All posts tagged: Faile

Dustin Yellin Suspends Dance in Glass for New NYC Ballet/Art Series

January 12, 2015 Artists

First it was the Street Art duo Faile. Then the photographer/scene maker JR. This spring it’s back to Brooklyn for ballet inspiration and cross-discipline-generation-pollination as Dustin Yellin will bring his sculptural paintings to the New York City Ballet and its Manhattan winter performances.

We’ve been right behind each one of these choices as a powerful partnership between the D.I.Y. street influenced art scene of New York today and the time honored expression of the ballet art form. This particular pairing isolates a dream most people have when witnessing the power and grace of dance – the ironic desire to suspend the dancers in movement – even if just for a minute – to more fully appreciate them.

With Dustin Yellin you may have that just that sort of opportunity because his detailed imagery and three dimensional collage will be available for anyone to see as he exhibit 15 new works created as part of an ongoing project of large-scale glass and mixed-media sculptures, each weighing more than 3,000 pounds. His multi-dimensional humans, or “psychogeographies”, will map out people in suspended animation.

“I make window sandwiches,” says Yellin as a simple distillation of his creation method and his project, which will eventually grow to 100 works in the next half-decade. To hear him speak of the layers of complexity captured at once, you hear that it is a way to capture many concepts as well – cellular memory, the atomization of our physicality, the human as the sum of all our experiences and history. Yellin would like to give you an opportunity to see through and within these humans, possibly grasping dreams, aspirations, humanity.

Starting January 20 the new works will be unveiled and on view throughout the 2015 Winter Season until March 1 – with special hours open to the public (below). As was the case with Faile and JR, 3 selected performances in February are prices within reach of most students and art fans of a number of income levels – and you get to bring something home with you as well.

Tickets go on sale today, January 12 at noon for the three special art series performances taking place February 12, 19 and 27

Single tickets for the NYCB Art Series performances are priced at $29 and will go on sale at noon on Monday, January 12, at nycballet.com, or by calling 212-496-0600. All audience members attending these three performances will also receive a special limited-edition takeaway created by Dustin Yellin to commemorate the NYCB Art Series collaboration.

NYCB will also host free, open hours for the general public to view the exhibition on the following dates: Thursday, February 12 through Sunday, February 22 – Mondays through Fridays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturdays from 10 a.m. to noon; and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Faile “Fuel, Fantasy, Freedom”, or Hot Rods, Unicorns & Coloring Books

July 15, 2014 Artists, Interview

Hormonal murmurings, childhood dreaming, race cars, hot rods, porky pig. All are on display at Fuel, Fantasy, Freedom, the new show by Faile running roughshod all summer at Galerie Hilger NEXT in Vienna. The collection of works on wood, paper, and fabric is a petrol injected force of beasts and beauty as the Brooklyn-based Street Artists / fine artists continue to challenge themselves to rummaging through childhood and teen lust and recombining images in an almost subliminal space juiced with fantasies from various perspectives, almost colored with punk-rock bleary hues. Or maybe it is more appropriate to say “parent-hood bleary” these days.

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Faile (photo © Jaime Rojo)

While early 2000s Faile also experimented with stopping the presses before the final screen, allowing the guts of their prints to be unfinished and imperfect in all their glory, recent projects like the one with the New York City Ballet have required a tighter control over the finished product. “I mean for a lot of these – like if you look back at 2002 with the “Space Shuttle” a lot of this is like going back to those things,” says Patrick McNeil as he shows us around the large collection of pieces in their Brooklyn studio before they made the trip to Austria last month – while Miller is at the computer finishing the cover design for a new 360 page Faile tome to be released this fall.

For the two Patricks Fuel, Fantasy, Freedom is an opportunity to re-engage with their art and to take a look back to the lesser finished, more ruff-cut approach of their early days. “A lot of the shows that we’ve done recently, like the one with the (New York City) ballet – things that require the woodblock prints, they are heavily dependent on assistants to like pump everything out to make the material and get ready for the show. So we are trying to get back – to get the “hand” back into it and step away from that process for a bit and go back to really being fully engaged with the work.”

“….These are diptychs, double page spreads of 1960s hotrod magazines . We took out all the content, redid the spread, redid all the cars, we did all of the text, dressed up a little bit of the content,” says Patrick McNeil. Faile (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: Much of this is like de-constructed Faile.
Patrick McNeil: Yeah I mean a lot of them have like the skeletal work of Faile. It’s basically how a Faile image gets built up, but we just kind of stopped earlier on it.

Brooklyn Street Art: So the color is blocked in on one layer and then you stopped. No detail.
Patrick McNeil: Yep, just kept them really loose and gestural

In addition to the “holding back” of the final over-printing, you’ll notice two other themes here. You may have seen sketches from the early 2000s of Faile’s ’57 Chevy screen printed in black on white that is rather scribbled upon by crayons? That image alone could provide sufficient foreshadowing for the other two directions for “Fuel, Fantasy, Freedom”. The artists actually experimented with their kids to have quality coloring-book time for this show, and McNeil consulted his own memories of his father as a race car driver while leaning on his Uncle Jim for his expertise of hot rods from the 60s and 70s.

“So we did six of these different cars – we kind of went in and we tricked everything out.” Faile (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Faile (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“And it’s kind of a personal thing with working on it with the kids,” says McNeil, “The other half of the show is about cars… and a lot of these things are what our kids like; Fantasy, fast cars, music, princesses, unicorns, animals, and all those kinds of things. The cars also go back to my childhood and with my dad.”

We turn to a collection of coloring book pages on the work table in the spacious worksop and talk about how kids fill shapes and areas with crayons or markers, and what color choices are involved. McNeil talk about how he spent time observing both his kids and Millers and taking the time to get inside their process. Eventually many of the new pieces reflect what he refers to as “collaboration”.

Faile. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“We were going through coloring books – We have all these amazing things from the 60s that were colored in. And the way kids would color them was they would block shit out and lock out shapes and I was like, ‘these look rad, we should do like a series of paintings.’ We’ve always talked about the trapping, the painting that goes in before the final print goes on,” he says.

“So we started to take these home and have the kids work on them or we would work on them together – so I painted this one and my son painted this one at home but when I was painting with the kids I got really in tune with just watching them – and the color and thinking about the shapes,” he says as he describes the very similarly rendered pieces he and his kindergarden-aged son would sometimes come up with. “My son sends me this one and he did the legs and the body kind of like how I did and I took what he did and I reinterpreted it like that and you kind of get this kind of thing happening.”

Faile (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: So you feel like you were tuning into a more childlike approach?
Patrick McNeil: Not only that I’m like collaborating with my son and he’s five and I would do them and then show him and he was like, “Daddy, why are you copying my work?” And I would say, “Well this isn’t copying, we’re collaborating and you’re helping me and I’m re-interpreting what you are doing.”

Faile. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

When it came to the hot-rods – the two page magazine spreads and the hero worship massive solo prints – more senior members of the family were brought into the process.

Patrick McNeil: So getting back to the cars – my dad used to race cars
Brooklyn Street Art: Did he have that roll bar inside the car?

Patrick McNeil: Yeah he raced cars and my Uncle Jim used to race cars in the 60s. – so here’s one he used to race. So we did a series of race cars, wait I’ll show you…

Brooklyn Street Art: Wow, yeah,
Patrick McNeil: So we did six of these different cars – we kind of went in and we tricked everything out. I worked with my Uncle Jim to get all the accurate information for these particular cars, the speeds that they ran, the engines that were running in them, the horsepower, transmission, the tracks that they raced at. And then we took the real content and made fictional cars with fictional names.

Faile. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: So they are grounded in fact…
Patrick McNeil: It’s grounded in fact but made entirely of fiction. So of the cars we did six different cars.

Brooklyn Street Art: My god, these are superstars.
Patrick McNeil: And of the six cars we did three of each again. You can kind of see the variations.

It’s not that Faile has been impersonal in the past, he says, it’s just that they are looking a little more inward a little at the moment. One influential artist that he points to is Mike Kelly, whose recent retrospective at PS1 drew on so many parts of his daily life and existence for inspiration in his work. “After seeing the Mike Kelley show and hearing how his life informed his work – we’re kind of embracing that. I mean the work always has some personal twist – like “Urban Assault” is about moving out to the suburbs while “Bunny Girl” was more about creating an image. There are things of course that connect more to personal experience,” he says.

Faile (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Fuel, Fantasy, Freedom clearly contains a lot of each, and for Faile it the freedom they have experienced in the making of these new pieces is as evident on their faces as it is in the vibrancy and risk-taking of the new work. From their earliest mono-prints and stencils to now, the duo has returned to the raw punk-rock well for inspiration and each time have found themselves re-aligned.

Brooklyn Street Art: This show really spreads wide. How many pieces are there?

Patrick McNeil: So there’s the magazine spreads, there’s five diptychs, six cars… Ten of the smaller, six of the larger verticals, three horizontal and three wood pieces. Then the t-shirts, the wood carvings…

Brooklyn Street Art: And you have used a lot of free hand rendering and a free range of materials.
Patrick McNeil: Yeah it’s a mixture of spray paint, acrylic house paint, and oil pastels, a little bit of pencil or pencil crayon. But this show has been a lot of fun to work on – It’s been good to be in touch with the work.

Faile (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Faile. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Faile (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Faile. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Faile “Fuel, Fantasy, Freedom” exhibition is currently on view at the Galerie Ernst Hilger NEXT in Vienna. Click HERE for more details.

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Sixe Paredes ‘Futurismo Ancestral’ Opens at Somerset House in London

May 21, 2014 Artists, Interview

Starting today, for one week only, the Andes will be inside the Somerset House.

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © Rafa Suñen)

London’s spectacular neo-classical home of arts and culture along the River Thames will play host to an all-encompassing exhibition experience mounted by the Barcelona-born graffiti artist Six Paredes in his tribute to Peruvian and Andean culture. Futurismo Ancestral: An Offering to Peru by Sixe Paredes has been inspired by the traditional and the modern, and aims to meld the two together surreally, and really.

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © Rafa Suñen)

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © A(by)P)

For weeks we have been seeing the progress of a loosely banded consortium of brother street artists laying plans and constructing exhibition elements beneath the fountained public courtyard. Today the public can experience a series of walkways leading to large-scale and smaller works evoking the rich color and symbols of the region; tapestries, totem sculptures, ceramics and quipus (a system of knotted cords known as ‘talking knots’), masks and fluorescent chichas (posters).

“We are taking over three spaces at Somerset House, essentially the whole of the lower floor of the building,” explains Rafael Schacter of A(by)P, an organization that enables artists to produce events and exhibit work and who organized the installation with his partners and the Somerset House. Built and installed by a “dream team” of urban and street artists and students from University College London, where Schacter teaches, the exhibition is complemented with daily interactive events including Peruvian and Andean food, music, film, and performance.

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © Rafa Suñen)

Futurismo Ancestral is born from the travels of Sixe Paredes to Peru beginning in 2009 and his adoration of the richness he experienced in the culture compelled him to bring it back to share. One of the six street artists featured on the river façade of the Tate Modern six years ago along with Faile, JR, Blu, Os Gemeos, and Nunca for it’s pivotal street art exhibition, Six Paredes completed his most recent large scale wall just last month at the Biennale D’Art Urbain in Charleroi, Belgium. Schacter, who co-curated the Street Art expo at that Tate show and who authored The World Atlas of Street Art & Graffiti with Yale in 2013, says that this return is Paredes first major solo show in the UK .

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © Rafa Suñen)

Sixe Paredes spotting the future on the horizon. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © A(by)P)

During the preparation for this much anticipated and lively show, BSA had the opportunity to speak with both Six Paredes and Rafael Schacter about the origins, inspirations, and preparations for Futurismo Ancestral.

Brooklyn Street Art: After touring Peru and being exposed to such eye-popping color, isn’t it surprising to be in such a grey northern city like London?
Sixe Paredes: It was not surprising for me to come here and find myself in a grey city because this color predominates in so many cities in Europe and so many European cities prohibit murals and even have specialized brigades set up to clean and remove color. Throughout my journey in different regions of Peru I’ve seen a lot of color but color can be found in all the different cultures of the world, when they maintain their primordial essence.

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © Sandra Butterfly)

Brooklyn Street Art: Rafael, can you tell us about Futurismo Ancestral and how it came about?
Rafael Schacter: Futurismo Ancestral is all about the connection between the traditional and the contemporary, the fusion of the Peruvian visual culture and craft tradition with the visual palette so unique to Sixe Paredes himself. Since I last worked with Sixe in the UK, he has been living in between Peru and his hometown of Barcelona, he has become obsessed with the visual culture of the region and has learned the techniques of ceramic and textile production with famous artisans and artists throughout the region. This exhibition is about bringing together the deep history and heritage of Peruvian visual culture, and his love for this tradition with his unique, colorful, distinct style in an all embracing, multifaceted manner.

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © Rafa Suñen)

Brooklyn Street Art: Sixe Paredes, you have already been incorporating a certain minimalism into your aesthetics over the past ten years. Is it difficult to merge that understated quality with the vibrant enthusiasm of Peruvian and Andean folk?
Sixe Paredes: My art has always been characterized by the agglomeration of shapes and colors. Throughout different periods I started introducing more elements, such as the circuits, which led my paintings towards another dimension – this dimension enhanced my painting, allowing for other interpretations of my work. In recent years I have been synthesizing some of my series. I like to play with this idea because it leaves more room for reflection and I don’t need as many elements to express myself. Some of these elements are iconic to my work, such as crests or beaks which have always been in my compositions and can be found there today.

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © Rafa Suñen)

Brooklyn Street Art: The work here is simultaneously modern and folk – with the bold colors and raw patterning and symbols combined with a certain minimalism. Rafael, can you walk us through the spaces in a way that helps translate this convivial duality in an exhibition space.
Rafael Schacter: Somerset House is really an amazing location for us to be working in, we are both proud and excited to be working here! After you have exited our introductory area, our visitors will go outside into the Lighwells, an amazing outside space which has been used for films such as Sherlock Holmes among others; within this arched space, we have built a series of 3 meter high trapezoidal arches – shapes which are highly significant in Inca culture. Acting as a rite of passage, as a journey from one sacred space to another, visitors well make their way into what is called the Deadhouse, an underground catacomb which exists directly below the famous Somerset House courtyard. This space, aptly, will function as a sacred temple space, within which Sixe’s ceramics, quipus and tapestries will be housed.

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © Rafa Suñen)

Brooklyn Street Art: Not only are the color palettes from the traditional Peruvian culture warm, so too are the materials. Can you talk about the warmer, more earthen properties of wood, of yarn, and hand made masks – and how they affect your work?
Sixe Paredes: Peru has had a considerable influence on my painting palette, bringing more color to it and motivating me to use new mediums, materials and techniques, some of which have endured since ancient times. I always wanted to move towards a new path, a more ancestral path, revalidating primal techniques through a contemporary perspective.

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © A(by)P)

Brooklyn Street Art: You have a stellar group supporting this one week event – some of these folks have had big shows of their own so it’s good to see them supporting another artist.
Rafael Schacter: One of the key things about A(by)P is that we want to be for artists by artists. We don’t want to simply get in a bunch of contractors to assist in bringing the project to life but want rather to recreate the group dynamic and energy that is so crucial to these artists’ worlds. As such, for every project, we want to bring the artist’s family together to help bring it to life; in that way, the creative juices and creative possibilities can flow in a much more organic manner. And not only that, but all these artists on the team are people who we will continue to work with in the future on solo shows of their own.

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © A(by)P)

For Sixe’s show for example, we really have got a dream team working together, a group who like you say are all artists of massive acclaim themselves. Both Eltono and Nano4814 are two of my favourite artists in the world; Eltono has just had a superb solo homecoming show in Madrid at Slowtrack and Nano4814 and insane solo show at the Delimbo Gallery in Sevilla. Pablo Limon, our exhibition designer is one of the most amazing makers I have ever come across, a creative genius. And Lucas Cantu, who is working on our graphics, branding and exhibition production, is the director of the Savvy Studios as well as the founder of the Nrmal Festival in Mexico. As I said, the dream team! And then alongside this we have had amazing support from the students of University College London, who have all been absolutely incredible.

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © A(by)P)

Brooklyn Street Art: Many Street Artists are bringing the animal world into their work today and sometimes artists will say they are giving the animals a voice to speak to us. How have animals been important in your compositions?
Six Paredes: In my case, the animal theme has been present in my work for many years, and this partly because of the admiration I feel for them. For me, among the most fascinating creatures of the animal kingdom are birds, mainly because of the wide variety of species, thousands of colours and silhouettes – and their relationship to the celestial and to flight. In terms of my compositions, this theme is important to me because it reminds us that we are also animals within the same world.

Brooklyn Street Art: In what way do you think of your work as something that evokes the future?
Six Paredes: I think my work evokes the future because it merges two different visions, the ancient and the contemporary and the bond between them which leads us to reflect about many of the things that humans have left on their way and some of them I think would be important to remember.

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © A(by)P)

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © Sandra Butterfly)

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © A(by)P)

Sixe Paredes. “Futurismo Ancestral” Somerset House. April 2014. London, UK (photo © Sandra Butterfly)

Sixe Paredes Futurismo Ancestral: An Offering To Peru at Somerset House in London, UK. Click HERE for more information on this exhibition.

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Kabul to Brooklyn, Street Art and Graffiti as Common Ground

February 26, 2014 Artists

Afghanistan is not the first place you think of when someone says Street Art scene and Kabul would certainly be sort of low on your list of urban art festivals to check out, but surprisingly it has both. These are a couple of the revelations we had earlier this month when BSA welcomed three 20-something artists to tour the streets of Brooklyn – and meet one of our own homegrown Street Art duos in their studio.

Abul Qasem Foushanji, Ommolbanin Samshia Hassani, and Sayed Mohebullah Ramin Naqshbandi were all good sports despite the brutishly cold February day – in fact Sayed had a fairly light jacket on because he said it gets as cold or colder back home in Mazar-i Sharif where he is a painter and student who has tried his hand at stencil work.

From left to right Qasem, Shamsia and Sayed in front of an Icy & Sot mural in Brooklyn. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Qasem and Samshia both grew up in Iran, so it made sense that they were excited when we began the tour by checking out the large mural done by Iranian émigrés and brothers Icy & Sot, who now live in Brooklyn. While Arthur, our astutely amiable co-host from the State Department, helped keep the mini-van warm and free of parking tickets, their escort/interpreter Mr. Aziz walked up and over the snowbanks with us while we checked out works by a number of graffiti and Street Artists all around the North Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint.

Shamsia, Qasem and Sayed in front of ROA’s squirrel mural in Brooklyn. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The Central Asian country of Afghanistan has historically eschewed modern art as being unacceptable and much art was destroyed by the Taliban in the last few decades for being un-Islamic.

With such a restrictive atmosphere it was good to learn that Qasem plays bass in a thrash metal band, does sound installations and has experimented with abstract expressionism – something that would have been unheard of in the 90s. “In the early 2000s when the Taliban left the country, there was nothing,” he says as he observes a gradual building of hope in the creative community.

Shamsia in front of Galo’s mural in Brooklyn. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

As the sun went down we were welcomed into the vast office and studio of Patrick Miller and Patrick McNeal, who together comprise the Brooklyn based Street Art collective better known as Faile. Having just walked the same streets where the Patricks began many of their experiments at the turn of the century, it was a great opportunity for the guests to see what a world-class art making studio looks like, to ask questions, and to share some stories about how the scenes on streets of Brooklyn and Kabul differ.

Mr. Aziz takes a cell phone snap of a rusted C215 piece while Sayed looks on. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

Speaking about their early days of illicit art posting, McNeal explains “You’d go out and you get to the wall and it’s quick,” he says with a snap of the fingers. “You’re not taking the time, necessarily, to think. And then you finish it up and get away from it and you came back to see it the next day. There was something loose in it, where now everything gets very tight and refined,” he says as he gestures to the large artworks in progress across the tables and the floor of the studio.

Qasem takes Shamsia’s portrait in front of Nelson Mandela’s portrait by Jason Coatney in Brooklyn. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“Yeah, it’s changed a lot over time,” says Miller about the street art scene, especially in the area of Williamsburg that has become a high-rent playground for professionals and well-heeled college kids. “Real estate, gentrification, a lot of those things have played into it in a lot of places like here and Barcelona where you used to see a lot more things on the street, it doesn’t really exist.”

Sayed, Qasem and Shamsia in front of a Faile wheatpaste in Brooklyn. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

One thing we learned is that Shamsia doesn’t even usually feel that she can go on the street in Kabul to create her work because she fears berating words, insults and possibly worse from people who don’t think a woman should be doing such a thing. And would never go out after dark. “It’s for the boys to go out at night. I wish to do so also but I am a girl. It is dangerous,” she says with regret, but is determined to use her art to advocate for the rights of girls and women in whatever way that she can.

One project she calls “Graffiti Dreams” is comprised entirely in her imagination and on her computer – where she creates virtual street art scenes on buildings she has photographed as a way to at least paint walls in her mind. “That’s nothing, but for me it is everything because I can do graffiti somehow.” She took out her iPad to show McNeal some of her renderings.

Shamsia poses in front of the same Faile piece she just saw in the street, but this time it’s at Faile’s studio. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

After British graffiti artist Chu held a one-week graffiti workshop for nine artists in Kabul in 2010 where the concept of graffiti and street art was introduced from a Western perspective, Shamsia and other young artists took the art form to heart.

She has traveled internationally in the last few years meeting other artists and sometimes collaborating with them like Tika from Zürich, Berlin’s Klub 7, and the well known Los Angelelino Street Artist El Mac, with whom she did two collaborations now on display in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and in Brisbane, Australia.

The Afghani artists pose with Patrick Miller and Patrick McNeil of Faile at their studio. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

McNeal asked Samshia, “How did you get exposed to graffiti?,” and Samshia talked about the workshop with Chu and how it affected her.

“I thought if I did graffiti then I could introduce art to the people,” she says, “Because no one goes to exhibitions and galleries – only some very important people are invited to exhibits. And I thought that I could put art in the street for all people and maybe they have never seen that there is this art.”

Qasem and Patrick Miller. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“How do you get spray paint there?” he followed up.

“There are very bad quality spray paint there,” she replies with a smile. “These are just for color to put somewhere. It’s not really for painting. The color drops a lot, and I’m not changing the size of the caps. Sometimes I do the small details with small brushes because the spray can is not able to do very thin lines.”

“That’s cool though,” McNeal encouraged, “ because that will inform your style and the way that you work.”

Shamsia and Patrick McNeil. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

As one of the first graffiti artists in Kabul, Shamsia is also unusual because most practicing artists of any discipline are men – and women face resistance to their participation in many roles, including as an artist on the street. Now an associate professor at Kabul University where she leads workshops to teach students how to use aerosol spray to create art, Ms. Hassani created a festival this December to highlight graffiti and Street Art as an art practice.

Her own work features stylized women in blue burqas, fish, and calligraphy that references poetry. As often happens, the definition of graffiti and street art are slightly different in Afghanistan than they would be in western cities like London and New York, often closer to what might be called murals or community walls.

Qasem and Patrick look through some Faile gems. (photo © Steven P. Harrington)

For now she is planning a new program when she returns to Kabul University in the spring.

“Another graffiti workshop is coming too for some children who have no parents. They are often very small girls and they have no parents and I want to help them and have a workshop for them,” she explains about her desire to provide restorative healing through art in a city torn by war. “I will start to teach a new subject, making characters, because there is nothing like that right now. I would like to add characters, because everyone likes characters. I would like to teach some technical steps, some secrets of how to make them.”

Artists talk (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The night ends with tea, cookies, and conversation in a warm living room and the artists talk about some of their projects, internet service, social media, and other ways that society is evolving and what they hope for art in Afghanistan. As he describes his work future projects Sayed says would like to create politically themed messages for the street. Qasem talks about a culture-jamming project creating a false college course advertisement that may also be humorous. Then in a flash, the visit is over, numbers and emails are exchanged and they get ready to go back out in the cold.

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In 2012 Shamsia collaborated with Los Angeles based Street Artist El Mac on two murals in Sai Gon, Vietnam. The first mural was painted in September of 2012 in front of Sàn Art, an artist non-profit contemporary art organization in Sai Gon. The second mural, also painted in Sai Gon was unveiled in Brisbane, Australia at the Asia Pacific Triennial in December 2012.

An El Mac and Shamsia collaboration in front of Sàn Art. Sai Gon,Vietnam. September, 2012. (photo © courtesy of Sàn Art)

El Mac and Shamsia “Birds of a Nation” collaboration. Brisbane, Australia. December 2012. (photo © courtesy of Viet Nam The World Tour)

The figure in the center is a portrait of Shamsia by El Mac from photographs that he took of her. The writing that surrounds the portrait is a poem by Ms. Hassani which she integrated with her own designs. The poem reads:

پرنده های بی وطن ،همه اسیرن مثل من ،صدای خواندن ندارن

Birds of no nation
Are all captive
Like me
With no voice for singing

Ommolbanin Shamsia Hassan: Afghanistan Graffiti

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The Power of Color via Street Art, Graffiti, and Murals

February 5, 2014 Artists

No doubt it is the grey days of late winter that is making us think about this as we brace for the next snowstorm, but today we’re considering the impact that Street Art color has on architecture that never asked for it.

We’re not the first to think of hues, shades, tones, and palettes when it comes to the man made environment of course, but it does strike us that most of the buildings that are hit up by street art and murals today were designed by architects who never imagined art on their facade.

Os Gemeos in Boston. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Modern architecture for some reason is still primarily grey, washed out greens, beige, eggshell, snore.

“Color is something that architects are usually afraid of,” said internationally known and awarded architect Benedetta Tagliabue in an interview last May about the topic of color. A generalization probably, and you can always find exceptions of colorfully painted neighborhoods globally like the Haight in San Francisco, La Boca in Buenos Aires, Portafino in Italy, Guanajuato in Mexico, Bo-Kaap in Capetown, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and the Blue City of India, but many of those examples speak to color blocking and pattern.

Interesni Kazki in Baltimore. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

We’ve been looking at the power of Street Art to reface, re-contextualize, re-energize, and re-imagine a building and its place in the neighborhood. Some times it is successful, other times it may produce a light vertigo. The impact of work on buildings by today’s Street Artists and muralists depends not only on content and composition but largely on the palette they have chosen. It sounds trite, and self-evident perhaps, but much of Street Art is about color, and primarily on the warm scale first described by Faber Birren with his OSHA colors and color circle in the 1930s .

Faile in Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Birren developed his color system with the observation that artists favor the warm colors more than the cold, from the violet side of red and extending beyond yellow because “, their effect is more dynamic and intense and because the eye can, in fact, distinguish more warm colors than cold.”

It’s common now to think of 21st century Street Art as the graffiti-influenced practice that primarily activates the detritus of the abandoned industrial sector blighting western cities in the wake of trade agreements that sent all the jobs to lands without protections and regulations. While that is definitely the sort of neglected factory architecture preferred for “activation” by many graffiti artists and Street Artists alike, we also see more curious couplings of color with the delicately ornate, the regal, or even modernist structures today thanks to artists being invited, rather than chased.

Shepard Fairey in Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The results? Abstractionist, cubist, geometric, letter-based, illustrative, figurative, text-based, outsider, folk, dadaist, pop. One common denominator: color.

“The environment and its colors are perceived, and the brain processes and judges what it perceives on an objective and subjective basis. Psychological influence, communication, information, and effects on the psyche are aspects of our perceptual judgment processes,” writes Frank H. Mahnke in his recent piece for Archinect. The author of Color, Environment, & Human Response has made it his mission to explore psychological, biological effects of color and light and to help creators of the man-made environment make good choices.

Whether all of these choices are good, we leave up to you. But it is worth considering that Street Artists have been part of the conversation on the street for decades now, making powerful suggestions to architects and city planners , so maybe it’s worth taking another look at what they’ve been up to lately.

Ever in Baltimore. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Escif in Atlanta. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Kenton Parker and Roa in Miami. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

LUDO in Chicago. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Anthony Lister in Los Angeles. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Kobra in Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Smells, Cash4 and Spiro in Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Don Rimx in El Barrio. Harlem, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Agostino Iacurci in Atlanta. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Barry McGee in Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Jaz and Cern in Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Pose and Revok in Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Rime, Dceve and Toper in Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Pixel Pancho in Miami. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Deeker and David Pappaceno in Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Reka in Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

RRobots in Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

MOMO in Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Skewville in Brooklyn, NYC with an old NEKST tag on top. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

3ttman and Elias in Atlanta. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Chris Stain and Billy Mode tribute to Martha Cooper in Brooklyn with ROA on the water tank. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Rubin in Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Os Gemeos in Manhattan, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

JMR in Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Greg LaMarche in Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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This article was also published on The Huffington Post

The Golden Age of Street Art in Barcelona – now on FB

January 28, 2014 Artists

Every Street Art scene has what it calls its “Golden Age” – that time when artists are just popping up new pieces every week and you can sense a real evolution in style and substance is happening before your eyes. For Barcelona many will tell you that they had a golden age during the first four years of the century when it felt like walls all over some areas of the city became a vibrant unbridled gallery and the Spanish city became a tourist destination for artists and fans alike. While there is still a scene there now, much of the areas have been developed for commercial and shopping escapades for visitors rather than urban exploration.

Btoy (photo © BCNWalls Project)

“BCN Walls Project” is the brainchild of Daniel Narváez, who recently contacted us to tell us about his project of posting images from 2000 to 2007 during his golden age of graffiti in Barcelona. We took a look at the Facebook page and were pleased to see some images of artwork that recall our own beginnings recording the turn of the century Street Art explosion that began in Brooklyn and New York at large at that time. No telling how his page will develop, but its worth a look to see what else Narváez will be pulling out of his archives.

Miss Van (photo © BCNWalls Project)

Faile (photo © BCNWalls Project)

Unknown (photo © BCNWalls Project)

For more images of Street Art In Barcelona from 2000 to 2007 click on the link below:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bcnwallsproject/511032425656978

A New Knitter on the Block, London Kaye Brings her “Ballerinas”

January 7, 2014 Artists

Yarn Bombing! Yarn Storming! Tell me another yarn.

Knitting and crocheting for the street is hardly new, but it is experiencing a great surge of interest right now – to the thrill of some who find it adorable and cute, and to the utter disgust of graffiti and Street Art dudes and dudettes who think it is all a trifle – not hardcore or STREET enough to be allowed up on walls and fences or on the, uh, STREET.

Also there are those mild-mannered fans who just think it is a cool thing to stumble upon some seemingly random hand knitted yarn things in a loud grimey underpass.

London Kaye (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ah, but that is just the point isn’t it? Artists who put their work up in the public sphere don’t usually ask for anyone’s permission and London Kaye joins that ever-growing list of bad-ass bombers, even if they are ballerinas.

On a side note: Have you noticed ballet has been all the freaking rage for Street Art over the last year? Faile did their Pas de deux with the New York City Ballet last spring, JR is getting ready to mount his project with them presently, and this series of dancers climbed a fence sometime in mid-December. Remember our first picture of the year LAST year? It’s like it was a telepathic message from the street – a vast conspiracy of so-called HI and LOW culture. It’s just as well that ballet get a kick in the leotards; since it was becoming an art form enjoyed by a dwindling number of patrons who are clumped on both ends of the human timeline but few in between those core constituencies of 6 year olds and 600 year olds.

London Kaye (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Back to our main story; A genuine newcomer on the street scene, knitter London Kaye follows her own whims and subject matter – not just ballerinas. She actually did a pretty cool reinterpretation of one of Invader’s tile pieces just after his went up at the turn of November, and which we posted that week. She joins the Street Art scene like most do and did – an artist in her early 20s who is churning out new work almost daily, a relatively new type of “bomber” who just wants her stuff to be seen by as many passersby as possible – before it dances away.

London Kaye (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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The 2013 BSA Year in Images (VIDEO)

December 18, 2013 Artists

Here it is! Our 2013 wrap up featuring favorite images of the year by Brooklyn Street Art’s Jaime Rojo.

Before our video roundup below here is the Street Art photographer’s favorite of the year, snapped one second before he was singled out of a New York crowd, handcuffed, and stuffed into a police car – sort of like the Banksy balloons he was capturing.

“Among all the thousands of photos I took this year there’s one that encapsulates the importance of Street Art in the art world and some of the hysteria that can build up around it,” he says of his final shot on the final day of the one month Better Out Than In artist ‘residency’ in NYC this October. It was a cool day to be a Street Art photographer – but sadly Rojo was camera-less in a case of mistaken identity, if only for a short time.

Released two hours later after the actual car-jumping trespasser was charged, Rojo was happy to hear the Chief Lieutenant tell his officer “you’ve got the wrong man”, to get his shoelaces back, and to discover this photo was still on his camera. He also gets to tell people at parties that he spent some time in the holding cell with the two guys whom New York watched tugging down the B-A-N-K-S-Y.

What’s everybody looking at? Jaime Rojo’s favorite image of the year at the very end of the Banksy brouhaha. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Now, for the Video

When it came to choosing the 112 images for the video that capture the spirit of the Street Art scene in ’13, we were as usual sort of overwhelmed to comb through about ten thousand images and to debate just how many ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ pieces made it into the mix. Should we include only images that went up under the cover of the night, unsanctioned, uncensored, uncompromised, unsolicited and uncommissioned? Isn’t that what Street Art is?

Right now there are a growing number of legal pieces going up in cities thanks to a growing fascination with Street Art and artists and it is causing us to reevaluate what the nature of the Street Art scene is, and what it may augur for the future. You can even say that from a content and speech perspective, a sizeable amount of the new stuff is playing it safe – which detracts from the badass rebel quality once associated with the practice.

These works are typically called by their more traditional description – murals. With all the Street Art / graffiti festivals now happening worldwide and the growing willingness of landlords to actually invite ‘vandals’ to paint their buildings to add cache to a neighborhood and not surprisingly benefit from the concomitant increase in real estate values, many fans and watchers have been feeling conflicted in 2013 about the mainstreaming that appears to be taking place before our eyes. But for the purposes of this roundup we decided to skip the debate and let everybody mix and mingle freely.

This is just a year-end rollicking Street Art round-up; A document of the moment that we hope you like.

Ultimately for BSA it has always been about what is fresh and what is celebrating the creative spirit – and what is coming next. “We felt that the pieces in this collection expressed the current vitality of the movement – at least on the streets of New York City,” says photographer and BSA co-founder Rojo. It’s a fusillade of the moment, complete with examples of large murals, small wheat pastes, intricate stencils, simple words made with recycled materials or sprayed on to walls, clay installations, three dimensional sculptures, hand painted canvases, crocheted installations, yarn installations etc… they somehow captured our imaginations, inspired us, made us smile, made us think, gave us impetus to continue doing what we are doing and above all made us love this city even more and the art and the artists who produce it.

Brooklyn Street Art 2013 Images of the Year by Jaime Rojo includes the following artists;

A Dying Breed, Aakash Nihalini, Agostino Iacursi, Amanda Marie, Apolo Torres, Axel Void, Bagman, Bamn, Pixote, Banksy, B.D. White, Betsy, Bishop203, NDA, Blek le Rat, br1, Case Maclaim, Cash For Your Warhol, Cholo, Chris RWK, Chris Stain, Billy Mode, Christian Nagel, Cost, ENX, Invader, Crush, Dal East, Damien Mitchell, Dase, Dasic, Keely, Deeker, Don’t Fret, The Droid, ECB, el Seed, El Sol 25, Elbow Toe, Faile, Faith 47, Five Pointz, Free Humanity, Greg LaMarche, Hot Tea, How & Nosm, Icy & Sot, Inti, Jilly Ballistic, John Hall, JR, Jose Parla, Judith Supine, Kremen, Kuma, LMNOPI, London Kaye, Love Me, Martha Cooper, Matt Siren, Elle, Mika, Miss Me, Missy, MOMO, Mr. Toll, Nychos, Okuda, Alice Mizrachi, OLEK, Owen Dippie, Paolo Cirio, Paul Insect, Phetus, Phlegm, Revok, Pose, QRST, Rambo, Ramiro Davaro, Reka, Rene Gagnon, ROA, RONES, Rubin, bunny M, Square, Stikki Peaches, Stikman, Swoon, Tristan Eaton, The Lisa Project 2013, UFO 907, Willow, Swill, Zed1, and Zimer.

Read more about Banksy’s last day in New York here and our overview of his residency in the essay “Banksy’s Final Trick” on The Huffington Post.

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Snapping Street Spirit at Miami Art Basel 2013

December 9, 2013 Artists

Miami was sunny and warm all weekend! New York had two snow-related car pileups overnight and a two-hour snow/sleet delay for schools this morning.

Thus we explain the attraction of an annual art circus that swims through the balmy Miami streets and fairs and beaches in early December called Art Basel. Each year it is better and worse than the year before, depending on who you got to dance with, or how much money you made, or how many walls you painted.

For Street Art there is now a bit more glam and glitz than in the past as the circling investors/collectors/brands are poised to ponder and plunder the possibilities presented – and there are the looky loos with cell cameras clicking, posing with friends and sometimes the artist if you are lucky. And there is still the basic pleasure of hitting up a wall and hanging out with your friends regardless of who sees it or not.

But hopefully somebody sees it.

For photographer Geoff Hargadon the pilgrimage is one more art fair, and one more opportunity to get off the beaten path to see what’s going on in the margins. An observer of behavior and communications and anthropological behaviors, Geoff captures some of the art on the walls, sure, but he also is looking at the trappings and the detritus and associated meanings.

“I don’t see any sense in taking pictures of all the stuff that had already been shot by the rest of the world,” says Hargadon of these fresh shots from Miami that he shares with BSA readers today. “I was trying to capture the spirit and the chaos of the street scene in a different way while being true to the art, the artists and their work.”

BSA Film Friday 09.27.13

September 27, 2013 Artists

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

Now screening: Graphic Surgery for “The Canals Project“, OLEK in “Russia’s PRIDE“, Team OBEY Visits FAILE, STREET ART BRAZIL via Frankfurt, and M-City in Paris.

BSA Special Feature: Graphic Surgery
for “The Canals Project”

Erris Huigens and Gysbert Zijlstra, artists from Amsterdam who together are called Graphic Surgery, work here in the industrial fields along the waterway near London’s site of the Olympics last year. The primary audience will mostly be floating by in this area once known for local spontaneous Street Art and now curated, and Graphic Surgery’s silhouetted geometrics will be sharply cutting as you pass, minimal and constructivist while you propel through the rippling canal. All the mirroring and refracting of angles and shapes are flattened momentarily, wavering and ricocheting off and with their surroundings in black and white.

As they speak the two artists take you with them to see how it is done, and how it is inspired – capturing the lines and the physical context of placement with intention while their intersections with modernism and industry are distilled.

Graphic Surgery: The Canals Project. London 2013. Produced by Cedar Lewisohn.

OLEK “Russia’s PRIDE”

A new video documenting Street Artist Olek as she did a public art installation in St. Petersberg last week. You can also read her interview this week with BSA here: OLEK Interview and Exclusive Photos “From Russia With Pride”.

Team OBEY Visits Team FAILE

A quick look inside Faile’s studio as they prepare for their currently running show at Dallas Contemporary museum.

STREET ART BRAZIL via Frankfurt

Ending today the Schrirn Kunsthalle has been showcasing the diversity of Brazilian graffiti art as Brazil was the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Artists included are HERBERT BAGLIONE, GAIS, RIMON GUIMARÃES, JANA JOANA & VITCHÉ, NUNCA, ONESTO, ALEXANDRE ORION, SPETO, FEFE TALAVERA, TINHO, and ZEZÃO

M-City In Paris: Interview

A relaxed look at stencil Street Artist M-City as he completes a huge wall in central Paris, followed by an interview at Itinerrance Gallery by Chrixcel.

With special thanks to Fatcap.com

Images of The Week: 09.08.13

September 8, 2013 Artists

First there was Labor Day, then the Jewish New Year, so it was easy to get a seat on the subway, and sometimes next to a model who’s here for Fashion Week and who got a room in Brooklyn on Air BnB (thinking BK is just steps away from Manhattan). Now everybody’s getting ready to vote in the mayoral primary on Tuesday and all the students are gearing up to start the new school year, and most people you meet on the street and on stoops are talking distrustfully/quizzically about O taking us to war in Syria. Meanwhile no humidity and lots of sunshine means every day seems nice for painting, pasting, or dissing somebody else’s work – depending on your frame of mind.

The big Calligraffiti show in Chelsea was packed Thursday night, where you could see some of your favorite artists in person like El Seed, Niels Shoe Meulman, Rostarr, and Olek, and you could catch work from Haring, Basquiat, and a room full of LAII. Out in Bushwick you could even catch Blek Le Rat, one of the originators of this kind of work, putting up some new pieces as he prepared for his opening last night at Jonathan Levine. And yesterday Faile started a monstrous new wall in Hells Kitchen that will create a swarm of fans and cameras on the street (more on that later). New York is spoiled, yo.

So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week including Bast, Bishop203, Blek le Rat, Dede, DZIA, El Kamino, Faile, GIJ Van Hee, Icy & Sot, Pastel, Palladino, QRST, Skuzz, Wonky Monky, and You Go Girl!.

A surprise to find this new small sculpture, and even more surprised to find that it was made by QRST, a Street Artist we have been bringing you since he first hit the streets a few years ago. Gonna keep our eyes open for more of these… (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Exposition Art Urbain – Colletion Nicolas Laguero Laserne (Paris, France)

July 28, 2013 Afghanistan

Exposition Art Urbain
Vernissage le mercredi 4 septembre 2013 de 18h à 21h
Exposition du 4 au 15 septembre 2013.

La collection d’art urbain sera accueillie dans les 200m2 de la Mairie du 1er arrondissement de Paris.

Environ 50 œuvres seront présentées à cette occasion. Des grandes figures de l’art urbain telles que Barry Mc Gee, Banksy, Blu, Boris Hoppek, Dem 189, Dran, Faile, Invader, Jacques Villeglé, Jef Aerosol, Jonone, JR, Lek, Ludo, Rero, Roa, Shepard Fairey, Sowat, Speedy Graphito, Swoon…
Mais aussi des nouveaux talents de la scène urbaine tels que Roti ou Studio 21 bis…

Exposition Art Urbain – Collection Nicolas Laugero Lasserre

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