We’re up to our necks in deep frosty wind-whipping winter, and yet the Street Art right now is verbose, detailed, bright eyed, distinct, political, critical, stylish, dense, richly colorful.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Miami, and this time featuring Armyan, Captain Eyeline, Cash4, China, City Kitty, COMBO, CP Won, Food Baby Soul, Glare, Jaroe, Jaye Moon, Jazi, Marameo Universe, Plasma Slug, Rodak, Sara Lynne Leo, Smells, UK WC, and Winston Tseng.
Meanwhile new stuff is popping off in Ridgewood, Queens, where some of the stuff below is from, proving that the scene is still incredibly relevant to artists and fans alike.
So here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Boy Kong, Chris RWK, City Kitty, Chance Paperboy, Damien Mitchell, Jaye Moon, Kashink, Kirza, K Liu Long, MeresOne, Myth, Raf Urban, Rx Skulls, Square, Squid Licker, Gane, Texas and Zimad.
As the snow birds flew back to NYC this week from their Miami art debauchery with dark circles under their eyes and paint under their nails we tossed them right back in the roiling red & white mash of SantaCon in the streets, 2 more politicians going to jail, and the alleged hunk-hiring Bronx priest resigning from his parish. You can really feel the spirit of Christmas and Hannukah all around.
BSA was proud to co-sponsor the talk with DAZE, LEE Quinones, and Jane Dickson for the special reception at DAZE’s “The City is My Muse” show currently on exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, hosted by Sean Corcoran. The three are vital to the historical thread that reaches back to NY’s earliest graff days and it was evident from seeing their newest works as they each presented them on screen that they refuse to be nostalgic about the city – but prefer to be on top of it. Case in point was Lee’s opening the following night that showcased his new mural on the ceiling at the Indigo Hotel – his Sistine Chapel if you will.
Invader finished his 42 piece wave of tile installations in New York, according to reports, Banksy struck out with political pieces addressing immigration and xenophobia (videos at end of this posting), and Gilf! wrapped the façade of a Williamsburg bar with “gentrification in progress” tape to mark its death by market forces. As artists continue to grapple with socio/political events, the art of the street keeps mutating forward.
Side note: “Images of the Week” takes a hiatus for the next few weeks thanks to special Holiday programming. It returns in 2016.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Banksy, Bunny M, City Kitty, Cost, Daze, Dee Dee, Gilf!, Invader, Jaye Moon, Jordan Seiler, KET, Labrona, Lee Quinones, Lex56, Mint&Serf, Never, Pet Bird, Read, Sipros, Specter, Wing, and WK Interact.
Specter was in France last month with FKDL and Upian, among others. Here are some examples of paintings and ad takeovers in Paris as well as an abandoned factory called La Rodia in Besancon. The Brooklyn based artist tells us that “It was a trying time to be there but supporting my friends and creating some colorful distractions was more important.”
From The Guardian:
“Street artist Banksy has painted a depiction of Apple founder Steve Jobs on a wall in a migrant and refugee camp in France known as the Calais ‘Jungle’. The artist, who has never revealed his identity, released a rare public statement challenging the perception that migrants and refugees from Syria are a drain on Western economies, UK media reported”
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring A Visual Bliss, Buttless Supreme, Case Ma’Claim, Dre, Jaye Moon, KAS, Kelly Towles, Lexi Bella, Mr. Prvrt, Pear, Shark Toof, Specter, Tuco Wallach, and What Will You Leave Behind.
ECB was back on the streets in Bushwick this week doing his portrait of a Moroccan street barber from his series of portraits in Morocco of traders whose trade is in danger of extinction. That is what BSA Images of the Week starts off with.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Caroatoes, ECB, Hendrick Beikirch, Icy & Sot, Jaye Moon, London Kaye, ROA, Scott Lickstein, SOBR, Ten Hundred, Trice, Wing, and X-O.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Crummy Gummy, Dan Witz, Dasic, Dot Dot Dot, Flood, Hama Woods, Jaye Moon, Jerk Face, LMNOPI, Mr. Toll, Ostream, Pobel, QRST, Robert Janz, The Department of Well Being, Tilt, and Todo Es Mentira.
These new pieces by QRST recently appeared with his ever more sophisticated technique of sculptural painting, now popping the forms forward into the street. The symbology is known to him only, combining religious iconography with street, science and mythological metaphor to tell a story, sometimes to write a diary entry. We found out that these are 3 of 4 new pieces that are about loss and death, relating different aspects of the the same experience, “different personifications of the same dark thing,” according to the artist.
A big deal has been made about the so-called virtual experience of Street Art – made possible by ever more sophisticated phones and digital platforms and technology – producing a pulsating river of visually pleasing delicacies to view across every device at a rapid speed, and then forget.
Sit on the city bus or in a laundromat next to someone reviewing their Instagram/RSS/Facebook feed and you’ll witness a hurried and jerky scrolling with the index finger of images flying by with momentary pauses for absorbing, or perhaps “liking”. The greatest number of “likes” are always for the best eye candy, the most poppy, and the most commercially viable. It’s a sort of visual image consumption gluttony that can be as satisfying as a daily bag of orange colored cheese puffs.
This is probably not what art on the street is meant for. At least, not all of it.
As we have been observing here and in front of audiences for a few years now, the 2000s and 2010s have brought a New Guard and a new style and approach to work in the street that we refer to as the work of storytellers. These artists are doing it slowly, with great purpose, and without the same goals that once characterized graffiti and street art.
While there has been the dual development of a certain digital life during the last decade, these street works are eschewing the shallowness that our electronic behaviors are embracing. Even though the digitization of society has pushed boundaries of speed and eliminated geography almost entirely, it is creating an artificial intelligence of a different kind. In other words there really is still no substitute for being there to see this work, to being present in the moment while cars drive by and chattering pedestrians march up the sidewalk.
Setting aside the recent abundance of large commissioned/permissioned murals and the duplication/repetition practice of spreading identical images on wheatpasted posters and stickers that demark the 1990s and early 2000s in the Street Art continuum, today we wanted to briefly spotlight some of the one of a kind, hand crafted, hand painted, illegally placed art on the streets.
The materials, styles and placements are as varied as the artists themselves: Yarn characters attached to fences, tiles glued to walls, acrylic and oil hand painted wheat pastes on a myriad of surfaces, ink, lead and marker illustrations, carved linotype ink prints, clay sculptures, lego sculptures, intricate hand-cut paper, and hand rendered drawings have slowly appeared on bus shelters, walls, doorways, even tree branches.
They all have a few things in common: The artists didn’t ask for permission to place these labor-intensive pieces on the streets, they are usually one of a kind, and frequently they are linked to personal stories.
We’ve been educating ourselves about these stories and will be sharing some of them with you at the Brooklyn Museum in April, so maybe that’s why we have been thinking about this so much. There is a quality to these works that reflect a sense of personal urgency and a revelation about their uniqueness at the same time.
If the placement of them is hurried the making of them it is not. The themes can be as varied as the materials but in many cases the artist informs the art by his or her autobiography or aspiration. And once again BSA is seeing a steady and genuine growth in storytelling and activism as two of the many themes that we see as we walk the streets of the city.
Street Artist Jaye Moon has some choice words to share on Brooklyn streets, which are no stranger to coursing curses rolling off turgid tongues with tantalizing invective – especially when you are fighting for a parking space or are cut off by a bike rider or when getting a slice of pizza or mailing a letter or tying your shoe. Today it appears that New Yorkers are sort of enamored with words that were once vulgar or verboten – we’re just trying to squeeze that last little bit of shock value out of them before they join the language as mere verbs and nouns.
The irony of spelling it out with Legos in saturated bubblegum pink and grape and almost-neon green and wrapping them around a tree limb is just one more great way to give the ol’ middle finger to your fellow New Yorker – a refracted derivation from the (in comparison) more traditional aerosol screed sprayed across a wall by the bristling graffiti writer or aggrieved anarchist.
Candy coated and rigidly high gloss, these new housing complexes in the heart of DUMBO are also ironic because of the real estate development that has metamorphosed this moribund industrial waterfront neighborhood in just 20 years. Installed just in time for the DUMBO Arts Festival last weekend, where tens of thousands of public art fans could see her tree houses at eye level or just above, we’re still not clear if she was part of the official program, but what the f**k – People seem to love them so fuggedaboutit.
Of the 10,000 images he snapped of Street Art this year, photographer Jaime Rojo gives us 110 that represent some of the most compelling, interesting, perplexing, thrilling in 2012.
Together the collection gives you an idea of the range of mediums, techniques, styles, and sentiments that appear on the street today as the scene continues to evolve worldwide. Every seven days on BrooklynStreetArt.com, we present “Images Of The Week”, our weekly interview with the street.
We hope you enjoy this collection – some of our best Images of The Year from 2012.
Artists include 2501, 4Burners, 907, Above, Aiko, AM7, Anarkia, Anthony Lister, Anthony Sneed, Bare, Barry McGee, Bast, Billi Kid, Cake, Cash For Your Warhol, Con, Curtis, D*Face, Dabs & Myla, Daek One, DAL East, Dan Witz, Dark Clouds, Dasic, David Ellis, David Pappaceno, Dceve, Deth Kult, ECB, Eine, El Sol 25, Elle, Entes y Pesimo, Enzo & Nio, Esma, Ever, Faile, Faith47, Fila, FKDL, Gable, Gaia, Gilf!, Graffiti Iconz, Hef, HellbentHert, Hot Tea, How & Nosm, Icy & Sot, Interesni Kazki, Jason Woodside, Javs, Jaye Moon, Jaz, Jean Seestadt, Jetsonorama, Jim Avignon, Joe Iurato, JR, Judith Supine, Ka, Kem5, Know Hope, Kuma, Labrona, Liqen, LNY, Love Me, Lush, Matt Siren, Mike Giant, Miyok, MOMO, Mr. Sauce, Mr. Toll, ND’A, Nick Walker, Nosego, Nychos, Occupy Wall Street, Okuda, OLEK, OverUnder, Phlegm, Pixel Pancho, Rambo, Read Books!, Reka, Retna, Reyes, Rime, Risk, ROA, Robots Will Kill, Rone, Sacer, Saner, See One, Sego, sevens errline, Sheyro, Skewville, Sonni, Stick, Stikman, Stormie Mills, Square, Swoon, Tati, The Yok, Toper, TVEE, UFO, VHILS, Willow, Wing, XAM, Yes One, and Zed1 .
Street Artist Jaye Moon is doing a diminutive deed to alleviate New York’s ongoing housing crisis by leaving new buildings cradled in the limbs of trees, or wrapped around their trunks.
Using Legos as building materials, the blocked geometry of her architectural construction is carefully considered and engineered to allow for the expansion of tree limbs and cautious to avoid damage. A Korea-born Brooklyn fine artist with gallery representation doing other work, Moon has more recently expanded her art practice to the street, and her multi-colored housing units have been catching the eye of curious New Yorkers – and thoroughly captivating their kids. Since we first discovered and debuted her work on the web in September 2011, she has also garnered a new collection of Street Art fans.
Moon says she chose Legos as a medium because they are ready-made objects that mimic industrial , mechanical uses and because they summon a certain childlike innocence and sense of play. When you discover one of her tree houses on the street, your mind jumps up to a fascinating miniature world above your head and your hand may reflexively reach to swing open one of the Lillipution doors or to tap your finger on a wee window. During a (aptly named) residency program last week in Seoul, Moon found a few small volunteers who offered to help with her latest Street Art installations. Experts on the intricacies of Legos, her young assistants schooled her, which she says isn’t unusual. “Passersby love to join to help make my tree houses,” she says.
While Moon is not the first on the street to use the popular children’s building blocks – there have been a handful in recent years– she is the only one to take this architectural approach and to expand upon it so extensively. Each carefully planned construction is site specific and is carefully secured so that any attempts at removal will effectively destroy the piece. So while she is fascinated by the idea that housing could easily become mobile and portable, don’t try it with these installations. In addition to the ongoing housing project Moon has also been leaving colorful placards glued onto walls or under nooks, each spelling out phrases, secret missives, and colorfully vulgar words. But primarily for Jaye Moon right now, da house is in Brooklyn!
Happy Friday! Wipe that stain off your shirt from last nights office holiday party and brush your teeth and get to work so you can be a zombie all day. For our part – it’s time for a little Street Art roundup of some things that you might like.
1. Miami in The House All Weekend
2. “Deck the Walls” at Stolen Space (London)
3. “Rinse & Repeat” Group Show at Ambush (Sydney, Australia)
4. Skewville in France, Quel Surprise! (Lille, France)
5. Jaye Moon at Paik Hae Young (Seoul)
6. “Sowing The Seeds of Love” – Just Seeds Group Show Friday (Manhattan)
7. Icy & Sot at Nu Hotel (Brooklyn)
8. Zombie Nation – Ezra Eismont
9. Herakut The Giant Story Book Project (VIDEO)
10. SWOON’s Konbit Shelter – Art in the Streets – MOCAtv (VIDEO)
Miami in The House All Weekend
This weekend the fun is for Street Art in Miami and check out some of our recommendations (Best Miami Street Art: BSA Picks Awesomest for Basel ’12) for hoofing it around that we posted Wednesday. Tonight of course there are a number of grand opening parties/after parties (including Fountain), but really just being on the street is equally fun if not funner! Thanks for that adverb from 7 year old Darnell Wilsen of Brooklyn.
For a full listing of Art Fairs, Events and Street Murals click here and here.
But not all the fun is in Miami here are a few picks of what’s happening elsewhere in the world:
“Deck the Walls” at Stolen Space (London)
Greeting cards are a nice way to say Merry Christmas to Grandma, and for suburban white middle class families to distribute photos proving that their kids are not on drugs. This is Stolen Space Christmas Show celebrates greetings cards and holiday cheer with D*Face, Word to Mother, Will Barras and David Bray among others putting their own imprimatur on Christmas. Come on, Uncle Bert and Aunt Dolittle will be there, so comb your hair, put some shoes on and get out of the house!
For further information regarding this show click here.
“Rinse & Repeat” Group Show at Ambush (Sydney, Australia)
With a collection of Australian Graffiti and Street Art Artists, “Rinse & Repeat” finds its inspiration by taking a look at the Old Masters and re-interpreting them with their own styles and techniques. An interesting proposition albeit fraught with risks – there are a few good ones here though that will delight your academic/street sensibilities. Included in the line up are: Adnate (AWOL Crew),Bridge Stehli, Cam Wall, Carl Steffan, Deams (AWOL Crew), Fintan Magee, Guido van Helten, Phibs, Shannon Crees, Slicer (AWOL Crew) , Team and Teazer.
For further information regarding this exhibition click here.
Skewville in France, Quel Surprise! (Lille, France)
Hope they realize what they have gotten themselves into, but Vertikal Gallery is hosting Brooklyn Street Art collective Skewville for a solo show entitled “Be Inside”. Considering we have had one or two Lillians in Brooklyn putting work up on the streets over the last few years, this sounds like a cultural exchange program of some kind, right?
For further information regarding this exhibition click here.
Jaye Moon at Paik Hae Young (Seoul)
New York Street Artist Jaye Moon is in Seoul, Korea on an Art Residency Invitation and tonight his her solo exhibition with her “Lego Tree House” opening tonight at the Paik Hae Young Gallery.
For further information regarding this exhibition click here.
“Sowing The Seeds of Love” – Just Seeds Group Show Friday (Manhattan)
The Art Collective Just Seeds new group exhibition titled “Sowing The Seeds of Love” opens tonight at the Munch Gallery in Manhattan. The artists in Just Seeds aim to put forth their world views on a variety of issues – looking to inform and bolster you through the power of art. Participating in this show are: Jesus Barraza, Kevin Caplicki, Melanie Cervantes, Santiago Doesntsitstill, Alec Dunn, Molly J Fair, Thea Gahr, Nicolas Lampert, Josh MacPhee, Fernando Marti, Colin Matthes, Dylan Miner, Roger Peet, Jesse Purcell, Pete Railand, Favianna Rodriguez, Shaun Slifer, Chris Stain, Meredith Stern, Mary Tremonte and Bec Young.
For further information regarding this exhibition click here.
Icy & Sot at Nu Hotel (Brooklyn)
Iranian expats and brothers Icy & Sot invite you to celebrate with them their first foray in the hospitality business. The brothers designed a room at the Nu Hotel in Brooklyn and you are invited to come over tonight for some refreshments.
Artist Ezra Eismont has a Kickstarter fundraiser to help publish his Zombie Nation book, which features his zombified portraits of icons and celebrities. Seems like a heartwarming holiday thing to do, doesn’t it? Please support your local artists and small family businesses.
Herakut The Giant Story Book Project (VIDEO)
SWOON’s Konbit Shelter – Art in the Streets – MOCAtv (VIDEO)
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
