Street artist/kinetic artist/commercial artist Felipe Pantone debuted his“Visual intensification: Focus” installation on the XO/Art Exosphere project at Sphere in Las Vegas,and it is blowing minds and stopping traffic (video below).
Another Sphere alum, Shepard Fairey has a new exhibition, Modular Frequency, opening this week in LA that distills three decades of modular geometry, street-campaign punch, and layered mixed-media into a tight visual rhythm drawn from Constructivism, propaganda graphics, and pop-culture overload.
Also, check out Say She She, a Brooklyn trio of female singers who are part of a larger 70s disco and soul revival a la Nigel Rodgers and Chic. They played at Greenpoint’s Warsaw last night, followed by an afterparty at Williamsburg’s Baby’s Alright. Video at the end of this article.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, including RnO, City Kitty, Chris RWK, ZOVER, KRS, The Postman, DELUDE, TwoFive, OH!, RIBET, HELCH, WILD WEST, and Robinson Moreno.
The State of New York is under a State of Emergency due to the storm, which made it a good decision to get out earlier this week to document new street art and graffiti. This is typically a slower period for artists and writers, but in this city, the street is never static. There’s always an ongoing visual discussion unfolding in public, often reflecting the moment back at us.
As the weather intensifies, attention turns to those most affected—especially people without shelter and neighbors who may need help. If you can, check in on people nearby and offer what you’re able: a blanket, food, or a small bit of assistance can make a real difference.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Acet, Dah Face, DASH, DELUDE, DIKS, DINK, FLASH, Hal Merick, Homesick, Kane, Mike, No Normal, Os Gemeos, Quaker Pirate, Trisan Eaton, Uwont, and Xara Thustra.
It looks like Xara Thustra is the artist behind the “STOP MEN” installation (sometimes interpreted as part of a larger, ongoing tag) on the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge. The letters are painted on a high, visible spot on the bridge structure, reportedly over several nights.
Snowy. Hard to see through right now. The physical temperature here in NYC is low, but the rhetorical temperatures are spiking across the land. The battle for freedom is in the courts and Congress and in the streets again, with the demonized and disenfranchised reeling back on their heels. When pressure like this builds, it surfaces everywhere at once—across institutions and culture, on ballots, in courtrooms, and eventually on the street—because culture absorbs, and sometimes rejects, what power attempts to normalize.
Humans never tire of this story—our story—the one where autocrats punch down, reign briefly, and are eventually upended by resistance. Otherwise, why does it recur across centuries, across societies and school districts and states and strata and Shakespeare? Silly and careless as we are, immigrants and the descendants of immigrants let our guard down again, and those who mistake domination for virtue rise again, attempting to strip us all of liberty, to fracture us, to manufacture narratives of the “other.”
One thing people don’t tire of is what keeps reappearing on walls and signs in cities nationwide: reminders of our ideals of welcoming the stranger, embracing difference, and becoming stronger because of it. Walls—often instruments of exclusion—remain contested surfaces for street artists and rebels, carrying rebuttal, invoking memory, and thrashing out dissent in public view. Immigrants are the heart of New York, our DNA melded through toil, competition, and chutzpah. We know tyrants, many of us, as did our parents and grandparents—having escaped them, named them, and fought back against them.
Lo, beware of those who forget where we came from: everywhere.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free… The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring ACE, Caryn Cast, CRKSHNK, DELUDE, Dieka, Garret Wasserman, Homesick, Jibz, Jim Power, Mosaic Man, Naiver, Qzar, Rae, Salami Doggy, and Welinoo.
The beat on the street is washed in autumn sunlight, cooler nights, and traffic jams. If you hear cars honking, you know its New York in the fall. Street artists and graffiti writers are still hard at work, or play, and we like to capture their work here, before it is gone.
And here we go boldly into the streets of New York to find new stuff from: Shepard Fairey, C215, Obey, Homesick, Queen Andrea, Steve the Bum, Boom, Pumpkin, Exiled, Stytte, Delude, Fader, and Aise.
Seizing the moment after a high-visibility Super Bowl performance, street artist Alberto León created a wheatpaste titled “America” in Barcelona. …Read More »
A transformed school bus becomes a mobile healing site at the US-Mexico border. This documentary short (Guadalupe Maravilla’s “Mariposa Relámpago”) …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
