A lot of action on the street right now – people are in organized events, on commissioned walls and doing their own personal thang too. Here’s our weekly interview with the street featuring Bast, Chris and Veng from Robots Will Kill, ECB, Faile, Jaye Moon, Jetsonorama, JM, Judith Supine, Meer Sau, Mr. Toll, ND’A, NoseGo, See One, and Stik.
Young Urban Professionals Evolved 4 Million Years Ago (a. urbanis yuppicus)
Barcelonian Street Artist Göla completed a new mural on the side of a modern housing building in Poznan, Poland recently, and he brought imagination and his sense of humor. It’s a somewhat sarcastic eight-story infographic on human evolution which you may enjoy while sitting at a café table while sipping a carbonated canned beverage and chomping on a Millenium Kabob, with suburban car traffic whizzing by.
Using the visual vernacular of many more serious science textbook illustrations, this is perhaps closer to the diagrams in an acupuncturists’ waiting room. Despite the pleasant and comical elements, Göla is bringing the human race in for a colorful and entertaining critique for being so thoughtless with the rest of the planet. Perfectly themed for a festival called “Outer Spaces”, the environmentally minded artist re-constructs the entire evolutionary timeline to include Yuppies at the very beginning. Since Yuppies first roamed the earth approximately around the time Göla was born, he undoubtedly thinks they have been here forever. In a way, he has a point.
“My idea of the wall was to read from bottom to top, passing through symbols, as a metaphor for evolution,” Göla told us this week ,“From Australopithecus and the Yuppie at the bottom of the Mayan pyramid up through the second element as the cell of the new human being and the third depicts humans as they are described nowadays as a tick of the world. The top image is meant to symbolize the return to the natural world, the concept that we are part of the biosphere and we have to cooperate with the rest of the forms of life.”
Happy Friday Peepuls. Now before we all set our sights on Friday art parties and dancing and getting crazy and writing on people’s foreheads with markers, it’s time for us to get Debatified so we are all ready to vote. Obama is ahead in New York by like a hundred and five percent but apparently there are some states in the imperfect union where it is still a toss-up and people are just not sure who’s better. Moderator Candy Crowley scoured all of New York’s Long Island Tuesday and came up with only 82 people who still don’t know who they’re voting for – 12 of them polled just before airtime were also not sure who is on the one dollar bill, so there’s a clue for ya right there. Here’s a capsulized version of what went down.
1. Becca and Philip Lumbang (LA)
2. “Purple”, a Female Group Show in Williamsburg (BKLN)
3. Fairey’s “Sound and Vision” (London)
4. Gregory Siff is “A Matter of Time” in LA
5. Shark Toof Takes a Bite out of LA
6. Meanwhile, Back in Haunted Brooklyn…Get Out Your Knife
7. “The Art of Basketball” at the Pop International Galleries (NYC)
8. Gallery For The People at Stonebook Court Estate (Los Altos)
9. “It’s Alive 2” at Urban Folk Art Gallery (BKLN)
10. “Art on the Seam” Documentary teaser (VIDEO)
11. Vermibus – The Sting (VIDEO)
12. ROA in the Boneyard (VIDEO)
Becca and Philip Lumbang (LA)
Becca and Philip Lumbang, two of LA’s Street Art scene, are teaming at Lab Art Gallery in Los Angeles, CA with their show titled “Babes & Bears” now open.
For further information regarding this show click here.
“Purple”, a Female Group Show in Williamsburg (BKLN)
“Purple” is the new color for this season as envisioned by a strong group of female Street Artists in a group exhibition in Brooklyn, NY at Causey Contemporary. This show opens tonight.
PURPLE includes Alice Mizrachi, Diana McClure, Gilf, Lady Pink, Lichiban, Miss Van, Olek, Priscila De Carvalho, Queen Andrea, Ritzy Periwinkle, and Sofia Maldonado
For further information regarding this show click here.
Fairey’s “Sound and Vision” (London)
Shepard Fairey’s solo exhibition “Sound & Vision” opens tonight in London at the Stolen Space Gallery. His first London exhibition in 5 years, Fairey brings along friend and collaborator Z-Trip to supply the soundtrack to the artwork.
For further information regarding this show click here.
Gregory Siff is “A Matter of Time” in LA
A “Matter of Time” is the title of Street Artist Gregory Siff’s new show at Gallery Brown in Los Angeles, CA opening tomorrow night.
For further information regarding this show click here.
Shark Toof Takes a Bite out of LA
If you have never seen a shark playing ping pong you’ll have your chance at C.A.V.E. Gallery in Venice Beach, CA where Shark Toof’s new show “Ping Pong Show” opens tomorrow.
For further information regarding this show click here.
Meanwhile, Back in Haunted Brooklyn…Get Out Your Knife
Fall is here, leaves are turning, the sweet smell of burning fires permeates many residential neighborhoods of the city, ACs are off and windows are open and you can hear the sounds of the streets are night. And now you get to stab a pumpkin and carve a face out of it at Crest Hardware. MWAH HAH HAH HAWWWW. Joe invites you and the whole family to come out and enjoy the 3rd Annual Pumpkin Carving Contest, Saturday.
For entry rules, times and more details on this event click here.
Also happening this week:
“The Art of Basketball” is a group exhibition curated by Billi Kid at the Pop International Galleries in Manhattan featuring Mr. Brainwash, URNY, The Dude Company, Skewville, Shiro, Rene Gagnon, Joe Iurato, Ewok, One 5MH, Jack Aguire, David Cooper, Cope2, Chris Stain, Cern and Billi Kid. This show is now open to the general public and you can click here for more details.
Gallery For The People Fall Pop-Up show with Sage Vaughn, Deedee Cheriel, and Curtis Kulig is now open for the general public at The Stonebook Court Estate in Los Altos Hill, CA. Click here for more details on this show.
“It’s Alive 2” showcasing the art of Mark Bode, Dr.Revolt, and Stan 153 opens tonight at the Urban Folk Art Gallery in Brooklyn. Click here for more details on this show.
“Art on the Seam” Documentary teaser (VIDEO)
An upcoming documentary by David Freid about the art work on the wall in the West Bank.
Vermibus – The Sting (VIDEO)
ROA in the Boneyard (VIDEO)
A new video from Jason Wawro for the Boneyard Project features ROA.
Right now you can get a good look at one sculpture that is usually six stories over your head with honking, speeding cars and trucks swirling around it 24 hours a day. The famous guy at the center of Columbus Circle is inviting you to hang out in his living room, and you won’t believe the views, bro.
Part of a limited engagement, this project called “Discovering Columbus” by Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi enlivens a public art piece first erected in 1892 by Gaetano Russo. BSA guest contributor Cassandra Brinen stopped by Columbus’s penthouse and tells us what it’s like to get up close with a 13-foot-high marble sculpture. Photos are by James Boo.
After ascending the six short flights (really it did seem short!) to reach the front door of what I will call Chris’ living room, we’re greeted by a volunteer who tells us that our time inside is allotted to 15 minutes. And please do not sit on the window seals.
We enter a short clean and modern hallway with hardwood floors and a large medium mirror on the right wall. The exit is in full view directly across from the entrance. As we walk to the center of the hall, it opens into the living room and the first glimpse of Columbus is from behind, in the middle of the room, surrounded by visitors. Oddly enough, he looks like he belongs there. This sculpture is what you could call a fitting “statement piece” for the modern New York apartment.
Almost as common as a column or a house plant, upon closer inspection and a front-facing view, this simple perspective is shattered. This piece of art was not meant for one apartment–it was meant for the vast New York public and was made to survive the years.
There’s no escaping Chris when you sit on the comfortable couches that flank him from three sides. Attempting to look at the furniture or people taking pictures requires a head (or full body) tilt. This is his house. He has lived here since before you were born and he will be here long after you leave. And he has good taste! The faded pink Americana wallpaper designed by the installations artist Tatzu Nishi, with illustrations of the Empire state building, Elvis, and hotdogs, creates a beautiful backdrop for the modern apartment furnishings and serves as a playful contrast to Columbus’ weathered exterior.
A detailed examination of that exterior shows wear and tear on the granite that calls out his daily existence. Questions arise; How did he get the tiny heart-shaped hole on his lower left cloak? How long did it take for whole chunks to fall off his leg? How is it possible that these are his only imperfections after he has lived here since the early 20th century? Only he knows and even though we are invited into his house, I don’t think he’s giving up his secrets anytime soon.
Street Artist Gaia regularly highlights people from whichever community that he’s painting or wheatpasting in. Passersby commonly stop to talk while he’s working, often adding layers of history, knowledge, opinion, and nuance to his piece while he works. With his newest wall in Sandtown, a neighborhood of Baltimore, Gaia draws attention to a dying local profession that is hanging on, but barely.
Arabbers, pronounced locally with a long A (“A-rab”) were salespeople who had as many as 400 commercial carts offering fresh produce and other items rolling daily through the streets of Baltimore at one time, according to some accounts. Horse-drawn carts were a normal part of the early 20th century street life and amazingly B-Town still supports a few of these small business people on the streets in the 21st.
Because of new zoning and bylaws enacted during a period of urban renewal, the city restricted where horse stables existed, and many were put out of business. But during our travels through Baltimore with photographer Martha Cooper, who grew up there, we have had occasion to meet a number of the people who still carry this trade forward, some for many generations. Their small fenced off plots of land and stables appear suddenly like an oasis of farm life from another era in the middle of otherwise urban blocks. Once able to provide a good living to a family, Arabbers still brings fresh food to under served communities at reasonable prices. Unfortunately the proud profession is now endangered by the economic pressures of rising fees, the costs of animal care, and stable upkeep.
“The Arabbers are a dying Baltimore tradition,” says Gaia, “that have long been a staple of this remarkable city.” The NYC Street Artist, who has been living in Baltimore for a handful of years while attending university as an art student, feels a kinship to the families who are still enduring to keep this kind of livelihood sustainable. “These men and women define the word ‘hustle’,” he remarks, “trotting along both desolate and vibrant landscapes selling their goods and making ends meet. This mural depicts four generations; starting with the great grandfather Manboy in the middle and up to Fruit’s son on the top right.”
As the many expressions of Street Art freely bleed into all of art’s disciplines, many of Gaia’s more recent work clearly overlaps the traditions of community murals, where local residents are called out and celebrated, deified, congratulated, and mourned. In this case, the tradition also extends to being a little bit educational as Gaia points to some of the contributing factors that endanger a profession here, “ The Arabber portraits are mixed with the logos on the containers in which their produce comes: a global economy meets a fading, tough tradition.”
Conceptual Street Artist General Howe will be sticking a pointy eared mask onto Obama’s photo after the presidential debate tonight – as he writes his next report for the Super Election News website.
A screengrab from the art parody blog by conceptual street artist General Howe called “Super Election News 2012”
One part HuffPost Politics, one part The Onion, and one part Halloween super hero role-playing – The site is the onscreen version of parodies General Howe started in his street work a few years ago. By subverting the election “news” that’s continually blared from the polycephalic cluster of political blogs and trustworthy news websites, Howe equates the candidates staged personas as spun by PR machines with the simplified good and evil story that is told in the Batman sagas.
Obama as Batman, Romney as Bane, Gingrich as Penguin, Sheldon Adelson as the Joker… “Presidential elections and summer blockbuster movies have become the same thing,” explains General Howe, “There is an epic battle of good vs. evil and the fate of the world is up for grabs. If we pay a little extra for the larger soda, the experience will be that much better.”
With regular postings on his online art/politics website, the General has been mulling over the implications of simplification of complex issues, the corrupting influence of blind money donations, the surreal spinning of real news, as well as parodying the more obvious manipulations he sees in his daily review of what has essentially has become a hyper-charged money-fueled media industry that commoditizes candidates for profit and ignores/deludes the citizenry.
What may frighten you more are the similarities between fact and fiction.
General Howe’s new series of characters are called “The Supers” and he has made a print comic book for the 2012 election, as well as installed some parody election signage in the perfectly mowed autumn lawns of sterile suburbia, where the effect of seeing a pro-Bane or pro-Batman and Robin sign is startlingly normal appearing in all their patriotic colors and crisp graphics. Antecedents to this campaign can be found in General Howe’s reworking of actual advertising signage during the 2008 campaign where John McCain was 2Face, Hilary Clinton had the bloody clown lips of the Joker, and Obama was again depicted as Batman.
While his art on the streets has always had a political element that is informed by American culture and history, General Howe has been having a blast with this new online art project, “This work has strong roots in street art but is completely digitally based. I’ve been thinking a lot about making accessible work and communicating a message to the masses and as much as street art does that and I think there is unexplored territory in how much of peoples lives exist in the digital world. It would be a great evolution to see digital content and websites subverted the same way our physical environment is being subverted by street art. I don’t have the skills or knowledge of a hacker so this is my attempt at transforming the digital experience.”
The impersonal isolation of living inside a human hive, the unraveling of a threadbare social safety net, the militarization of the natural world, the impact of industrial activity on our environmental, and the brutal punches of a bankrupt monetary system set free. How can Isaac Cordal address such weighty matters with such miniature sculptures? Also, does he sleep?
As has been true for decades, certain Street Artists use their work to directly or indirectly speak to the ills of society. Part of his studio work and his street practice, to varying degrees Cordal is determined to visually illustrate the impact of our external world engineering on the internal world of the individual through installations and staged scenes. What makes them particularly effective is placement; his involvement of his figures in pre-existing venues. He uses puddles of water, litter, municipal protuberances and holes in bricked buildings as pre-designed sets for his figures to interact with. Normally overlooked on your daily travels, their scale is suddenly altered by their relation to the sculptures.
Just back from trips to Zagreb, Croatia and Vienna, Austria, the artist shares these exclusive images with BSA readers of some of his latest works.
These September works in in Vienna were part of the BLK River Festival and the ones in Zagreb were for /// MUU /// Muzej ulične umjetnosti.
This week we saw pumpkins piled at the corner deli, the Yanks pushing on toward the series, Streisand returning at 70 to sing again in Brooklyn, that Rasta MC goin’ hard over his stack of speakers outside the barbershop on a sunny cool day, Christopher Columbus as a giant sculpture in somebody’s living room, and we can confirm that underground art parties are now moving to Bed Stuy, bypassing Bushwick. Stranger things will undoubtedly keep happening because Halloween is on Wednesday this year; pretty much guaranteeing a solid week of sexy horror on the street because people won’t know when to party, and you’re going to see at least 3 mock boxing fights between two guys dressed up as Obama and Romney with gloves because the Presidential election is 11/6. The actual 2nd match-up of the candidates is this Tuesday in Long Island to debate. Are the Yankees playing that night?
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, an eclectic trip that takes us to Brooklyn, Paris, Baltimore, and Russia with Cern, Overunder, Philippe HÉRARD, Lili Luciole, Concrete Jungle, Hot Tea, Love Child, Dain, Sorta, and Cynthia von Buhler. We start of with this faux neighborhood painted by Concrete Jungle on a building in Vladivostok.
Wheat-Pasting Botero, David Gouny Rolls Out a New Collection
Like a tray of hot chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies these one-off hand painted wheat pastes have been just been served in the area of Montmartre to the streets of Paris. A Botero for the urban art fan, Street Artist David Gouny has specialized in plumply chunky everyday characters and idealized rotund super sheroes in bikinis and high heels in top-down convertibles since the mid-2000s.
Often comical, fashionable, or even erotic, the strutting ladies in Gouny’s scenes can be comical in their placement or tableau. With this little chubby collection Gouny appears to widen his family of characters to include a more cultural references than previously- including one Russian hatted tribute to the activists Pussy Riot. As ever, the central focus continues as the heralded full-figured gals he loves who have so much to offer.
Mexican artist Hugo Rojas participated in this year’s DUMBO ArtsFest and created a series of installations inspired by animals in the wild of New York State. “This piece aims to revive the real New Yorkers, creating live visuals of the animals that lived in this area for centuries, in the form of moss graffiti,” says the description on the festival site. It also says “he has been exploring photography, video and street art as a means of intervention”.
The Spanish moss illustrations are up on the exterior walls of Galapagos Art Space, and at first many Street Art watchers mistook them as work the eco-minded Brooklyn collective MOSSTIKA. Much the same as Mosstika, Mr. Rojas art work involves sheets of real moss and features animal shapes, including some of the exact same animals like deer and moose, although these versions are more detailed, most likely because they were installed as part of a proscribed program.
“By far the best exhibition we’ve yet created,” says Martyn Reed, organizer of the Nuart 2012 street art festival as it draws to a close in Stavanger, Norway. What’s left after two weeks of painting, panel discussions, and parties stands on it own; The Art.
On old factory buildings, bricked stairways, in labyrinthine tunnels, and hanging on gallery walls, the city itself has welcomed international Street Artists to do these installations over the last decade and the funding for the events, artists, and materials are largely contributed to from public grants.
It’s a stunning model of arts funding that we’d like to see more of; one that is sophisticated enough to make behavioral and aesthetic distinctions and that is appreciative of the positive contributions of Street Art to the contemporary art canon. Here is one model that recognizes the importance of art in the streets as something necessary, valued. And the city of Stavanger keeps inviting a varied mix of well-known names and newcomers who show promise year after year.
At some point during the panel discussions at Nuart Plus this year there was talk about the dulling effect that the growing popularity of Street Art festivals specifically and sanctioned public art generally can sometimes have on the finished pieces. Certainly we are all familiar with those brain-deadening community murals of yesteryear that include lots of diversity, droning morality lectures and cute ducks. But we think the right balance of currency, community, and unchecked creativity can often catalyze great results, and smart people will know how to help keep it fresh.
Solidly, Stavanger took a lead in the Street Art festival arena early and is still setting standards for high quality as an integrated cultural event without compromising integrity with so-called ‘lifestyle’ branding. These images from 2012 show just a sampler of the many directions that Street Art is taking us, with traditional graffiti and letter-based influences and new overlays of 20th century fine art modernism keeping the scene unpredictable and vibrantly alive. Nuart artists this year included Aakash Nihalani (US), Dolk (Norway), Eine (UK), Ron English (US), Saber (US), Sickboy (UK), Mobster (UK), HowNosm (US), Niels Shoe Meulman (NL), Joran Seiler (US), and The Wa (France).
Thanks to Ian Cox for sharing these images, some exclusive and some previously published.
German Street Artist TIKA has been in Chur, Switzerland recently and last week she put up this piece called “Staibock & Hirtin”, which loosely translates to Albine Ibex and his shepherdess. It is a local theme, this heraldic animal, she says, that has a lot of history in this part of the country. She did the entire wall with aerosol, using stencils and some tape for details. She pulled back some of the aluminum tape to give it a relief structure, which is a technique she’s been experimenting with for a few years.
“One man with a long, wild, white beard was very interested in the piece and stopped to talk. He was super happy when he saw that I painted the alpine ibexes “zipfel” (a really old-fashioned Swiss word for penis) and he told me that in town nowadays they do not always paint it in the emblem and kids often ask why sometimes it has a penis and sometimes not.”
So there you have it, when in Chur doing a bit of gatukonst (street art), do as the Churians do and make sure all your ibexes have zipfels.
Great thanks to TIKA for sharing these new exclusive pics with BSA readers!
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
