All posts tagged: Sharon Matt Atkins

Don Rimx and BSA at Brooklyn Museum : You With Markers in Hand (VIDEO)

Don Rimx and BSA at Brooklyn Museum : You With Markers in Hand (VIDEO)

BSA continues to bring artists to the street wall, to the gallery, and to the museum whenever we can. The video here today captures one of the recent opportunities we had to help bring together Brooklyn Museum goers with one of Brooklyn’s hometown graffiti & street artists Don Rimx.

Just for one night in the grand ballroom of the museum, Rimx invited anyone with a marker to help fill in the color on his new kneeling figure on the temporary wall. Comprised of a complex series of trussing, supports, and various architectural abutments Rimx explained that the materials depicted represented both those he has seen in Brooklyn and Puerto Rico, places close to his heart and personal history.

(Check out the new video by Alex Seel at the end of these photos.)

brooklyn-street-art-don-rimx-brooklyn-museum-2014-web-1

Don Rimx. Still from the video. (Video © Alex Seel)

We helped with the markers, initially to color in some of the paper mural ourselves, then to hand them out to guests of all sorts – moms, dads, grandparents, teens, students, graff writers, professionals, workers, – basically everyone who makes up the community here, even New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito and the Brooklyn Museum’s Managing Curator of Exhibitions, Sharon Matt Atkins.

It was excellent to see people accessing their inner artist and participating in the interactive piece while just behind it hung more classical examples of oil paintings and before us were couples taking live salsa lessons across the ballrooms’ glass and marble floor (it was Latino Heritage and Culture night after all).  We always say that Street Art is just one part of a conversation on the street. Seeing our neighbors taking an active role in creating art with one of New York’s talented street artists is just a confirmation that the creative spirit is alive and well to anyone who wants to access it.

brooklyn-street-art-don-rimx-brooklyn-museum-2014-web-2

Don Rimx. Still from the video. (Video © Alex Seel)

brooklyn-street-art-don-rimx-brooklyn-museum-2014-web-4

Don Rimx. Still from the video. (Video © Alex Seel)

brooklyn-street-art-don-rimx-brooklyn-museum-2014-web-7

Don Rimx. Still from the video. (Video © Alex Seel)

brooklyn-street-art-don-rimx-brooklyn-museum-2014-web-6

Don Rimx. Still from the video. (Video © Alex Seel)

brooklyn-street-art-don-rimx-brooklyn-museum-2014-web-3

Don Rimx. Still from the video. (Video © Alex Seel)

brooklyn-street-art-don-rimx-brooklyn-museum-2014-web-5

Don Rimx. Still from the video. (Video © Alex Seel)

brooklyn-street-art-don-rimx-brooklyn-museum-2014-web-8

Don Rimx. Still from the video. (Video © Alex Seel)

Don Rimx at The Brooklyn Museum. Video by Alex Seel

 

We wish to extend our heartfelt gratitude to the Brooklyn Museum, Alex Seel and of course to Don Rimx.

Brooklyn-Street-Art-Don-Rimx-Brooklyn-Museum-740-Screen-Shot-2015-01-25-at-3.04

Brooklyn-Street-Art-Don-Rimx-Brooklyn-Museum-740-Screen-Shot-2015-01-25-at-2.16

Brooklyn-Street-Art-Don-Rimx-Melissa-Mark-Viverito-Brooklyn-Museum-740-Screen-Shot-2015-01-25-at-3.19

 

Read more
BSA Film Friday: 05.23.14

BSA Film Friday: 05.23.14

Brooklyn-Street-Art-Farewell-Video-shot-Man-of-Mystery

BSA-Video-Friday3-Jan2014-b

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :

1. “Free Graffiti” with a Mystery Man by Farewell
2. BSA in Conversation at Brooklyn Museum
3. Talk Of The Sea from POW! WOW! Hawaii
4. Decolonizing Street Art: Teaser for August in Montreal (unceded territory)
5. The Tower, a film by Erik Vestman & Nils Petter
6. Banksy’s Acceptance Speech at Webby Awards
7. JANZ Artist in Time (Trailer)

BSA Special Feature: “Free Graffiti” with a Mystery Man by Farewell

A parody of thousands of graff videos which portray the can-carrying outlaw, this one takes an unexpected turn in a Pink Pantherish sort of way.

BSA in Conversation at Brooklyn Museum

Part II of the Brooklyn Museum: In Conversation with Brooklyn Street Art night. This video features the second part of our talk after the multimedia presentation at the Brooklyn Museum on April 24 where we invited guests onstage for a discussion and Q&A about personal engagement with works on the street and the storytelling that lies behind the work; Swoon, Luna Park and Keith Schweitzer with Sharon Matt Atkins of the Brooklyn Museum as moderator.

Talk Of The Sea from POW! WOW! Hawaii

“It’s about reviving this knowledge and also about passing on this knowledge, keeping the culture alive,” says Kamea Hadar as he describes the mural and the educational training that enables students to become navigators.

“The final installation of POW! WOW!’s three part project with Hokulea and the Polynesian Voyaging Society was a mural created by Kamea Hadar and the young artists of the POW! WOW! School of Art and 808 Urban.

“In order to be a navigator, you have to be fierce.” ~ Papa Mau Pialigug

Decolonizing Street Art: Teaser for August in Montreal (unceded territory)

This August a new gathering will converge to further the street art conversation while putting a focus on activism. It’s goal of turning attention to the decolonization of Turtle Island and reminding people who live in Montreal of the city’s colonial history continues the work of people like Jetsonorama and LMNOPI and others on the street. It will be also interesting to see how the discourse of the current street art movement expands itself to include these voices.

Check out their Indiegogo link below:

 

Please click on their indiegogo page to help with their crowdfunding campaing: http://www.igg.me/at/decolonizingstreetart

The Tower, a film by Erik Vestman & Nils Petter

The Tower, a film by Swedens Erik Vestman & Nils Petter  is now showing at Moderna Museet Malmö’s entrance hall between May 20 and June 1. With this project, the film makers take a large advertising sign from the noisy city environment and position it in an idyllic setting in the country side. The structure then undergoes a transformation and becomes a… The two have created a number of projects receiving critical acclaim that question public space and who has the right to use it. This film draws the contrasts effectively by throwing the acceptance of commercial messages in our built spaces into a new context.

 

Banksy’s Acceptance Speech at Webby Awards

Not really an acceptance speech and not really an award, this self-produced overview of his one month installation last October in New York also features a shot of the Deitch Gallery when referring to street art galleries who were visited by the police. Since that gallery closed three years earlier, perhaps they taped their “card” to the metal grating? You’ll recognize the narrating voice over as one from his answering machine, and you’ll die when you see the dead animals in the meat market, but mostly you’ll just be happy that you were here and blessed to be in the loving glow and embrace of Ban-sky.

JANZ Artist in Time (Trailer)

“Everything is transient, period. Everything.”

Follow Street artist Robert Janz as he goes through the street and his studio, narrating his experience and philosophy. If someone knows, its probably Mr. Janz.

Read more

El Anatsui Shows Both “Gravity and Grace” in New York

Post industrial African urban pointillist El Anatsui is outside at The High Line in Manhattan and inside the Brooklyn Museum right now to offer “Gravity and Grace”, two characteristics one may associate with the man himself.

Using aluminum bottle caps and similar mass consumer materials from his home country of Nigeria, the Ghana-born Anatsui paints temporary organic facades, glittering curtains, crumpled moonscapes that bend clumsily and undulate gracefully.  So familiar has he become with his materials over his four decade career, Anatsui can create translucent scrims to peer through and reptilian skinned impressionist coats of armor, each bending and folding of the metal fabric in service of a multitude of imaginations.

El Anatsui. “Peak”, 2010. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“I have a desire to manipulate the material to get something else out of it,” he said during his recent talk with African art expert Susan Vogel and Kevin Dumouchelle, Associate Curator of Arts of Africa and the Pacific Islands at the museum before a capacity auditorium audience this month.

While speaking about his own approach to his practice, Anatsui showed a refreshingly straight forward investigative approach to his own process of discovery, perhaps explaining how such rigid materials are transformed by his hand into something flexible, malleable, free. “I have a feeling that artwork is a parallel of life, it is life itself. It is not something static. We are about changing, forever in a state of flux.  If that is the case then the artwork should be in a state of flux.”

El Anatsui. “Peak”, 2010. “Earth’s Skin” 2007 on the left. “Gravity and Grace”, 2010 on the right. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

As he offers observations of his own culture and the effects of consumerism and globalism on it, he encourages you to take a hands-on approach to art making. A scholar and professor, El Anatsui’s practice has been rooted in the same D.I.Y. ethos that propelled many a street artist in the current global scene that emerged in the 2000s and 2010s.  Mining the diamonds in his backyard, El Anatsui models a personal mission that encourages artists to look at everyday consumer products and see their potential as high art, as vehicles for expression that go beyond craft making or green initiatives.

In an invitation to collaboration, El Anatsui appears to have a remarkably un-Diva-like disposition when it comes to how his work should be exhibited, inviting others to determine how to best display it according to their site-specific considerations. Speaking of his retrospective that ran from September through the end of 2012 at the Denver Art Museum, the artist expresses a gleeful sense of surprise at how curators there displayed his work. “I saw that they were able to mount some of the works very interestingly and they were able to give them shapes that I would not have thought about myself. “

El Anatsui. “Earth Skin”, 20o7. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn’s curator Dumouchelle used that same freedom to formulate exhibition decisions as he mounted work in the varied spaces for this show – to great effect. Describing the rationale for some of his curatorial choices, Dumouchelle talked about it this way to the artist, “We were very inspired by your admonition to collectors and curators to take your work and use it to respond to the space and that’s really what happened with ‘Gli’,” one of the larger works in the show.

“We had this incredible 72-foot rotunda that is very rarely used for art, ” says Dumouchelle, “Very rarely do we have art of the scale that will actually fill that space, so we wanted to think about how best to make use of that space. ‘Gli’ is designed as this sort of architectural environment where you find yourself as a visitor immersed and sort of surrounded by these works and so we wanted to make full use of the drama of that space.”

El Anatsui. “Gravity and Grace”, 2010. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The work of El Anatsui is equally charged and effective inside the formal exhibition and outside on the street, and New Yorkers are treated for free to the latter through the summer with “Broken Bridge II”, a huge work suspended along a passage of The High Line in Manhattan. With threadbare and broken pieces disrupting the glistening grid-like patterning, there are striking similarities to the work he hung outside the Palazzo Fortuny during his famed splash at the 2007 Venice Biennial. A patchwork effect that he associates with frugality and poverty, free hanging portions of “Broken Bridge II” are fluttering and gently knocking in the East River breezes on The High Line. Similarly, you are reminded of “Ozone Layer”, an aluminum and copper wire piece hanging in the museum with some sections loosely fluttering and banging against one another in the small breezes created by fans mounted into the wall.

In a video for the exhibition El Anatsui appears to dismiss formal art training and relies upon his own conviction, “All the things I was taught about in art school – I set about subverting them,” he appears to say with aplomb.  With “Gravity and Grace”, viewers will experience some sense of awe and unexpected appreciation for ingenuity and revealed beauty; a confirmation that El Anatsui’s steadfast dedication to his own exploration and instincts has expanded the options for artists who will follow.

El Anatsui. “Earth Skin”, 2010. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Anatsui. “Peak”, 2010. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Anatsui (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Anatsui. “GLI (Wall)”, 2010. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Anatsui. “GLI (Wall)”, 2010. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Anatsui. “Ink Splash”, 2010. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Anatsui. “Drifting Continents”, 2009. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Anatsui. “Drifting Continents”, 2009. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Anatsui. “Drifting Continents”, 2009. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Anatsui. “Ozone Layer”, 2010. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Anatsui. “Red Block”, 2010. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Anatsui. “Amemo”, 2010. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Anatsui. “Broken Bridge II”, 2012. Detail. Currently on view at the High Line Park in NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

El Anatsui. “Broken Bridge II”, 2012. Detail. Currently at view on the High Line Park in NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

For more information regarding the Exhibition “Gravity and Grace” at the Brooklyn Museum click here.

<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA

Please note: All content including images and text are © BrooklynStreetArt.com, unless otherwise noted. We like sharing BSA content for non-commercial purposes as long as you credit the photographer(s) and BSA, include a link to the original article URL and do not remove the photographer’s name from the .jpg file. Otherwise, please refrain from re-posting. Thanks!

<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA<<>>><><<>BSA<<>>><<<>><><BSA

 

Read more

Brooklyn Museum Presents: GO See Art in Brooklyn: A Community – Curated Open Studio Project (Brooklyn, NYC)

GO

BROOKLYN-BASED ARTISTS OPEN THEIR STUDIOS TO THE COMMUNITY SEPT 8-9

FOR “GO See Art In Brooklyn,” sponsored by Brooklyn Museum

Vote for Your Favorite Artist & Two or More Artists will be included in BROOKLYN MUSEUM Exhibition

Put on your walking shoes and come visit the studios of Brooklyn’s vast array of artists over the weekend of September 8-9, 2012 from 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM.   Come meet the artists and watch them work in their medium, from sculpting and painting to photography, textile arts, print making and illustration, among others.

“GO See Art IN Brooklyn” is sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum.  During the open studio weekend, voters will visit artists’ studios and check in using text messaging, the GO mobile app, or the GO mobile website.  After votes have checked in, they will be eligible to nominate three artists from their visits for inclusion in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

The ten artists with the most nominations will receive studio visits from Brooklyn Museum curators. Two or more nominated artists will be chosen by the curators to have their work displayed as part of a Brooklyn Museum group exhibition opening at TARGET FIRST SATURDAY on December 1, 2012.

Brooklyn Museum Invites Brooklyn Artists to Open Their Studios for Community Members and Curators to Collaborate on an Exhibition

The Brooklyn Museum is launching a borough-wide initiative in which Brooklyn- based artists will be invited to open their studios, allowing community members to visit and nominate artists for inclusion in a group exhibition to be held at the Museum. Brooklyn Museum curators will visit the studios of top nominated artists to select works for the exhibition. The open studio weekend for GO: a community- curated open studio project will be held September 8 and 9. The exhibition will open during Target First Saturday on December 1, 2012, and will be on view through February 24, 2013.

Web and mobile technology will be a central component bringing artists and community together to share information and perspectives on art. All participants (artists, voters, and volunteers) will be able to create a personal online profile at the project’s website, www.gobrooklynart.org. Artist profiles will include photos of each artist and their studio, along with images and descriptions of their work. Volunteers will be connected with their respective neighborhoods online, and voters will have profiles that track their activity during the open studio weekend and provide a platform on which to share their perspectives.

The project organizers are Sharon Matt Atkins, Managing Curator of Exhibitions, and Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology. GO: a community-curated open studio project is inspired by two predecessors: ArtPrize, an annual publicly juried art competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the long tradition of open studio events that take place each year throughout Brooklyn.

GO is sponsored by Deutsche Bank.

The L Magazine is media sponsor.

“GO is a wide-ranging and unique project that will transform how Brooklyn communities engage in the arts by providing everyone with the chance to discover artistic talent and to be involved in the exhibition process on a grassroots level. Through the use of innovative technology, GO provides every Brooklyn resident with an extraordinary opportunity to participate in the visual arts in an unprecedented way,” says Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman.

The Brooklyn Museum is located at 200 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, NY. For more information go to: https://www.gobrooklynart.org/participate

Read more

Keith Haring 1978-1982 : Early Keith at The Brooklyn Museum

1978 and 2012 seem closer to one another than ever right now when we look at the blossomed Street Art scene in cities around the world. More than 30 years after Keith Haring moved to New York as an art school kid at the School of Visual Arts, a new generation of art school kids consider it almost a birthright to take their work directly to the street. Right now feels like an excellent time for Brooklyn to spotlight this study of his first four years in the city that blew his mind and inspired him to alter the whole system of how an artist reaches the public.

Keith Haring. Untitled, 1982. Courtesy of  and © Keith Haring Foundation. The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo

Keith Haring: 1978-1982, a traveling exhibition first shown in Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna and The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, introduces a period of his work not often examined, taking you up to the edge of the seemingly sudden international fame he experienced as artist, activist and public figure through the rest of the 1980s.

“Raphaela Platow, who was the original curator of this show, went into the archives and pulled out things that had basically just been sitting there, ” explained Tricia Laughlin Bloom, the project curator for the current show as she gave a tour this week before its opening at the Brooklyn Museum Friday.

At a time when the small-town boy was developing his visual vocabulary as an artist, Haring was also discovering himself as a man in the world and in a city that he found endlessly fascinating and worthy of exploration. Capturing his spirit of hands-on experimentation, the show is almost entirely comprised of works on paper with one collaborative piece on plywood with his contemporary Jean Michel Basquiat, paper collage, video, and documentary photos.

Keith Haring. Untitled, 1982. Courtesy of and © Keith Haring Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In these years Disco was on a full force collision course with Punk, New Wave, and Rap, and Haring was embracing the nightlife of a college student sampling the downtown scene, exploring his sexuality, and commandeering entire rooms at SVA to mount shows on paper. Some of those “body involvement” painting sessions are documented well here in video; a sort of full immersion painting baptism. While jamming out to music he covers every white surface with thick black symbols and gestural marking, sometimes painting with both hands in a rhythmic automatic study of both the physicality of the process and his own interaction with space and materials.

Not to be missed in person is the 30 piece collection in the final room of actual subway black papers that Haring adorned with his white line drawings, energetically created symbols and characters throughout stations in New York’s train system. The frames and glass protect them for us to appreciate them today in their disarming simplicity, their collection ironically alleged by some to be why the artist discontinued the subway practice. Equally compelling is the projected large slide show of Haring in photos by Tseng Kwong Chi, whom the artist called to shoot almost every time he did an illegal piece in the subway.

Keith Haring. Matrix, 1983. Courtesy of and © Keith Haring Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Keith Haring. Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks, 1978. Courtesy of and © Keith Haring Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

With almost half of the pieces here never displayed publicly like this before, the show is a welcome revelation for fans hoping to peel back a little of the hype-like gloss that time and opportunism may have shined his legacy with. Whether it’s his hand-collaged flyers for the indie group shows he curated, his home movies of Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias performing in the living room, or the complete re-installation of a wall from his 1980 show at PS 122, you get the idea that this was an audacious observant art student gulping at the faucet of life in a pulsating dirty city that welcomed him.

“He’s such a thoughtful and complicated figure – at the same time with that really pure impulse of not wanting to alienate people but to bring them in,” says Laughlin Bloom as she describes the young artist she discovered en route. “He’s this combination of fun-loving, and life-loving, and intellectual, accessible – a total populist but not in an insincere way.”

Keith Haring. Twenty Polaroid self-portraits with glasses painted by Kenny Scharf and Peter Schuyff, 1979-82. Courtesy of and © Keith Haring Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Keith Haring. Still from Lick Fat Boys. April, 1979. Vide0 3 min. Courtesy of and © Keith Haring Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Keith Haring. Still from Lick Fat Boys. April, 1979. Vide0 3 min. Courtesy of and © Keith Haring Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Keith Haring. Still from Lick Fat Boys. April, 1979. Vide0 3 min. Courtesy of and © Keith Haring Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Keith Haring. Still from Lick Fat Boys. April, 1979. Vide0 3 min. Courtesy of and © Keith Haring Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo

After 1982, Haring’s entire visual language of characters and symbols would become iconic, international; his work in dialogue with modern art history and everyday people eventually outlasted him to inspire a diverse generation of artists working on the street from Shepard Fairey and Swoon to Stikman and Specter, among many others.

“Haring saw the subway as the ideal platform for showing work – one of the few places to catch New Yorkers off-guard,” says Poster Boy, a Street Artist/collective who is credited/blamed for re-engineering and culture jamming subway posters with a razor in very recent years. Speaking of Haring’s chiding of corporate commercialism in the culture, Poster Boy observes, “For advertisers it’s the perfect opportunity for a commercial break. Haring saw it as a break from commercials.”

Respected for his early interest in busting down barriers in social activism, street art, and illegal art, it’s likely that many on the Street Art scene today will be checking out the pre-buzz Haring on display at this show. At the moment, it feels like one of New York’s adopted hometown heroes is back in Brooklyn.

Keith Haring. Untitled, 1982. Courtesy of and © Keith Haring Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“Art is for everybody. To think that they-the public- do not appreciate art because they don’t understand it, and to continue to make art that they don’t understand and therefore become alienated from, may mean that the artist is the one who doesn’t understand or appreciate art and is thriving in this “self-proclaimed knowledge of art” that is actually bullshit.”  1978

 – Keith Haring Journals

Keith Haring. Cipher chart, 1971-73. Courtesy of and © Keith Haring Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Keith Haring. Wall papered with reproductions of hand collaged flyers to advertise shows that Keith Haring curated, 1981. Courtesy of and © Keith Haring Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Keith Haring. Detail. Courtesy of and © Keith Haring Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“These are flyers from 1981 – an aspect of his production that maybe people aren’t aware of. He did a lot of organizing shows in alternative spaces and curating 24 hour exhibitions, xerox exhibitions, neon exhibitions, open-calls for artists where they show your work for 24 hours and then it’s taken away. He designed these – the framed works are the originals of the collages and posters that he did for these shows,” Tricia Laughlin Bloom, the project curator for the show.  Keith Haring. Detail. Courtesy of and © Keith Haring Foundation, The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Keith Haring. Thirty untitled subway drawings, 1980-85. Private Collection. The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Keith Haring. Thirty untitled subway drawings, 1980-85. Private Collection. The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Keith Haring. Thirty untitled subway drawings, 1980-85. Private Collection. The Brooklyn Museum. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

 

With special thanks to Tricia Laughlin Bloom, Sharon Matt Atkins, Sally Williams, Marcus Romero, Matthew Branch, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Keith Haring Foundation.

 

Read more

Brooklyn Museum Cancels “Art in the Streets” Show for Spring 2012; Currently at LA MOCA

Director Sights Financial Difficulties

When we visited the LA MOCA “Art In the Streets” exhibit days before it opened in April, the feeling of camaraderie and expectation hung thick in the air as artists and curators and museum directors put the final touches on what they knew was the first major show of it’s kind; an historical taking stock of the route graffiti and Street Art travelled over the last half century to become an undeniably positive influence on art, music, fashion, … the culture.  That week when talking with Sharon Matt Atkins, The Brooklyn Museum’s Managing Curator of Exhibitions, about the plans for bringing the show to our beloved city in Spring 2012, we were nearly apoplectic about the prospect of somehow being involved in the welcoming.

brooklyn-street-art-banksy-jaime-rojo-MOCA-Art-in-the-streets-II-04-11-web-11

Banksy “Art in the Streets” MOCA (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Sadly this afternoon we hear from the museum and friends that the show has been withdrawn.  Sally Williams from the Museum’s Public Information Department confirmed the news to BSA over the phone. “This is a very important show for anybody to have but it is also a huge and very costly exhibition and we just couldn’t get funding for it”.

brooklyn-street-art-Jaime-jaime-rojo-os-gemeos-LA-MOCA-arts-in-the-streets

Os Gemeos. Detail. “Art in the Streets” MOCA (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Meanwhile the last hour in the Twitterverse has raised a bit of a buzz  about the statement by Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman’s that the decision is “due to the current financial climate”.  The current home for “Art in the Streets” has found the show receiving great critical and popular acclaim and the much sought after younger demographic forming lines, making their own videos of the show, and yes, hitting up the giftshop. It really looks like it is proving to be a blockbuster for the museum and business in the community. That’s why its even more sad and a little confusing to find that Brooklyn can’t host what would surely be a boon to the organizers, the museum, and the city.

We thought that the cultural history of our city would have been greatly enhanced by the Brooklyn Museum’s decision to be the next stop of this exhibition. Despite it’s association with the negative aspects of vandalism and all that go with it, graffiti and Street Art have transformed global arts culture in many positive ways and New York is known worldwide as one of the birthplaces, an epicenter of this rich cultural history and what it has evolved from it.

brooklyn-street-art-Jaime-jaime-rojo-swoon-LA-MOCA-arts-in-the-streets

Swoon. Detail. “Art in the Streets” MOCA (photo © Jaime Rojo)

From the museum’s press release:

Brooklyn Museum Withdraws from Art in the Streets Exhibition

Brooklyn, New York–June 21, 2011. The Brooklyn Museum has canceled the spring 2012 presentation of Art in the Streets, the first major United States museum exhibition of the history of graffiti and street art. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, where it is currently on view at The Geffen Contemporary through August 8, 2011, the exhibition had been scheduled at the Brooklyn Museum from March 30 through July 8, 2012.

“This is an exhibition about which we were tremendously enthusiastic, and which would follow appropriately in the path of our Basquiat and graffiti exhibitions in 2005 and 2006, respectively. It is with regret, therefore, that the cancellation became necessary due to the current financial climate. As with most arts organizations throughout the country, we have had to make several difficult choices since the beginning of the economic downturn three years ago,” states Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman.

brooklyn-street-art-Jaime-jaime-rojo-fab-five-freddy-LA-MOCA-arts-in-the-streets

Fab Five Freddy speaking at the press conference of “Art in the Streets” LA at MOCA. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

brooklyn-street-art-Jaime-jaime-rojo-fav-five-freddy-LA-MOCA-arts-in-the-streets

Fab Five Freddy in front of his piece. “Art in the Streets” LA at MOCA. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Read more