Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. The weather is tropical this weekend, like we’re expecting a hurricane – ominous and windy. Maybe its our ongoing fear of runaway inflation, which Fed Chair Jerome Powell is trying to make us forget he called ‘transitory’. That should be the word of 2021. Transitory. Like fanny packs worn diagonally across the chest, or Dua Lipa.
The city’s vaccination rate is 78, and the mayor is requiring more vaccine and mask mandates in private companies and schools. Let’s hope it works, brothers and sisters.
So here’s our regular interview with the street, this week including 4SomeCrew, Buff Monster, Calicho, DAK 907, DOT DOT DOT, Drecks, ERRE, MIDABI, Not Banksy, Paper Monster, Paul Richard, Praxis VGZ, Roachi, Swrve, Urban Ruben, and Zexor.
SCORPIO, BLOOD TEA, ALI, STAN 153, SAL 161, CLIFF 159. It was the mid to late 70s in New York and train writing was in its foundational stages, later to be referred to as legendary. For a modest crew of teenagers, it was the hypest stage you could be on, and going all city constructed many dreams of fame and recognition on the street.
Jack Pelsinger wanted to help shepherd these talents and energies into something they could develop into a future, maybe a profession. With a lease on a storefront from the city for a dollar in 1974, he made way for the Nation of Graffiti Artists (NOGA). An artists workshop and haven for a creative community that was regularly sidelined or overlooked, the author of this new volume, Chris Pape (acclaimed OG Freedom), says “Like moths drawn to a light, the kids showed up, hundreds of them.”
With extraordinary photos shot by Michael Lawrence, the book serves as a true document for the New York of that moment and opens doors to a chapter of graffiti history you may not even have known of until now.
NATION OF GRAFFITI ARTISTS, NYC. WRITTEN BY CHRIS PAPE WITH PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL LAWRENCE. PUBLISHED BY BEYOND THE STREETS, 2021.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Prince Of Luna Park 2. Of Memory and Debris a film by Rodrigo Michelangeli 3. The Velvet Underground / Official Trailer
BSA Special Feature: Prince Of Luna Park
New York’s history is marbled and concrete, full of dreams and philosophy, and brutish transactional business at all costs. Before there was this Luna Park, there was the original Luna Park. But all the Luna Parks are tied together in a haze of thrills, chills, excitement, oddity, and french fries with hot dogs. Here in Daniel Lombroso’s “The Prince of Luna Park,” Alessandro Zamperla works to protect his family’s iconic theme park during the pandemic—and prove himself to his father.
Prince Of Luna Park. A film by Daniel Lombroso
Of Memory and Debris a film by Rodrigo Michelangeli
More than 20 million people have left Venezuela in the last five years due to economic collapse. A gorgeous story of love, loss, memory, and the artifacts of life that are all set in motion by upheaval.
“An intimate character diptych, OF MEMORY AND DEBRIS tells the story of an unseen generation — the grandparents left behind by the largest exodus in Latin America’s recent history.”
The Velvet Underground / Official Trailer
Good Evening. We’re your local velvet underground.
It’s almost sublimely subversive to publish your illegal graffiti escapades in a handsomely bound photo book with creamy paper stock and gauzy, professional photos. Positioned as a travelogue across the great Australian continent (complete with a hand-drawn map), the international troupe of sprayers named 1UP from Germany provides a genteel accounting of their expansive itinerary in a diary here for you, dear reader.
They say they are embarking on what is cheekily described as the “Gentlemen’s Tour” in certain aerosol circles. The band of anonymous travelers accompanies their multi-city art exhibition tour at respectable art/café/gallery venues with a parallel expedition in mind: hitting all five commuter train systems of Australia – including Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Jotted with aplomb, these adventures appear rather squirreled away between sometimes heroic, sometimes misty atmospheric photographs by OLF, – a gentle mix of storytelling that can be disarming in its dreamy aspirational quality. “Our imagination was running wild: what will happen in Australia? Kangaroos, parties, trains, bombing! What will the desert be like? How will we endure the many thousands of kilometers driving across the country?”
The stories are not without surprise and carefully touch on all the necessary road trip tropes you may wish for but cannot be assured of in a cross-country graffiti tale of skylarking and aesthetic destruction: angry rural police, security cameras, sleeping in rolled-up carpets, fancy receptions with Aperol Spritz, climbing over fences, sudden fire extinguisher tags, exploding paint cans, smoky wildfires, beaches, wallabies, long never-ending-stretches of road, the Sydney Harbor, an emergency-brake whole-car in Melbourne, and yes, a large kangaroo smashing into your car on a darkened country path.
One favorite tale includes the officer who grills them about painting a water tower and who protects the little lady from his swear words so he can awaken the slippery conscience inside these trapped vandals.
Then he told our female companion to put her hands over her ears and screamed at us two blokes, “Fucking grow up!”
By the end of the slim journal told in the voice of the royal “we”, you are satisfied that they have traveled further than they ever imagined, and you went with them. They may have indeed matured a little, you’ll tell yourself, but hopefully, they have not grown up. Thankfully, not enough to assure that there will not be a sequel adventure trip in another country sooner than later.
PAINT, FUN, RUN, 1UP & OLF: GENTLE PEOPLE TOUR. 1UP CREW BERLIN. PRINTED AND BOUND IN GERMANY
Last week during our interview with Patrick and Patrick from Faile in Miami we discussed with them the many layers of meta that have always characterized their art-making since first putting their handmade screen prints on New York streets in the late 1990s. Not only would Faile photograph their own prints after putting them up on walls and fences and garbage dumpsters, they would convert those same photos into another screen print, and go out again to install those on the street.
This back-and-forth between studio and street is not exactly common, but it does solidify the importance of experimentation and play in their work, and the use of the street as laboratory for many street artists over the years.
During this summer a related project took place in Ibiza that rings with that same echo. Photos of children making their own games and toys that were first shot on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side in the 1970s were printed and displayed directly on the streets here. Part of an 11-year-old street art festival called BLOOP Festival IBIZA, the photos were attached to historic cobblestone walls and flown banner-like from posts along the main thoroughfare.
Never previously done at this free festival called BLOOP, these photos of Street Play, so-called for the book she published with them in 2005, were part of an open-air exhibition for photo-journalist Martha Cooper. Known perhaps by many for her photos of New York’s graffitied subway trains from the same era, these pictures focus instead on a different segment of children making their own toys and environments in an atmosphere of urban blight.
Somehow these areas of The Port and the Dalt Vila are imbued with a new spirit briefly as they become settings for these black and white photos of Alphabet City in New York. The images bridge the locations, and the locations likewise become a bridge for the photographs.
“This is not a piece about gloating but about the anger I feel,” says street artist Lapiz about his newest public stencils renders beautifully the jarring facts of hospital workers right now in overwhelmed hospitals everywhere.
“I’ve been shocked to see the nurses wearing so much protective gear that one can not see their faces, nothing really that identifies them as caring,” he remarks on the healthcare professionals who cover their faces, then feel compelled to tape a photo of them on the outside of their uniform to reassure patients that there is a warm smiling person under all those layers.
For all you know, it could be Santa under there this Christmas.
For another consecutive holiday season, many of us, like those in Germany, are finding that they live in a hotspot for infections again. And some have become patients.
“But this is how intensive care units now look like since they are overrun by infected antivaxxers,” he says. “This is not a painting of schadenfreude but of anger. It shows the Christmas that many of these disbelievers are facing for a final time.” Oof! There are many complex feelings rolled into this one obviously.
Stylistically diverse artists are gathered loosely around a dispersed list of goals – and the results are a variety of public works that hope to challenge communities in Bristol, England, with pertinent messages about the collapse of ecological systems demarking the current age.
A series of art activations curated by Charlotte Pyatt this fall in conjunction with the Vanguard exhibition here at M Shed, Charlotte asked artists Richt, Peace of Art, Filthy Luker, Mau Mau, Gabriel Pitcher, Lucy McLauchlan, Caryn Koh, Ampparito, and Paul Harfleet to conceptualize pertinent responses to the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030. It’s a high order, but you must begin somewhere and, by partnering with local community groups in Bristol, the team hoped to show how the people of this city can localize global conversations on poverty eradication, environmental protection and societal equality.
The Vanguard team is made up of a collective of artists, specialists and collectors involved in the global street art movement, say the promotional materials, and the project is led by Mary McCarthy with creative direction from Charlotte Pyatt, art direction from Justin MacCarthy aka DICY, and design direction from Graham Dews aka PARIS.
Below are images from the outdoor installations along with some information from their press department about each artist. Special thanks to photographer Doug Gillen for sharing these excellent images with BSA readers.
“Luke Egan and Pete Hamilton AKA street art duo Filthy Luker and Pedro Estrellas have been creating inflatable artworks together for 24 years. The artist’s unmistakable style and use of medium has carved a unique niche in the international Street Art movement.”
The duo took over the rooftop of We The Curious with an inflatable floral sculpture to amplify SDG15 Life on Land, in partnership with The Natural History Consortium.
“This year city partners came together to create the first One City Ecological Emergency Strategy,” says Savita Willmot is chief executive of The Natural History Consortium. “Our challenge is to now bring these ideas to life across the streets of Bristol. Arts and culture are at the heart of our city, and harnessing the engaging power of art will be crucial to tackling our environmental emergencies.”
The Pansy Project created a tour calling for Gender Equality, say, organizers. More specifically they called for an end to all discrimination and violence against women and girls, which includes lesbophobia, biphobia, and transphobia.
Artist Paul Harfleet brought The Pansy Project to Bristol, leading a free walking tour of the city along which he planted pansies at sites of homophobic and transphobic abuse as a defiant but gentle resistance to hate.
“Despite the melancholic nature of my work, there’s always joy in connecting with my LGBTQ+ siblings to share our stories and connect,” Harfleet says. “I believe that sharing the challenges we face connects and strengthens us.”
A British artist based in South Korea, Gabriel Pitcher uses figurative portraits, short films, and on-street interventions to confront norms about classical beauty, and examines attitudes and psychology in the meantime.
The community ambassador for this intervention in St Werburgh’s is The Global Goals Centre. “I’ve always been interested in exploring and documenting the stories behind the people I paint,” says the artist. This portrait celebrates Katie Cross, her sport, and her effort to ignite that same curiosity and energy for engaging meaningfully with the conversation on climate action.”
Aligning his materials with the climate focus of the activation, Pitcher created his mural using Graphenstone paint which draws in carbon from the air as it cures.”
British Artist and illustrator based in Bristol, UK. Richt aesthetic is minimally monochromatic works with elements of comics, pop, and abstract landscape.
Focusing on the need for “Decent Work and Economic Growth,” he partnered with community ambassador Campus Skateparks and painted a mural at Campus Pool Skatepark to celebrate the role of skate culture in fostering pathways into the creative industries.
“Skateboarding is so many different things,” he says. “For me, at its core, it’s an act of rebellion where nobody is in charge of the biggest club of misfits and rejects ever assembled. The only logical outcome from that recipe is creativity in abundance.”
Light-spirited satirist Mau Mau calls out social injustice and environmental disaster, as he has done for the past 2 decades. “His stable of urban creatures have grown to become icons in their own right,” say organizers. “His foxes, pigs, and sheep have appeared on walls from Japan to the States,” they say, and “He has worked with the likes of Banksy, Dizzie Rascal, Surfers Against Sewage and Greenpeace to name a few.”
Speaking on the artwork, a representative for Frank Water said: “[Here] The globe’s surface points to India, the country with the most people in the world (77 million) without improved access to safe water and the region where FRANK WATER undertakes most of their overseas work. This is juxtaposed with the fact that we undervalue our access to quality water here in the UK, we even flush toilets with drinking-quality water. This aligns with the organization’s efforts to encourage a shift in attitudes to water locally, increasing its perceived value and promoting stewardship.”
Bristol-based female street art collective “Peace of Art” features local artists Emily Richards, Aumairah Hassan Safina Khan and Manazzar Siddique. Begun the street in 2020, the trio say they are “passionate about painting murals that are empowering and reflective of the diverse local community and bringing positive, inspiring art to the area.”
“This mural aims to highlight the issues around climate change and clean air inequalities. It is a reminder of our deep connection with nature as well as one another and the quality of the air we breathe should not and cannot be taken for granted.”
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week – this week from Wynwood Walls in Miami, which each year Goldman Global Arts invites a slate of artists to artistically collaborate by providing them with the opportunity to paint on the walls of the compound. The artists created new pieces in the weeks leading up to Miami Art Basel and debuted them this week. Many of the artists were in attendance during the events and attended the celebration dinner given by the Goldman family as well. Martha Cooper and Nika Kramer were invited to provide the documentation of the process and the completed works.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Add Fuel, Aiko, Bordalo II, David Flores, Ernesto Maranje, Farid Rueda, Greg Mike, Hiero Veiga, Joe Iurato, Kai, Kayla Mahaffey, Mantra, Quake, and Scott Froschauer.
“Late-stage capitalism”? Too heavy; sounds sort of industrial, like that Goth kid in college with the thick-soled boots and big words. “Apocalypse” sounds inspirational, aspirational, so NOW.
Now, from Milan, Italy, comes the “Apocalypse Trilogy”, at least the first two parts, courtesy of two other smart kids in your street art class, Francesco Garbelli and Biancoshock. Together this pair is staging a trio of uncommissioned, unapproved, and unapologetic public art installations featuring flowers as the protagonists.
“The series talks about issues related to the globalization era, the consumerism, and the imminent environmental disaster,” they explain. “Each installation presents paradoxical scenarios” – as we will see here. Aside from their symbolic visual messages that are on-target, you’ll also appreciate that in this age of co-opting and corporate green-washing, the artists also create fictional sponsors who can’t resist proudly taking credit – and shooting themselves in the foot at the same time.
Partly inspired by satire and movies, the first two installations of the “Apocalypse Trilogy” are called “Super Size Flowers” and “Engulf and Devour”.
“A series of flowers, handmade by the artists, that grows ‘obesely’ into a public green area directly,” is meant to welcome you to your favorite omnipresent fast food restaurant, sponsored and managed by the fictional Father of all Fast Foods.
With many western societies facing ever-increasing rates of obesity, they suggest that even the flowers have put on a little extra weight. The artists say they are targeting “a system that has transformed the eating habits of millions of people with no exclusion, thanks to strategies and services dedicated to all age groups; with menus containing surprises for the little ones, parties with entertainment, seats with video games, free Wi-Fi, drive-through service and so on.”
“The future pandemic has been served, without having to get out of your car.”
Inspired by the name of a fictional company in a 1976 Mel Brooks movie, this installation features hundreds of flowers “imprisoned in rusty cages.” A reference to intensive farming methods that surpass the past methods in ways that harm, effectively de-naturing and poisoning our natural systems to extract resourses – even flowers – the artists say this simple installation “is configured as a metaphor for a certain – and dominant – way of interpreting the economy.”
Sponsored and managed by the fictional Engulf & Devour company, the caged flowers represent “the idea of infinite growth that is in stark contrast to the correct perception of our planet which, on the contrary, is finite by its nature,” they tell us.
“The image of these herded flowers deprived of their living space inevitably recalls the theme of intensive farming – or the notorious wet markets, and their modus operandi.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. DETOKS & GENOM, “NOT BIGGER, NOT BETTER …BUT MORE” 2. RERO @ Espace D’art Montresso in Marrkesh 3. Virgil Was Here. His Last Collection for Louis Vuitton in Miami Beach. November 30th, 2021
BSA Special Feature: DETOKS & GENOM, “NOT BIGGER, NOT BETTER …BUT MORE”
“Detoks and Genom form a deadly duo that has been claiming prominent highway spots around Barcelona for some time now.” And with guys like this, there is always so much more to the story.
DETOKS & GENOM, “NOT BIGGER, NOT BETTER …BUT MORE”
RERO @ Espace D’art Montresso in Marrakesh
“It’s about getting rid of the superfluous and focusing on the essential,” says RERO as he describes his new exhibition at Montresso Foundation.
Virgil Was Here. His Last Collection for Louis Vuitton in Miami Beach. November 30th, 2021
Get in, get out, no one gets hurt. Our few days in Miami were full of adventure on the street and at parties and receptions for artists. The party rages on tonight and this weekend at the fairs and in the galleries and bars and streets of course, but our last events were interviewing Faile onstage at Wynwood Walls last night, going to the Museum of Graffiti 2nd Anniversary party/opening for FUZI, and, well there was this thing with Shepard Fairey and Major Lazer and a guy proposing marriage to his girl before the crowd…
But really, where else but Wynwood do you see Blade and his lovely wife Portia on the street, or sit with Ron English and his son Mars on folding chairs directly on the street in front of his new pop-up, or have a hug with ever-sunny Elle in front of her lift, or hide in the shade with seven 1UP dudes across the street from their massive new space piece, or talk with Ket in the back yard with “Style Wars” playing on a large screen behind him and the DJ while a florescent colored Okuda marches by, or chase Lamour Supreme while he tries a one-wheel skateboard around a parking lot, nearly crashing into Crash who is in his cherry picker with Abstrk painting a wall? The dinner at Goldman Properties Monday night? Dude.
Faile. Artists Panel. Wynwood Walls/Goldman Global Arts. Wynwood, Miami. December 1, 2021. (screengrab courtesy of Wynwood Walls)
We’re not really name-droppers, you know that, but honestly it was like a family reunion dinner with perfectly punctilious attention to detail over at Wynwood Walls this week – after two years of Covid fears killing everyone’s buzz. We saw Daze, Shoe, PichiAvo, Bordalo II, Jonone, Shepard Fairey, 1Up, Add Fuel, Case MacClaim, Nychos, Faile, Martha Cooper, Nika Kramer, Mantra, Ken Hiratsuka just to name a few – cavorting with collectors, cultural workers, fanboys, journalists, bloggers, academics, critics, bankers, gallerists, curators, museum people, real estate folks, photographers, dancers, silk climbing aerialists and hustlers of many flavors – and all the class of ’21 artists whom Jessica Goldman invited to paint this year. A Miami mélange, we’ll call it.
Faile. Artists Panel. Wynwood Walls/Goldman Global Arts. Wynwood, Miami. December 1, 2021. (screengrab courtesy of Charlotte Pyatt)
We were even having dinner with Martha when a local stencilist named Gregg Rivero sat in an empty chair at the table with us to offer an array of small stencil works featuring graphically pornographic scenes – to choose from as a memento of Miami indubitably. Naturally, we carefully perused his entire collection of 20 or so spread-eagles, doggie-styles, Shanghai-swans, Mississippi-missionaries, Dutch-doors, bobbing-for-sausages, and lord-knows-what-else. After careful consideration and we each selected a favorite stencil and he autographed it. Just not sure what room to hang it in…
Faile. Artists Panel. Wynwood Walls/Goldman Global Arts. Wynwood, Miami. December 1, 2021. (screengrab courtesy of Wynwood Walls)
Our treasured part of the Miami art vortex ’21 was meeting some BSA fans and Faile fans mixed together at the artist talk hosted by Peter Tunney at GGA Gallery last night. An action-packed hour of pictures covering their 35 year friendship was on offer for the assembled – focused mainly of course on their 22 year professional career. What an amazing career of image-making it is too – and even though we were prepared, there are always surprises with such dynamic dudes who have parlayed an illegal street art career into a well-respected and pretty high profile career with intense collectors and fans of their simplest silk screens and works on paper to their wood puzzle boxes, wood paintings, toys, ripped paintings, and their very new, completely radical approach that breaks their own mold for this “Endless” exhibition. And need we say it, Faile have already released a number of NFTs of course – which some in the audience didn’t know that Faile had – but could have guessed since Faile pioneered interactive digital games that accompanied their analog works as early as 2010 when most people still didn’t even have a smart phone.
But we digress. Back in New York now and it’s grey and cold and unwelcoming, and of course we love it. Thanks Miami! See you soon.
The image below was taken in Wynwood, Miami. At the panel, with Faile, they talked about the process of making their art and one of the subjects was about ripping up posters from the street…. – and how their original name was Alife. Two blocks away we found these ripped posters advertising Alife.
The street art can double as advertisements, the advertisements can double as street art, and all of it has been supplanted by fevered talk about NFTs, as if the speaker whom you’ve been accosted by invented them. For a scene that likes to consider itself to be on the bleeding edge, this is all a bit disappointingly 2017 to hear, but there you have it.
Yet we are still pleased to see that the neighborhood is popping with more fresh new creativity than last year and you again feel like new things are to be discovered around almost every corner. Oh sure, there are many cultural looters here, but that’s always been the case. It’s good to see that some new transgressive pieces, eye-opening missives, and dripping wet tags are scattered here among the permission-based walls and ghosts from December past. No one knows what the socio-economic future holds, but for now, Wynwood’s holding steady.
Here are a few shots from Jaime Rojo as he made a few laps among the streets.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
