.
“Groundbreak” behind CBGB’s in the Alley Tomorrow
Curated by Joyce Manalo of ArtForward & Keith Schweitzer of MaNY Project, this outdoor small group show will be waiting for you to come by tomorrow. Featured are Abe Lincoln Jr., Ellis Gallagher, and Jon Burgerman, who doodled the hell out of the sidewalk this week, bless him.
For further information regarding this show click here.
“Paperboys” at Pandemic Saturday (BK)
Okay, time to haul out to the south side of Williamsburg, Brooklyn Saturday night. With this show, you are at an epicenter for a solid new direction Street Art is going to. Wouldn’t want to be so bold to say “don’t miss it”, but…
Featured will be brand new work by ND’A, Labrona and Overunder.
“Most of my contributions are gouache pieces referencing some of my favorite paintings and places. I feel so fortunate for being able to travel and paint so much the last 2 years. It has really been a blessing! But now I’ve begun sourcing all those past images and street pieces for this new body of work where I can combine the architecture features, the figurative wheat pastes, and the paper bird phrases. It’s been a real reflective period, which I think is beneficial for people like me that are constantly churning out work (whether good or bad) so that I can now begin to see it with fresh eyes.” ~ Overunder
Also happening this weekend:
POSE and KC Ortiz show “White Wash” at Known Gallery in Los Angeles. Click here for more information.
Sixeart at N2 Galeria in Barcelona, Spain. Click here for more information.
“Dissidents” A group show at West Berlin Gallery in Berlin, Germany. Click here for more information.
“SelfEst” at Kind of – Gallery. A group art event. Sydney, Australia. Click here for more information.
Bask solo show “Box of Fun” at William Rupnik Gallery in Cleveland, OH. Click here for more information.
VIDEO PREMIERE! TEEBS by Brock Brake in Chicago
BSA Video debut of Photographer and BSA collaborator Brock Brake of artist Teebs who was recently in Chicago for his solo show at Pawn Works Gallery.
Brock Brake “Black Book”
JM Rizzi “Day Dreaming Under Streetlights” (VIDEO)
Cleveland’s favorite culture-spinning Czech vandal, Ales BASK Hostomsky comes back “home” with a portfolio of brand new, never-before seen, mixed-media works. Throwing innocence and purity right into the meat grinder, BASK’s newest series of portraits are both playful at heart, and sinister by nature. Through these difficult times in which we live, BASK shows us that we can still have fun by manipulating our own realities, even while they constantly change around us. A metaphor… that indicates that in this twisted world, we don’t always come out in the same manner in which we came in.
In commemoration of BASK’s fourth solo exhibition at WRG, the artist has partnered with 1xRun to make available a limited edition print titled, Fun Box Toons. This 24 x 24 in. giclee is printed on 330gsm archival cotton paper and is priced at $75 ea. The edition is available for seven days beginning Tuesday, November 15, and can only be purchased direct from 1xRUN.com
Please join us for the Box of Fun After-Party, hosted at Lava Lounge, immediately following the gallery reception on November 19. A swank atmosphere with live DJ, sumptuous foods and artfully-crafted drinks welcome gallery show-goers. An exhibition of new artworks from the portfolio, HEAT by Cleveland-based gallery owner and artist William Rupnik will be on view in the downstairs lounge. Lava Lounge is located at 1307 Auburn Avenue, in the historic Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland.
Reception at the Euclid Avenue gallery 7-10 PM, Saturday, November 19. After-party at Lava Lounge 10 PM – ? AM.
William Rupnik Gallery
1117 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland OH 44115
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
