When it comes to the methodology of transgressive art in the streets you can take over a whole subway car with screaming bubble letters and animated characters in eye-popping color to get your message out, or you can subtly mess with public accommodation signage. In an unconscious way, the minimalist and subversive one can have as powerful an impact. It could also just confuse you.
Sweden’s Vlady Art says that he calls this installation “White, Male, Supremacy.”
Artist JDL has created an enormous split image of the same person in Rome, and the message is one of celebration and acceptance.
In a city known for its reverence of so-called classical beauty, this beauty is looking in the mirror and seeing someone who others may not. She’s “looking into a frame, as a mirror, seeing her reflection as a man,” says JDL.
“It is designed to create an emotional understanding in the process of acceptance of persons in the LGBT+ movement.”
Part of Yourban2030, organizers say it is the first green mural dedicated to the LGBTQ+ movement, with mixed materials – where the last layer of paint (airlite) is actively displacing enough pollution to equal the same amount produced by 52 cars per day.
Together with the team, JDL has created an iconic image of the LGBTQ+ world, Andrea Berardicurti, a larger than life figure who passed away in 2018 and who was also known as Karl Du Pigne.
Here’s the euronews video on YouTube where a lot of hateful comments were added towards the LGBT+ community, a time-honored tradition that still hangs on:
This mural was done in collaboration with Yourban2030 and with the support of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Circolo Mario Mieli, and Vladimir luxuria.
Are you finding it challenging to get excited about Christmas this year? Santa says “Go Shopping”!
Lapiz says, “Alles für das BIP” or “All is for the GDP (Gross Domestic Product)”
This grouchy-looking elf by Lapiz in this shopping district in the Sankt Pauli district in Hamburg Germany doesn’t look like he wants to be helpful. The stenciled piece is only in a t-shirt and a grimace in this normally busy area. His T-shirt lists the cultural items that are all restricted because of Covid.
But shopping? That is allowed.
“What really matters to society, what really counts – and what defines the system – is the ever-growing economy,” Lapiz opines. “We shall reduce our social contacts so we can consume. Restaurants and Bars need to close, socialising and eating is not important anymore, neither is culture. Even worse it is punishable.”
“All hail the GDP,” says Lapiz, “Who needs to be happy anyway?”
What is the real meaning of Liberté Égalité Fraternité?
That’s a good question in the face of a new proposed law censoring French citizens free speech. According to the law, you would be criminalized for publishing any photo or video where a police officer or gendarme could be recognized if there is an intent to harm their “physical or psychological integrity”. Obviously this sounds like a vague restriction that could be widely interpreted and possibly abused.
Undoubtedly people see that individual freedoms are being steadily threatened by the state in many countries now, but France has explicitly fought for Liberté of the press. Since many people have a camera today – we are almost all the de facto “press” members who can hold civil servants and elected leaders accountable by self-publishing images and events for other citizens to see and discuss. It’s a right worth fighting for, if you ask the demonstrators in Paris right now.
The question as it pertains to the new print that Faith XLVII is selling right now is something slighty different, but still related – and still heroic on some level.
“The imagery of a rearing horse signifies a powerful animal which has been subjugated by humankind, and has finally broken free. Carrying with it the weight of nationalism and patriotism, memorials and statues of statesmen and war ‘heroes,'” she says.
“Historically, they were the creatures men took to war, to fight and die alongside them with unrelenting loyalty. Inescapably majestic and elegant in their powerful and muscular form, horses have an inherent sense of nobility,” says the street artist and fine artist in a statement accompanying the print release.
“Within this discrepancy between their physical power and their subservience, they become archetypal symbols for notions of human power struggles, war, nationalism and blind loyalty to leadership. By unleashing or freeing these dignified creatures through these images, we understand our own sense of agency, independent from political quests, ultimately expressing potentiality for our own humane power.”
LIBERTÉ ÉGALITÉ FRATERNITÉ II
6 layer Stone Lithograph
Printed on Japanese Udagami Paper 70g
78 cm x 109 cm / 30.71 inches x 42.91 inches
Edition of 60
A percentage of all sales will be donated to The South African Cart Horse Protection Association, who have have been providing vital services and education to the cart horse owners since 1995, including a clinic, treatment stalls and paddocks, cart repair workshop, education and training providing services to over 260 working overworked or abused cart horses and their owners.
Click HERE to purchase the print
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week.
…and welcome to a December in New York City where shootings have risen 96% this year, the Sugarplum Fairy and Mouse King and The Nutcracker are not going to appear, 24 subway train cars were aerosol bombed in Queens, a Judge ordered the federal government to fully reinstate the DACA program, the Middle Collegiate Church has burned in the East Village in Manhattan, and Red Bull Arts – home of the awe-inspiring Rammellzee show a few years ago, has announced that it is closing in Manhattan.
Looking for a Christmas tree? An accurate barometer of the income gap perhaps, we found two vendors on the streets of Williamsburg who each told us a 6 foot tree this year starts at $150 this year. Later in the neighborhood of Bushwick we saw a collection of 6 foot tall trees for $60 each. In Soho or 5th Ave just double it, or quintuple it.
Also, as an entirely unrelated aside, have you noticed that Noam Chomsky is metamorphosing into Santa Claus? To be fair, Noam is rarely jolly.
Here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring City Kitty, Elfo, Exposure, Easy and Joz, Gak, Giani NYC, Kest, No Sleep, Quality Mending, Raw Raffe, Skewville, TV Head ATX, UFO907, Muk 123, Gen 2907, Oze108, and Unlok.
Dr. Chip Thomas and his “Painted Desert” project invites you to see the new face of Whiting Motel in Gray Mountain, Arizona. Once a haven for the weary travelers on their way to the Grand Canyon or Las Vegas, the property is an abandoned eyesore along this highway that is heavily used by motorists from across the Navajo Nation.
15 years after the motel building was deserted here to languish without a thought for its appearance or effect on the community or the environment, Chip invited Thomas “Breeze” Marcus to organize a crew of artists with native lineage to transform the exterior into a somehow mystical mirage in the desert.
Using portraits of strong natives, graduating colorways, and calligraffiteed writings, the community reclaims the visual landscape, transforming it with aerosol painting. A reference to the taking of native lands by Europeans and the machinations of the motel itself, the team emblazoned the backside with a message, “American Rent is Due.”
Forty miles north of Flagstaff, Arizona, Chip tells us that the motel was built originally in the 1950s and he shares this postcard from the 1980s that displays the business in its humble heyday. Now with a new façade by this small group of artists who painted just before the weather turned chilly at the end of November, this fresh coat may inspire passersby this winter.
The crew included:
Vyalone – Zuni, Raramuri, Chicano
Breeze – Tohono O’odham / Adimel O’odham / Ponca / Otoe
Douglas Miles – Apache
Jerrel Singer – Diné
LivA’ndrea Knoki – Diné
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Fintan Magee / Nothing Make Sense Anymore / A Selina Miles Film
2. Aufstieg (Rise) by Eginhartz
3. Nadia Vadori-Gauthier “Une Minute de Danse” For The Art And Culture.
What a fantastic title! The narration of selective outtakes from the news, from the artist, from the atmospheric music – quickly take you here.
“I didn’t have to develop any grand themes or concepts around the work. I just knew I was going to paint a plant every day,” say street artist/muralist/painter Fintan Magee as he describes the structure he put in place of the unstructured life that Covid foisted upon him. “It kind of became almost a daily meditation.”
“Too much chaos this year to string any common narrative,” he says. “Or maybe chaos is the narrative.”
Fintan Magee / Nothing Make Sense Anymore / A Selina Miles Film.
Aufstieg (Rise) by Eginhartz
From Austria, Eginhartz gives us Aufstieg, a video performance meant as an ironic comment on the psychological interplay between the rapacious development of drones and the stubborn attitude of brutalist architecture.
Here’s the artists attempt “to contrast the massive aesthetic of a brutalist residential block with a poetic gesture. The coexistence of nature and ruins is broken here by the action of a protagonist.”
“The coexistence of nature and ruins is broken here by the action of a protagonist.”
Nadia Vadori-Gauthier “Une Minute de Danse” For The Art And Culture.
An ongoing performance of poetry from your favorite French street choreographer, Nadia Vadori-Guthier. This time she brings friends!
News reports are telling a story about an uptick in domestic violence because families are confined in closed quarters for long periods of time during the COVID-19 lock-downs across the world. A tendency toward abusive behavior is further complicated by economic insecurity, lack of food, and generalized fear. There is help available, please see below for resources.
Photographer and BSA contributor Lluis Olive Bulbena sends a dispatch from Barcelona’s Plaza de las 3 Xemeneies where a group of 13 artists were selected from 30 submissions to paint a graffiti jam to highlight the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Organized by @Wallspot.
If you or someone you know is in crisis and considering suicide or self-harm, please seek support:
Recover from Financial Abuse
“Unfortunately, financial abuse occurs in 99% of all domestic abuse cases, and the effects can negatively impact survivors for years after they escape,” says Nina Humphry at Bankrate. Below is an article that focuses on “rebuilding finances after escaping an abusive relationship, providing tips on budgeting, building credit, and getting back into the workforce.”
Here’s the link to the guide:
https://www.bankrate.com/personal-finance/rebuild-finances-after-financial-abuse/
The new exhibition “Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures” is on view at the URBAN NATION Museum – a six-decade retrospective of Martha Cooper’s photographic work. Through photographs and personal objects, artifacts and ephemera, the exhibition traces Cooper’s life, from her first camera in 1946 to her current reputation as a world-famous photographer.
The most extensive career survey ever exhibited, “Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures” is curated by Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo (BrooklynStreetArt). For over a year Harrington and Rojo poured over thousands of photographs and hundreds of artifacts, memorabilia, and archives, working closely with Martha to ensure an accurate and complete presentation of Cooper’s career and to make certain the exhibition will appeal to a wide audience as well as her ardent fans equally. In an interview the two acclaimed curators talk about the challenges of planning a new exhibition and their relationship with Martha Cooper, giving a rare insight into the work of a curator and providing an inside look at selected highlights of the exhibition.
Steve and Jaime, you have been working as curators, writers and bloggers for many years. Please take us back to the beginning of your careers. How did you meet and when did you decide to work together as a team?
We met in the 1980s when we both came to New York as university students and we have been actively involved in a wide range of projects in the arts separately and together for the last three decades. From “Low” to “High” art, we’ve always relied on the intelligence of the street-based subcultures to tell us the future, and we’ve each found that a fully immersive approach is the best way to understand everything from aesthetics to the humanities to music to movements in media and popular culture. We also discovered that as a team we are both determined to do it 100%.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s we became captivated by the new wave of art on the streets in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where a booming artist community was reimagining and remixing cultures in the wake of radical economic shifts that were forcing the young creative communities off the island of Manhattan. Primarily art school students of one kind or another, these artists were using the platform of the New York streets to bypass a rigid gallery system and other “gatekeepers”– and they were of course influenced by the collective legacy of graffiti, pop culture, decades of being drenched in advertising, and the dawning of the Internet age. Not content to simply imitate graffiti culture, they were reinterpreting, reinterpolating, when translating concepts, techniques and history learned in formal education.
In short, it was the dawn of street art as we knew it and we were lucky to be living as artists/curators at one physical epicenter of it. Our neighborhood and social and professional circles included loosely organized groups of artists and collectives who created art parties and mounted interactive events in empty factory lofts or on rooftops or in basement speakeasies; art shows, theatrical events, djs, projections, video, performance, fashion, new music and a new merging of technology. We too were throwing loft parties and staging art events and performances, sometimes for hundreds of people, and it all seemed perfectly normal that art was spilling out into the streets as well.
These were all influencing factors that led us to self-publish our first street art book in 2006 with Steve’s words and with Jaime’s photographs of works by artists in our neighborhood. It was called Williamsburg Street Art: Unrestricted and it featured artists like Swoon, Faile, Banksy, Bäst, Shepard Fairy, Dan Witz, and DAIN – all of whom went on to show with major galleries and some who have had huge exhibitions in museums worldwide with great commercial and critical success. When we secured a proper publishing arrangement for our second book Brooklyn Street Art (Penguin/Random House) we started a small website to support it in March of 2008 under the same name. That first month we had 54 hits on the site. Later we would pass 100,000 per month.
Click HERE to continue reading the interview at Urban Nation Museum For Urban Contemporary Art Berlin.
Rome-based artist Greg Jager is “dismantling” the forms of architecture in much the same way that modern graffiti writers have been “deconstructing” the letter form in the last decade. The results have great similarities, but a careful eye will detect the original source possibly.
For comparison you may take a look at Sweden/Brooklyn artist, muralist and graff writer Rubin415, who evolved his 90s graffiti style into one that interprets the architecture and skylines of New York. Other current practitioners whom we’ve published in the last few years include ONCE from Barcelona, Stohead from southern Germany, Moscovite graffiti artist/muralist Konstantin Danilov, aka ZMOGK and the Eindhoven, Netherlands-based Erosie.
Here in Ragusa (Sicily) Greg Jager has selected a wall in the industrial ruins of the A. Ancione factory to reinterpret the shapes, colors, and juxtaposition of forms. Part of the Bitune public art festival that has crossed the city that with new public works in the last five years, Jager says that his new mural is his attempt at creating a “dialogue between architecture and anthropology” as this former asphalt industry is claimed by a developing artistic hub.
He calls his new work “Dismantle”.
“It’s not simply a name that I’ve chosen to underline the charm of decadence,” Jager says, “it represents for me an ethical approach to art: the idea of dismantling, deconstructing, stripping is present in all my practice and it’s with this spirit that I related to the majestic industrial archaeological site.”
As you look at these hulking forms and heavy materials, it is perhaps difficult to imagine how such technologies with presence, power, and footprint can be considered obsolete, no longer germane to modern industrial processes. Here we see construction waste, broken glass, bricks, iron pallets – all part of the residue of the past that we’ve built upon. Once considers as well that the processes of the past have an impact on our present: environmental, economic and political.
“In my artistic research there are traces of anthropization,” says the artist. “Urban landscapes, large architectural structures, bridges, quarries, – all represent alterations of the natural balance that have led man to face enormous catastrophes.”
With precision and guile Sandra Chevrier has painted a female world that is sophisticated, unreachable and appealing, whether painted on canvas, street mural, or stuck to a wall in the margins of a city. The characters who are punching and pouncing and swooning across her faces are reflective of her own hearts’ adventures, seamlessly rolling and intermingling with those epic storylines and dust-ups with superheroes and villains of yesterday.
Perhaps it is because of this sense of inexactly placed nostalgia, in “Cages” we are aware of the ties that bind us, the roles that we hold – whether chosen or imposed – and we’re rooting for these Chevrierotic women to win – as they scream and cry and swing for the rafters, looking for the way out.
“A dance between triumph and defeat, freedom and captivity, the poison and the cure,” stands the ambivalent quote on the page facing her black and white photo by Jeremy Dionn.
A closeup of her face, her hand horizontally obscures the lower half, her index finger raised to allow Sandra to see, to study and assess. Without question this artists’ work is more than autobiographical – these expressions offer a stunned sense of mystery, an understanding at the precipice, an adventure ready to occur.
Arranged chronologically over the last decade you can witness in her works ample evidence of her refinement of technique and reverence as an artist and as an individual; struggling between revealing and hiding, adding human dimension or remaining an object. Selected swatches of superheroes form collage masks across a steady parade of beautiful female faces and forms, their drama stirred and everpresent, lying in wait until confidence takes root.
Gorgeously designed and laid out; alternating between large matt-finished plate portraits and small sketch paper inserts, the book conveys warmth and clarity even as her superheroes remain mysterious. These cages, however they present themselves, are glossy and refined. Are they empowered, or are they objectified? The lines are blurred. Her femmes are imbued as more than just the fatale who lures one into a dangerous or compromising situation, but these figures may also revel in mystery itself, just beyond your arms reach.
Inquisitive, strong, and full of imagination, Chevrier may surprise everyone when these figures eventually take off their masks. Until then, the enchanting mysteries continue.
Sandra Chevrier: Cages. Published by Paragon Books and designed in San Francisco, CA. by Shaun Roberts. August 2020.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week.
Hope you had a good Thanksgiving, although it is hard to imagine anyone feeling like it was great, considering that we now have long food lines around the city on a daily basis as more and more people are going hungry.
In our own Brooklyn neighborhood during a Thanksgiving stroll we witnessed people cueing up to get into a local overpriced restaurant while one block later we saw 4 people – two middle aged women and two teenagers – opening garbage bags on the sidewalk and looking for 5 cent returnable bottles.
Remind us please: Is this a Republican failure, or a Democratic failure? The wealth gap has continued to grow no matter who was in office for the last few decades. We are better than this.
Looks like Trump has finally accepted that he lost and is now turning his attention to who he will pardon. Regarding his hometown New York City, Trump will probably come back like a rash, fielding lawsuits and bragging about one thing or another. Other recent articles are turning attention to his various brood and surmising things like “Ivanka Probably Isn’t Welcome Back in New York City.”
Here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring A Toy Shop, Allei Kelley, CRKSHNK, De Grupo, Downtown DaVinci, Eye Sticker, I Heart Graffiti, Tenderloin Television, and The Postman Art.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY