Just as we leave for Madrid’s Urvanity we thought you’d like a look at New York’s current scene on the street. Or a portion of it.
We start off the new collection with Andy Warhol, who looks fresh on the street – and who’s work is on exhibit at on display currently at the Whitney.
Also he is in an ad campaign for Burger King – that old footage of him eating one of those mystery meat sandwiches is now wholly appropriated to actually sell their products instead of mock them. It’s from Jørgen Leth’s 1982 documentary 66 Scenes From America. According to folklore, Andy didn’t even like BK –preferred McDonalds. What a jokester, that Mr. Warhol. #fastdeathfood
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Antennae, City Kitty, Combo-CK, DPM Crew, Fuck Cats, Invader, Matt Siren, Phoebe New York, Seed, The Postman Art, and William Wegman.
Yes we know. This is an ad for junk food. But that’s besides the point. Most of you who were glued to the TV during the Superbowl got to see the actual video of Andy eating the hamburger…vintage pop if not art…
Let’s move to Weimaraner dogs with William Wegman’s famous pooches, Flo and Topperdogs in stylish outfits. The new mosaic murals by German mosaic fabricator Mayer of Munich adorn the NYC Subway stations on 23rd street.
A week on the street – and 3 days on stage with Urvanity 2019
As refugees from institutionalized dogma we’ve never felt a need to align our thinking about art on the streets with any one perspective regarding the various sets of “rules” that are set forth about graffiti, street art, and fine art, and their various intersections with the Internet, the commercial art world, urban dialogues, anthropology, sociology, legality, illegality, institutional embrace, patronage… unless you can make an appealing argument that rings true.
BSA Talks intends to provide a forum for multiple voices wherever it appears, opening the conversation about where these grassroots art movements came from, how they developed and merged, how they have retained their individual character or became aligned with more established aspects of the culture on their route from being strictly part of a subculture.
At this year’s edition of Urvanity we are pleased to invite some scholars, artists, producers, cultural curators, free thinkers and disruptive rebels to the table, to the stage, to the discussion of ideas. We are calling this edition of BSA TALKS in Madrid “How Deep Is the Street”, and we invite you to come and see the presentations and discussions and ask your own questions about this exciting, vibrating, shape-shifting, and evolving people’s art movement at this moment; locally and globally.
Agnostic
as ever, we may not become believers, but we won’t try to force you to become
one either. Welcome!
How deep is the street?
“When you talk about Street Art, Urban Art, Graffiti, and Urban Contemporary, there is much more than what you can see on the surface. For this years edition of Urvanity we present the “BSA Talks”, a lively and opinionated series of talks that are curated and hosted by the founders of the influential art blog BrooklynStreetArt who created an entertaining program that reflects and investigates the complexity of a half century of artists working on the streets – and the hot topics that deeply affect the scene today.
Hacktivism, Intellectual Property, Place Making, Urban Planning, legal/illegal DIY escapades and large scale collaborative public projects – These are all within the scope of this massive movement and are shaping the future. Come join us, talk with and listen to artists, professionals, academics, and thinkers who are studying and pivotal in the formation of this global grassroots art scene. Let’s see how deep it goes!”
FRIDAY MARCH 1st.
4.30pm-5:25pm – Denis Hegic– The Intelligence of Many
“Street culture and digital technologies continue to flatten hierarchies in the art world. Art, Activism, and evolving models of Collaborative Creation are all converging toward a new way of working. Disciplines more easily melt together, why not collaborative works of exhibitions, performance, and engagement. The concept of The Intelligence of Many provides insight into opportunities (and possible dangers) for new truly D.I.Y. energy as applied to art and culture movements.”
6.00pm-6:55pm – Fernando Figueroa– How Graffiti Speaks to Society as a Humanity Barometer
Graffiti and Street Art can act as a social barometer; an emotional
and ethical reflection of a neighborhood, a community, and a city. But
how can you decode it? Urban art and its myriad expressions are
intrinsically red to real or figurative space and time and can act as an
alarm system, a stress valve, or a request to change. Come hear Dr.
Fernando Figueroa as he shows us that graffiti is alive, insisting on
opening awareness, taking action and ultimately giving voice to
individual expression.
BSA Film Friday presents the Madrid premiere of “Equilibri”, the documentary directed by Batiste Miguel about Okuda San Miguel’s intervention at the Fallas in Valencia. The new film presents his piece as it re-interprets the historical celebration and illustrates a harmony between tradition, modernity and New Contemporary Art. Join Steve and Jaime as they welcome Oscar Sanz and the protagonist of this incredible event, artist Okuda San Miguel.
The proliferation of so-called Street Art mural festivals in the last
10 years has certainly added color to our cities, but has it created a
dialogue with them?
Can we thoughtfully program works that respond to the rhythm of a city,
cognizant of its systems, in concert with its various populations? What
is “creative placemaking” and how does one get permissions from all the
parties affected by complex works. Why is it important to see Urban Art
in a broader light beyond murals on walls? What should be the scope of
public art nowadays in our communities and how to be able to achieve
that? Join these two professionals in the fields of Urban Art / Public
Art to hear about making art that steps outside the mural tradition and
creates a dialogue within the city.
4.00pm-3.55pm – Jan KalábUrban Art and Inclusivity
Whether it’s illegal graffiti on trains and streets or studio-based artist collectives who create new events together, the creative process open thrives on collaboration. A multi-disciplinary artist, Jan Kaláb shows you why, working solo or collectively, his motto is the same: always get higher. Whether it is the inventive soul of graffiti or the organic lines of his geometric sculpture and painting; Urban Art is about nurturing inclusivity.
The Gag Law reaches into areas many could not have imagined, including the practice of art as speech and its intersection with the public sphere. Join artist and arts professional Alberto González Pulido as he speaks about censorship and another important topic for artists, intellectual property.
7.00pm – 7.55pm – Sabina Chagina– How I Co-built an Urban Art Biennale in Moscow
A leading curator in the Street Art scene in Russia, Sabina Chagina talks about the stages of development she had to foster to launch ARTMOSSPHERE, the first Biennale of Street Art and urban culture in the country, now presented in its third edition in 2018. A rewarding and challenging series of programs built the road there and she’ll speak about how it is changing conversations about Street Art, murals, and Contemporary Art in Moscow..
From hacking public space to subvertising to collaborative interventions, the street practices of Creative Activism are anything but rote, especially when there is a message to convey or a story to tell. What role does activism play in a time of social-political-psychological upheaval and who gets to have the last word?
16.00-17.15 Pascal Feucher + Dan Witz– Urban Art and Residencies: The Importance of Nurturing Artists and the Creative Process
From traditions born in the age of the apprentice, art residencies have been a valuable step in the developing, broadening, and advancing of fine artists (and sometimes curators) for years. Graffiti writers and Street Artists open come with a different worldview entirely. Is there a model for nurturance of D.I.Y. outlaws?
For a complete schedule of events, dates and times click HERE
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. Escif: Magic Piano 2. Adele Renault: St+Art India. Lodhi Art Festival 2019 3. Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean Museum 4. OS Gemeos: Flying Steps at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin
BSA Special Feature: Escif: Magic Piano
Spanish Street Artist Escif creates a museum installation that uses irony, sarcasm, and deep truths that we’re not always ready to see.
By hi-jacking some of the current interactive nomenclature enabled by augmented/mixed realities and the normalizing of tablet use, he alerts viewers to the connection of age-old mineral mining that is just as contemporary as the hi-tech gadgetry many have embraced.
Since you can use the device to contemplate human suffering and make music, it is an indictment of modern attitudes that dehumanize and turn real stories into a video game.
From the artist:
“Coltan is a mineral, found specially in eastern Congo, used to make cells and computer chips. Violent rebel groups are exploiting coltan mining to help finance a bloody civil war which is now in its 12th year.
The link between the bloodshed and coltan is causing alarm among high-tec manufacturers slowly they are beginning to realise that their products may contain the tainted fruits of civil war. Since the outbreak of fighting in august 1998: an estimated 5.4 million people have died; 45.000 continue to die each month; Children account for 47% of these deaths.
Magic Piano is a music installation. With the help of a tablet (that obviously contains coltan) you will be able to play the piano. Use the device to navigate on the wall. When you pass on the screen over a charater, a sound will be activated. If you push the character with your finger a sound loop will be activated. You will also activate the animation of each character.”
Adele Renault: St+Art India. Lodhi Art Festival 2019
?Lodhi Art Festival 2019 || Adele RenaultAdele's imprints are visible in the winged beauties that now adorn the walls at Lodhi. Laying on a main arterial road know the colony, her birds now peek through the trees and woo passersby.Watch the film to get a closer look into her creative process! ? Pranav Gohill & Jay NuEdited by Filterkaypee Festival supported by Asian Paints.#artforall #startindia #startdelhi #startdelhi2019 #asianpaints #lodhiartdistrict #lodhiartfestival2019
Posted by St+art India on Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean Museum
“It lacks all the give and the breath of fresh art,” the
bespectacled art critic intones with all the weight of a final damnation.
“We need haters out there. They are affirmations that we’re doing something right,” says the streetwise pop star with clever sunnies and sans big hat.
Taking a break from the Banksy beat, Doug appears to put forth that supposition that Jeff Koons is proving once again that as long as you are a white guy and you reference European art history you are 80% on your way as an artist whose work will be collected and exhibited.
OS Gemeos: Flying Steps at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin
A splendid hybrid that sends heartbeats racing, even
involuntarily, here is a trailer for Flying Steps and Os Gemeos as they interpret
Mussorgsky’s
“Pictures at an Exhibition”, the famous piano composition that has become a
showpiece for virtuoso pianists. Good to see museums of contemporary art truly
stretching, redefining the street and Street Art.
This past Sunday, February 17 at La Plaza de las Tres Chimeneas ( Three Smokestacks Square) in Barcelona an international group of artists participated in the first “No Borders Festival.”
Called “Murs Contra el Murs”, which is Catalan for “Walls Against Walls”, the multi-mural festival intends to highlight the ongoing humanitarian crises of refugees and immigrants at international borders around the world.
Graffiti artists, Street Artists, painters, and illustrators came together to create new murals to speak to the issue and encourage debate and conversation. Artists included Btoy, Carles G.O’D, Dixon, Eledu, Enric Sant, Javier Arribas, Juanjo Surace, Julieta XLF, Kenor, Kram, Pincho, Roc Blackblock, Ruina, Saturno, Simón Vázquez, Tutzo, and Wati Bacán, among others.
NO
BORDERS is a grassroots organization that was created to raise awareness about
the refugees, to demand their acceptance, and to raise funds through debates,
art and documentaries.
They say they want to raise the uncomfortable questions – which will undoubtedly lead to uncomfortable answers as well. To paraphrase the text on their website:
“Do we settle for a society that violates its moral and legal obligations to refugees? A refugee is a person who flees – Flees because he is on the losing side. Because he thinks, feels or prays differently than those who point him with their weapons.”
As
usual, artists are bringing these matters to the street for the vox populi to
debate.
Our sincere thanks to photographer Lluís Olive for sharing his shots of the walls with BSA readers.
For more information on the festival running through March 3rd that includes documentaries, panel discussions, workshops, and prints, please go to https://noborders.es/ and follow @nobordersrefugees on Instagram
The streets can be a mirror, a diary, a stage to rant, prophesy, profess love.
Today we have Chinese Street Artist 0907 pouring his heart out for all to see. This Saturday will be the 100th day since he met someone very special he tells us. “This is a story about love at first sight,” he says, adding, “She is a student at an art college.”
And what else does a Street Artist do when he’s in love? He makes art to tell the world, like this 50cm square stencil portrait. “I am sure I have fallen in love with her,” he says with stars in his eyes.
Occasionally
you hear someone comparing an empty, abandoned factory to a gallery where
graffiti writers and Street Artists have sprayed their pieces directly on the
walls instead of hanging them as canvasses. Less often is the space itself
claimed as an exhibition opportunity for sculpture, or mobile.
Spanish
Street Artist Elbi Elem has taken that step from two dimensions with three with
this new hanging piece that engages geometry, abstraction, and texture with a
kinetic perspective, and the results fill the room as much as the imaganation. What
is next for a Street Artist whose work is geometric on the wall?
“I made this a couple of days ago in an abandoned place in the Costa Brava, Girona,” says Elem, who has been creating sculptures since 2002, and in the past few years has exhibited in galleries and on the street in places like her home Barcelona as well as Valencia, Madrid, and Turin in Italy.
The work itself reflects, architecture, urban landscapes, surfaces, and patterns of the city. The artist says that invariably the expression also is an interpretation of her inner world. This new mobile sculpture gives you an additional clue with its name: “Liberty”.
A welcome and necessary addition to any graffiti academic’s library comes Urban Styles: Graffiti in New York Hardcore, carefully documented by Freddy Alva. A thorough recounting of the birth and growth of graffiti through the lense of punk and hardcore scenes after 1980, Alva presents a parallel evolution of a scene as it was interpreted by a largely white constituency of rockers, anarchists, and rebels who grew up in and around New York at that time.
Freddy Alva. “Urban Styles: Graffiti in New York Hardcore”. Second Edition. Radio Raheem, 2018.
Alva is careful to give due to the graffiti scene that is more often identified as the roots of this practice of urban mark making; the hip-hop culture of primarily black and latino youth during the 1960s and 1970s. As the neoliberal corporate capitalists took over Wall Street and the Reagan White House, a different sort of graffiti writer was often showing up on the street – and often on stage as part of a hardcore band.
Mr. Alva says that early hardcore bands like Frontline “became an important foundation to the eventual hardcore and graffiti synthesis that would come to envelop the scene.” It makes sense since the band featured graff writers including HYPER, RACE, ME62, and NOAH.
Freddy Alva. “Urban Styles: Graffiti in New York Hardcore”. Second Edition. Radio Raheem, 2018
It’s an infrequently told history related in great detail following a timeline which identifies the “golden age” of this subcultural hybrid as 1985-1995. Packed full of extensive interviews with writers and essays by experts on the scene like Sacha Jenkins, it summons a gravel-voiced city cinema vérité flavor to a rugged unvarnished history and sometimes conflicting perspectives.
The series of interviews profile a wide number of individuals who are looking back on a common graff writing history; sometimes imparting a certain nostalgic haze to their stories. Their common path leads them to espouse philosophies and worldviews that are somehow universally rooted in struggle, but the insights and individual outcomes are anything but homogeneous. But almost all of them dislike or hate Street Art, that’s nearly universal.
You may not have been there, but you may feel like you were; its complete with amateur photography, a good selection of zines, black book works, ephemera, and some serious info-graphics on crews, members, and neighborhoods where they originated from (shoutout to designer Orlando Arce). The thick tome even offers a selection of relevant tattoo photos.
On arms.
Freddy Alva. “Urban Styles: Graffiti in New York Hardcore”. Second Edition. Radio Raheem, 2018
With a newly released second edition after only one year on the bookshelves, this one captures a big name that is as elusive as it is heralded by New York hardcore graffiti fans, REVS. Also a member of a hardcore band named Adam 12, the writer gives a great deal of insight into his path, ethos and career (see the first online publishing of a portion of this interview on BSA).
Tony Rettman, author of NYHC: New York Hardcore 1980-1990 gives praise to Alva for chronicling a scene that not many have paid sufficient due to and which contributed in a large way that clearly illustrates the interstitial relationships of New York’s various graffiti cultures.
Freddy Alva. “Urban Styles: Graffiti in New York Hardcore”. Second Edition. Radio Raheem, 2018.
“The correlation between graffiti culture and punk rock is something solely concentrated to New York and it’s surrounding boroughs,” Rettman writes. “Freddy Alva was there to absorb it all in real time and now he gives us the clear-cut history of the whole deal it all its grim and gritty glory.”
“I have had the good fortune of maintaining decades-long friendships with some of the people featured in these pages; the writers that played in bands, the writers that represented the scene, the graffiti crews that were composed of hardcore fans, the photographers of classic train pieces, the artists inspired by hardcore iconography, the tattooists that incorporated this imagery in their work… I have always wanted to give these voices an outlet to be heard and to be celebrated,” Alva writes.
With Urban Styles, he has.
Freddy Alva. “Urban Styles: Graffiti in New York Hardcore”. Second Edition. Radio Raheem, 2018.Freddy Alva. “Urban Styles: Graffiti in New York Hardcore”. Second Edition. Radio Raheem, 2018.Freddy Alva. “Urban Styles: Graffiti in New York Hardcore”. Second Edition. Radio Raheem, 2018.Freddy Alva. “Urban Styles: Graffiti in New York Hardcore”. Second Edition. Radio Raheem, 2018.
*Banner poem excerpt by Chaka Malik, 2017
To purchase this book please click on the link below:
Meanwhile the art on the streets that we keep finding in NYC tells us that a lot of people are in love, in lust, or looking for some sort of tenderness. Call it early spring fever but the feels are out there in some of these new pieces this week.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring #Dysturb, Adam Fujita, Bunny M, Dead Bradshaw, Jax and Dean, Kai, LMNOPI, Mr. Djaul, Pers Anders-Petterson, Pop Artoons, Rime MSK, The Hypsit, Theodoru, Vitruvian Truth, and Vondom Labs.
Dysturb is a collective of photojournalists, writers and artists formed in 2014 to promote their own work and to highlight contemporary global issues around the world such as women’s rights, the environment, equality etc… A lofty endeavor with its heart in the right place which we support wholeheartedly. The group brought their new campaign to the streets of NYC this week. The issue this time is female genital mutilation.
The group uses the streets as their vessel to disseminate the information and to create awareness but in the process they ignore a basic tenet of the rules of the street: Respect the art that already exists on the walls. We spotted a couple of their billboard sized prints wheat pasted on top of long running murals by respected artists like Iranian brothers Icy & Sot, shown above and American/Berlinian painter James Bullough below. These are rather careless placements from visitors who don’t respect the local culture – especially in a city that has so many construction sites with plenty of available empty plywood walls. We’re sure you are all fabulous, but you are not the only ones.
Saturday fun today from local Barcelona graphic designer Núria Toll, who’s sort of new to the experience of doing murals and art on the street.
Translating her own history with illustration and typography, Ms. Toll finds that humor is a welcome antidote to the negativity that is produced by our invasions of animals’ natural habitats.
Here with “Veïnes” (female neighbors in Catalan), her seagulls are meant to remind us that the natural world was here first, and we should make a home for all of us. The seagulls are rather good at integrating, and Toll here is giving them their due.
Love seeing people like this high school gent on the train and in the street and on the elevator and in the store – in gentle anticipation of giving a rose to the one he has a crush on. Sending love to all of you today.
BSA readers know that we’ve always been democratic about the work we show here- because that’s really how to best understand the evolution of the scene.
The illegal small stuff you find actually tells you a great deal – the selection is a barometer of sorts. These works aren’t permitted, commissioned, sold, traded or co-opted ususally, untouched by the voracious appetites of advertising and consumerism
We love murals, don’t get us wrong. But we are always making certain to return to where things began for us; the small, eclectic mix of blink-and-you-miss-it pieces on the streets.
They come in all forms; stencils, stickers, wheat pastes, sculptures, crafts and small drawings. In some cases, we know the artist who created the piece and often we do not. But everyone gets a chance to address the public in the lively Street Art scene, and we bring to you a small selection of pieces we’ve found recently.
The transition from graffiti to abstract painter invariably captures our attention. The two disciplines that would be so insulated from one another, yet many times we find a graffiti writer who fifteen years after spraying his first illegal tag is now parsing a very different visual language.
Alexey Luka. Wall #1. Premio Antonio Giordano Festival. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of Marianna Giordano)
Then you think of the endless permutations of wildstyle and all the subgenres of the graffiti practice of deconstruction as applied to the letterform. It is only a short jump from there to complete abstraction.
In the case of Russian Street Artist Alexey Luka, the route was made smoother perhaps by his study of architecture, provided entrée to a less literal interpretation of shape and form. Here his two newest wall pieces in Santa Croce di Magliano (CB), Italy, remind us of his wooden wall sculptures, assemblages as well, the palette warm and the snug overlapping feeling of the forms is almost nested.
Alexey Luka. Wall #1. Premio Antonio Giordano Festival. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of Marianna Giordano)
For this fifth edition of the Antonio Giordano Urban Art Award in October and November, we are told that Alexey has hidden organic forms and even faces in his work. We’ll leave it up to your sleuthing and imagination to identify them. See anything?
Alexey Luka. Wall #1. Premio Antonio Giordano Festival. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of Marianna Giordano)Alexey Luka. Wall #2. Premio Antonio Giordano Festival. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of Marianna Giordano)Alexey Luka. Wall #2. Premio Antonio Giordano Festival. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of Marianna Giordano)Alexey Luka. Wall #2. Premio Antonio Giordano Festival. Santa Croce di Magliano, Italy. (photo courtesy of Marianna Giordano)
Street art welcomes all manner of materials and methods, typically deployed without permission and without apology. This hand-formed wire piece …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
