BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
SaveArtSpace 10th Anniversary Public Art Exhibition & Gallery Show
– Opens May 30, 2025
SaveArtSpace marks its 10th anniversary with The People’s Art, a sweeping public art initiative and gallery exhibition that brings together some of the most urgent and incisive voices in contemporary art. Curated by an influential panel of curators and cultural leaders grounded in the study of graffiti, street art, and public art — Anne-Laure Lemaitre, RJ Rushmore, Zahra Sherzad, Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo, and Travis Rix — this year’s exhibition takes the streets of New York City as its canvas and its airwaves as amplifier. Selected from a competitive open call that drew nearly 500 artists from across the country, the final group includes over 50 creators whose work explores money, power, and the poetic disruptions of public space.
Opening May 30, 2025, The People’s Art debuts with billboard takeovers throughout New York City, featuring works by Walter Cruz & Lamar Robillard, Tod Seelie, Anastasios Poneros, Jonathan Yubi, Itzel Basualdo, Matthew Morrocco, Kip Henke, Tariq AlObaid, Wen Liu, and Gordon Hull. The works will occupy advertising real estate typically reserved for commercial persuasion, instead offering pointed, personal, and public reflections on inequality, representation, and collective memory. Complementing these installations, Satellite Gallery on Broome Street will host a one-night-only opening reception, showcasing work by more than 40 artists selected for the gallery component of the exhibition.
The event will also include a live public performance by Autumn Breon, who will pull a mobile billboard truck through the Lower East Side while animated censorship incidents flash across its screens — a confrontation between voice and silencing in the most physical sense. Breon’s body becomes a vessel of resistance, and her performance, animated by Brindha Kumar, anchors the evening’s commitment to calling attention to what we too often try not to see.
This year’s featured essay by cultural critic Carlo McCormick sets the tone for the project, articulating a vision of art that rejects the insularity of luxury culture in favor of a raw, public vernacular. “This is the art of the commons,” McCormick writes, “that shared space between the tyranny of privatization and the compromise of collectivity.” His essay, presented in full below, will frame a series of images from the exhibition — an offering not just to the art world, but to the street, the sidewalk, and the people who walk them.
The People’s Art
The People’s Art is an art of, and for, the people. In a town like New York City, we’ve got plenty of established spaces – galleries, museums, lobbies and the like – to showcase the art that exists as trophies and baubles in the marketplace of luxury products, or to serve the glut of cultural production like sewer drains in a deluge. This is a project, in however many billboards it takes to get a gesture out there that can dance in the public imagination without becoming a brand, that is all about the space between polemics and poetics, how we communicate in this crowded place without screaming, like the way we somehow know how to walk the busiest of sidewalks without running into one another. It’s a folkloric choreography of lover’s leaps and slapstick pratfalls, talking out loud because you think your phone gives you permission to occupy the bandwidth of everyone around you, or because you’re just fucking crazy. It’s a way of looking as well as representing, the terms of engagement where we try not to stare but aren’t afraid to wink.
Signs of the times, the veritable zits of our zeitgeist, we’ve demeaned and damned billboards at least since Lady Bird talked her hubby President Lyndon Johnson into enacting the Highway Beautification Act (HBA) back in 1965 – the idea being that beauty would make America a better place to live. No doubt the time is nigh for some new assault on this ongoing ugliness (the equivalent of late night TV ads on the cultural landscape), maybe we can call it MABA, but until then let us celebrate billboards as the old-fashioned eye-sores they truly are – neglected vestiges from an early outbreak of a visual rash – the residual old scar tissue of corporate co-option and commercial coercion that has since all but subsumed the society of the spectacle.
An art of the people needs to speak a lingua franca and there can be no more common language than the come-on. We don’t shoot the shit in Latin or iambic pentameter; we communicate in the vulgar vernacular of persuasion. Wherever the artist’s billboards of SaveArtSpace appear like deranged interventions in the quotidian, they do not so much bust out of the normalcy as weave their idiosyncrasies into it, joining the din of optical overload like an odd harmony in an ancient Greek chorus, queries and quandaries in the surface of surety, alternatives to the obvious not afraid of eschewing subtlety for the sake of commanding attention. This is the art of the commons, that shared space between the tyranny of privatization and the compromise of collectivity. In a medium dedicated to telling the people what they want, SaveArtSpace allows us to occupy public space as a personal place where we can imagine what we need.
– Carlo McCormick
To see all the artists’ work selected for the billboards and the gallery exhibition, learn about the artists, curators, and SaveArtSpace click HERE.
