Graffiti writer Terror 161 favors the digital expression of political critique these days, and he shared this simple image with us yesterday. Since we’re not going outside to capture new Street Art for you, we thought we’d share this visual commentary with you.
Street Artist Jilly Ballistic has long favored face-masks on her black and white photo figures of yesteryear, so it interesting to see this vintage kid incognito in the current context of Coronavirus on the streets of New York. At the very least the mask prevents transmission to some degree, but no one seems to know how much. And what about children?
“If your child is healthy, there is no need for them to wear a facemask,” says the website Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “Only people who have symptoms of illness or who are providing care to those who are ill should wear masks.”
The Street Artist named Early Riser reminds us that Kangaroos can be formidible boxers when it comes to dwindling resources, like canned tuna. And toilet paper.
As New York enters its first full day of Pause, or lock-down, the social ramifications of the panicked psyche have all been rivetingly on display.
Todays’ Street Art piece by Pure Genius lampoons the behaviors of people actually fighting one another to greedily horde supplies. The drawback with toilet paper is, it is not food, which may become a much larger topic of interest shortly.
We’re off the street now, the BSA team, as New York City goes into lock-down mode in the face of the global Covid19 virus pandemic.
We
know that our medical infrastructure will be overwhelmed, because it was broken
apart systematically into a thousand tiny pieces years ago. Unlike centralized
medical care that many other countries have, it has been only available to some
of us and usually at a great cost that outstrips our abilities to provide for
our families.
Now,
as New York faces the prospect of becoming completely overwhelmed for months,
we see that even basic testing, medical supplies, beds, and personnel cannot be
pulled together fast enough through a decentralized profit-based system. This
isn’t political – this is life. Unfortunately this is also death.
So
if we do get sick, we’re not even thinking of going to a hospital. If some of
our older friends and relatives get sick, we’re hoping that there will be
enough money and resources to serve their needs. But the signs are not good
here in the country with the highest GDP in the world. Makes you wish there was
Medicare for All right?
So, as long as we’re able, we’re going to publish work from the street. But for the first time since we began publishing 12 years ago, the new shots on the street will also need to come from you – since we are quarantined. Please send us what you see, what you capture – maybe out the window. But don’t put yourself at risk, or others.
So here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring 1UP Crew, 907, Fours, Kuma, Pork, Pøbel, Poi Everywhere, Raf Mata Art, Smells, Stres, The Act of Love, The Postman Art, and Zexor.
Grassroots organizations like Extinction Rebellion have been battling to raise awareness and turn back the tides of disaster in our climate systems, ecological collapse, and loss of biodiversity. But how many listen, and how many bankers and corporations summon the resources that will be necessary to reverse the extinction of species and biodiversity?
As a worldwide virus sweeps through the species, causing a scale of suffering and fear not experienced in a few generations, the topic of our own extinction presents itself boldly and with no opportunity to negotiate.
Enter ROA and his newly opened show which you are able to attend by appointment only, called “Annihilation”.
During his Street Art career of the last decade and a half, his focus has often been on the marginalized and endangered and our culpability – directly as it relates to the animal kingdom but also by extension it is a metaphor for the human condition. Taking extinction one step further, the word annihilation captures the deliberate violent intention behind the killing, decimating, wiping away a record with great finality.
The Ghent based Street Artist and studio artist cannot invite you to the Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne unless it is by appointment, so hostile is the natural world toward our immune systems right now. But he says in his press release that the new show “is ROA challenging us to quietly focus, observe, and investigate nature without the noise of current climate discourse.”
Looking
at his collection of images from the animal kingdom rendered in the distinctive
style that he has painted on hundreds of walls across the world, he tells us
that this exhibition is “an invitation to reconnect to nature, to empathize,
and as the dominant species, to recognize that the choice is ours alone to
ensure all of nature’s survival, not just our own.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Challenging The Status Quo With Street Art – Blanco
BSA Special Feature: Challenging The Status Quo With Street Art – Blanco
One could argue that the whole modus operandi of Street Art was originally to challenge the status quo, however that is defined. The fact that in recent years banal “Street Art” festivals have cooked that goose and various industry brands have adopted it for a perceived ‘edge’ appeal doesn’t really change our minds about what real Street Art was and is.
Of course the graffiti and Street Art “scene” itself is not free of its own status quo – the need to circle wagons, slamming doors, forming cliques, and keeping gates is perhaps an ironic hypocrisy in a counterculture that prizes itself for bucking these practices, but examples abound.
True to form, Blanco has not pursued slick stardom as a Street Artist per se, and you probably have not heard of him. That’s sort of the way he likes it.
Challenging The Status Quo With Street Art / Blanco / TEDx Coeurdalene
A
spooky set of images today from València, where an enormous torso of a
woman is set afire in the center of the city, billowing blackened smoke through
its cut severed body upward hundreds of meters into the air.
Escif. “This Too Shall Pass”. Valencia Fallas, March 17, 2020. Spain. (photo courtesy Escif)
Only two years ago we gave you stunning photos by Martha Cooper of Okuda’s enormous geometric pop art sculpture aflame for this traditional festival (OKUDA Sculpture Engulfed in Flames for Falles Festival in València). The culmination of a city-wide street celebration that is enjoyed by hundreds of thousands in this city of 2.5 million. Now there is no one outside on Valencia streets.
Escif. “This Too Shall Pass”. Valencia Fallas, March 17, 2020. Spain. (photo courtesy Escif)
Spain and most countries in Europe are closing their borders, going into some version of a 24-hour lock-down curfew, encouraging people to self -quarantine to protect against the spread of coronavirus.
Look at the images of the yoga posed woman with a face mask, cut in two, lit on fire, only her shoulders and neck, and head remaining. Is it violent? Is it poetry?
Escif. “This Too Shall Pass”. Valencia Fallas, March 17, 2020. Spain. (photo courtesy Escif)
“Suddenly this image became a symbol of peace and calm, unity and solidarity,” says Spanish Street Artist Escif, the political sociologist who often infuses his figurative imagery with greater commentary on society.
Escif. “This Too Shall Pass”. Valencia Fallas, March 17, 2020. Spain. (photo courtesy Escif)
Escif tells us that the Valencia government decided to burn just the body of the sculpture and to keep the face with the mask in the square – until this crisis ends. Surrounded by firefighters, this fire goes up. Yet this serene woman will remain after the flame is extinguished, what is left of her.
“This too shall pass,” he says.
Escif. “This Too Shall Pass”. Valencia Fallas, March 17, 2020. Spain. (photo courtesy Escif)Escif. “This Too Shall Pass”. Valencia Fallas, March 17, 2020. Spain. (photo courtesy Escif)Escif. “This Too Shall Pass”. Valencia Fallas, March 17, 2020. Spain. (photo courtesy Escif)Escif. “This Too Shall Pass”. Valencia Fallas, March 17, 2020. Spain. (photo courtesy Escif)Escif. “This Too Shall Pass”. Valencia Fallas, March 17, 2020. Spain. (photo courtesy Escif)
New walls from Madrid from only a few weeks ago at the Urvanity Festival, before the city became known as a hub for Coronavirus, went on full lockdown – today closing all of its hotels…
Zest (photo courtesy of Urvanity Art / Madrid 2020)
We start off the collection with graffiti writer from Montpellier, France named Franck Noto aka Zest. His gestural abstracts are just the kind of bright swipes of energy that capture a commercial market these days, and here he brings those energies to the street as well.
Enjoy the new massive pieces from London’s D*Face, Switzerland’s Never Crew, GVIIIIE and Argentinian Eversiempre as they each knock out new murals that Madrid is thankful for – or will be when people are allowed outside again.
Franck
Noto combines the different energies found in Graffiti and brings them
out through the basic shapes and the primary colors he uses. The bright
colors symbolize the aspect of urban art that immediately catches the
eye of passers-by, even before they give a positive or negative opinion
on what they see. As for the transparency of the forms, it reflects an
accumulation of energies and movements.
Animals
use natural space without transforming it but they seek the space to meet their
needs. A cave will provide shelter for a bear. The bear will not paint it, wire
it for electricity or install air-conditioning.
Safely (somewhat) in Japan right now, the Italian land artist Gola Hundun is studying space again for his self-created ABITARE project.
“It’s
my personal research on the border between human functional space and other
species’ use of space,” he tells us as we look at this ivy-covered hump of
industry that he regales with gold lame. We often imagine New York City’s
skyscrapers engulfed in ivy and wildflowers with enormous insects and birds
freely roaming about.
“I think I want to title it ‘Presence’,” he says, “Because this time I found a space where some dead trees were re-colonized by ivy and vitalba that generate really evocative imaginary shapes,” he says. “Like Readymade sculptures, like giants and strange horse-giraffes.” You can see his eyes alight, the dialogue inside his head full of calculation and intent that turns these ephemeral “sculptures” into abstract beings inhabiting space.
He talks about his relationship with gold, which has reoccurred throughout his multiple ABITARE installation. “Gold and green is the combo color for this project. I use gold because it is for me the color of the sun, the color of the soul, of the divine.”
And of our current crises of an infectious coronavirus circling the globe and threatening humanity, killing some of us, crippling our lives in many cases; what does this Earth-Star man observe?
“For me, it is a way to critique our modern human behaviors, post-capitalism, post-economic globalization, which is the main reason why we have arrived at this point, at the brink of ecological systemic disaster. I think this issue with Corona is a good opportunity to meditate about slow down the rhythm.”
Our headline comes from adapting the title of a novel by the Nobel prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, replacing the infectious Corona for the infectious Cholera. In his love-triangle story, he speaks of the lessons learned from a particular woman, but he may as well have been speaking about the now-global crisis we humans are facing:
“(she) stood him on his head, tossed
him up and threw him down, made him as good as new, shattered all his virtuous
theories, and taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody
teaches life anything.”
In an encounter that feels like Norwegian magical realism, Street Artist Pøbel has left this love-struck couple grappling for one another in the city of Byrne.
Sadly, not even this mask-kissing precaution is enough to protect these lovers from the transmission.
Dr. Muhammad Munir of Lancaster University’s department of biomedical and life sciences, and an expert in viral diseases, says “It’s not just sex itself – it’s any contact involved during the act,” in an article in the Guardian. Journalist Sirin Kale reports there that “Even if you don’t kiss the person you are having sex with, you may still contract coronavirus.”
Only two weeks ago we were making jokes here about the NYC plastic bag ban and Coronavirus. Now the city, state, and federal government are in official states of emergency. What will this city look like in another two weeks?
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring City Kitty, Erdogan Terrorist, Lego Party, Little Lucky, LMNOPI, Lunge Box, Messy Fart, Neon Savage, Sara Lynne Leo, The Mushroom, and Urbanimal.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
