All posts tagged: Rhode Island

Aryz Celebrates Workers in Providence, RI Mural

Aryz Celebrates Workers in Providence, RI Mural

Loosely layered and color-blocked figures in the desaturated tones of pre-Depression 1910s, the new lineup on these walls in downtown Providence, Rhode Island recalls a proud industrial age here – as painted by the graffiti/street artist Arz.

Originally from Palo Alto, he’s now considered a Catalan muralist of large scale works whose more than two decades of experience on the streets has fully formed this trim team of workers. It is a style that hearkens to the elegant depictions of a century ago by illustrators like Frank Godwin – known as much for his depictions of industrial workers as the privileged beneficiaries in their drawing rooms balanced gently on a piano bench.

Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Chop’em Down Films)

“The idea is to make a representation where you can read the hard years of the construction of a ‘modern’ city from scratch,” says Aryz in a press release, “representing all the anonymous workers who built it, representing the American Industrial Revolution and the workers in their labors.”

Funded by donations from perhaps some of todays’ captains of industry, the mural lends a grace to that toil, a dignity to the classes who fought for union rights, better working conditions, a minimum wage, an end to child labor. Providence itself is known as the location of America’s first Labor Day Parade on August 23, 1882, with thousands of union members parading through downtown. 11 years later Labor Day became a holiday in Rhode Island.

Previously a graffiti writer in Barcelona, Aryz is no stranger to factory buildings when it comes to getting up. Now the owners of factory-looking buildings invite him to paint. A little over a decade we published his work on the side of a Brooklyn deli with How and Nosm. Today his visual style and mastery of technique has evolved into one that is quickly recognized and admired for its harmony, composition, and impeccable color palette.

Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Chop’em Down Films)
Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Chop’em Down Films)
Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Chop’em Down Films)
Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Chop’em Down Films)
Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Chop’em Down Films)
Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Chop’em Down Films)
Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Aryz)
Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Chop’em Down Films)
Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Aryz)
Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Chop’em Down Films)
Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Chop’em Down Films)
Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Chop’em Down Films)
Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Chop’em Down Films)
Aryz. The Avenue Concept. Providence, Rhode Island. (photo © Chop’em Down Films)
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BSA Images Of The Week: 06.21.15

BSA Images Of The Week: 06.21.15

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Summertiiiiiiiiiiimmme, and the living is eaaaaassssssyyyyy. Yessir, today is the first day of Summer here in New York and the longest day of the year – which means you can take a nap under a tree in the park or on your towel at the beach and still have plenty of time to play when you wake up. There are abandoned buildings to explore, murals to paint, wheat-pastes to stick, interventions to engineer, stencils to cut, selfies to snapchat, potato chips to eat, beer to swig. That couch by the window is calling me even now, the big temptress, as she does so often on these languorous days, induced by the heat. But I will not heed her siren song.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Bezt, Buff Monster, Dain, Dee Dee, Faile, Fra. Biancoshock, Free Humanity, Gold Loxe, Li-Hill, Natalia Rak, Okuda, Old Broads, Phoebe, Sophia Hirsch and Johannes Mundinger, and Simon Vazquez and Sebastien Waknine.

Top image above >>> Okuda (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Li-Hill for The Bushwick Collective. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Li-Hill for The Bushwick Collective. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Bezt (from Etam Cru) in Providence, Rhode Island for Avenue Concept/Inoperable Gallery (photo © Bezt)

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Dee Dee and Dain are BFF’s on the streets. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Gold Loxe (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Faile (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Faile with a remnant of El Sol 25. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Faile. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Phoebe New York (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Phoebe New York (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Natalia Rak in Providence, Rhode Island for Avenue Concept/Inoperable Gallery (photo © Natalia Rak)

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Fra Biancoshock’s new installation in Vilnius, Lithuania features a speed checking camera refashioned in the fashion of an Instagram camera. He calls it #picoftheday (photo © Fra Biancoshock)

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Old Broads (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Old Broads (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Buff Monster for The Bushwick Collective (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Sophia Hirsch and Johannes Mundinger installation at the former prison ‘JVA Magdeburg’ in Magdeburg, Germany.  (photo © Johannes Mundinger)

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Sophia Hirsch and Johannes Mundinger installation at the former prison ‘JVA Magdeburg’ in Magdeburg, Germany.  (photo © Johannes Mundinger)

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Free Humanity (photo © Jaime Rojo)

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Simon Vazquez and Sebastien Waknine interventions in an abandoned hotel someplace in Northern Spain. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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Simon Vazquez and Sebastien Waknine interventions in an abandoned hotel someplace in Northern Spain. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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Simon Vazquez and Sebastien Waknine interventions in an abandoned hotel somewhere in Northern Spain. (photo © Lluis Olive Bulbena)

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Untitled. Coney Island, NY. Summer 2015 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

 

 

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EVOCA1 Addresses Addiction in Providence, RI

EVOCA1 Addresses Addiction in Providence, RI

“Addiction is a hard battle, and even when sober, the next fix is always lurking around the corner tempting you to fall back into that pit,” says Nicholas of INOPERAbLE Gallery, as he looks at this new piece by EVOCA1  “Sometimes you need a bit of help.” EVOCA1 is offering encouragement with his can-wielding skills and some visual metaphor.

Just finished in Providence, Rhode Island in an area known for crime, violence, and drugs, the piece is part of an initiative by a local organization called Avenue Concept. The Dominican born figurative painter is one of the rare cases of Miami coming north this time of year, especially since half of New York’s art crowd is headed for Basel next week. While painting the piece he met a lot of nice local people who stopped by to say hi and you can see how his self-trained style exudes a warmth that would make him approachable.

Thanks to Evoca1, INOPERAbLE , and The Avenue Concept for sharing these exclusive images with BSA readers.

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Evoca1. (photo © courtesy of Inoperable)

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Evoca1. (photo © courtesy of Inoperable)

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Evoca1. (photo © courtesy of Inoperable)

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Evoca1. (photo © courtesy of Inoperable)

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Evoca1. (photo © courtesy of Inoperable)

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Evoca1. (photo © courtesy of Inoperable)

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Evoca1. (photo © courtesy of Avenue Concept)

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Martha Cooper, Photographer of Art on the Streets for Six Decades

Martha Cooper landed in LA yesterday and will spend the next week installing her photos and their remixed new versions beside them, even flanking hers like stereo speakers. Since the press release has gone out we thought we’d share with you the bio written by Steven P. Harrington and the promo photo by Jaime Rojo which will appear in a special issue of The Art Street Journal dedicated entirely to her to come out this week.

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Martha and Pablo at home, with a portrait of her sitting on a train car with camera in hand painted by Os Gemeos overlooking the scene. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Martha Cooper, Photographer of Art on the Streets for Six Decades

Written by Steven P. Harrington, this article is featured in The Art Street Journal vol ii – issue v.

The daughter of a Baltimore camera store owner, Martha Cooper’s romance with photography began in the 1940s when bobby-soxers and penny loafers were the sign of edgy youth culture. Her dad, an amateur photographer himself, gave his small girl a camera and together they hit the streets in search of adventure. “Yeah, my father used to take me out and we would take pictures. That’s what I thought photography was…we were just looking for pictures,” she recalls. Six decades later, Cooper is still looking for pictures; meanwhile, many works from her archive are cited as pivotal recordings of the birth of hip-hop culture and its plastic art form, graffiti.

During the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, Cooper earned a Bachelors of Art degree in Iowa, taught English for the Peace Corps in Thailand and rode a motorcycle from Bangkok to obtain a graduate degree at Oxford. As a freelancer and staff photographer in Japan, Maryland and Rhode Island in the early 1970s she moved to the media and art center of New York City to catch bigger fish. Landing a job on the staff of The New York Post in 1977, she discovered that the resistant and competitive boys club of photographers there were reluctant to countenance this scrappy young woman shooting hard news stories and Studio 54 celebrities.

Hungry for discovery, Cooper would spend her time to and from assignments in bombed-out neighborhoods, where she took pictures of kids entertaining themselves with games they devised on the street, often with the humblest of materials. It was during one of those trips that she stumbled on graffiti and the members of its community. She met a young boy who suggested she photograph the work she was seeing, then showed her a stylized drawing of his name, or piece, in his notebook.

Then he asked her if she wanted to meet “The King”.

Following this lead to Brooklyn, Cooper met Dondi, the citywide-famous graffiti writer who kept a published photo of hers in his black book because its background contained one of his graffiti throw-ups. Cooper quickly realized that she had stumbled into a lively street culture and became an avid student of the teen writers she befriended. By the time she took her last news picture for the New York Post in 1980, her primary desire was to capture as many pieces, tags, and trains as she possibly could find. Today, she remarks on her near-obsessive devotion to documenting New York’s graffiti: waking before dawn to hit the street, waiting five hours for a freshly painted #2 train to pass with the sun at her back and countless secret adventures with vandals in train yards, evading transit police in order to pursue a shot.

Joining efforts with fellow graffiti photographer, Henry Chalfant, Cooper proposed putting together a book of their documentation. The pair endured multiple rejections from publishers while lugging around a big “dummy” book with their pictures glued to the pages. Eventually, however, they landed a deal and Subway Art was published in 1984. Although not an immediate success, it came to sell half a million copies and established itself as a holy book for fans, aspiring artists and art historians worldwide.

By the time the 25th anniversary edition was published in 2009, generations of graffiti and street artists had been influenced by it and the hip-hop culture Cooper and Chalfant had captured had gone global.

In the intervening years, Martha Cooper never stopped shooting. Her love of serendipity on the street and the exploration of cultures led her to publish thousands of photos in books such as R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art, Hip Hop Files 1979-1984, We B*Girlz, Street Play, New York State of Mind, Tag Town, Going Postal, and Name Tagging. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide and published in numerous magazines including National Geographic, Natural History, and Vibe. While she is still shooting graffiti, street art and the occasional break dance competition today, Cooper’s current project involves documenting people and events in Sowebo, a drug-riddled neighborhood in her birthplace of Baltimore.

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Steven P. Harrington is editor-in-chief of BrooklynStreetArt.com and co-author (with Jaime Rojo) of Brooklyn Street Art and Street Art New York, both by Prestel Publishing. He and Jaime Rojo are also contributing writers on street art for The Huffington Post.

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Photographs by Martha Cooper

Martha Cooper ; Remix

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Original remixes of these photographs in a range of media by Aeon, John Ahearn, Aiko, Bio, Nicer & B-Gee, Blade, Blanco, Mark Bode, Burning Candy, Victor Castillo, Cey, Cekis, Claw, Cosbe, Crash, Dabs & Myla, Anton van Dalen, Daze, Dearraindrop, Jane Dickson, Dr. Revolt, Shepard Fairey, Faust, Flying Fortress, Freedom, Fumakaka, Futura, Gaia, Grotesk, Logan Hicks, How & Nosm, LA II, Lady Pink, Anthony Lister, The London Police, Mare 139, Barry McGee, Nazza Stencil, Nunca, José Parlá, Quik, Lee Quinones, Kenny Scharf, Sharp, Skewville, Chris Stain, Subway Art History, Swoon, T-Kid, Terror161 and more.

Carmichael Gallery is pleased to announce Martha Cooper: Remix, an expansive group show featuring highlights from Martha Cooper’s photographic archive and works by over 50 artists who have created their own unique interpretations of her iconic, historically significant imagery. There will be an opening reception for the exhibition on Saturday, April 9 from 6 to 8pm with Martha Cooper and several of the participating artists in attendance. The exhibition will run through May 7, 2011.

Click on the link below to read BSA interview with Martha Cooper:

http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/?p=19366

Carmichael Gallery

5795 Washington Blvd

Culver City, CA 90232

April 9 – May 7, 2011

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 9, 6-8pm

 

 

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