Part of the ongoing drama that your life becomes as someone who knows street art is you never feel like you are alone on the street. The appearance of a tag or an artwork reminds of you people and it becomes part of a continuum of communication you have with them, even if they left this missive a long time previous, it may feel like a new salutation from an old friend, or a mystery-cloaked announcement from a new one.
Brooklyn street art collective FAILE just appeared with these new pieces, after being absent for a couple of years. On the streets of BK for more than two decades, here are three new stencils of collaged images – one that we’ve seen before and two that look new to us. Some things change, some stay the same.
The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Monday, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery while jogging in Georgia in February, the racist threats and intimidation toward Christian Cooper over the Memorial Day Holiday while he was merely “birding” in Central Park in New York City, Breonna Taylor shot, unarmed in her apartment in March in Louisville; These are the recent examples, but there are more, thousands more…
Street artists and graffiti
writers around the world are responding visually to current events with new works
on the street. Sometimes it is a full-blown community mural or a hand-posted
sign. Other times it is the scrawl of a vandal in text – a visual equivalent to
a scream in the night. When it comes to issues of race and identity, many so-called
western societies are now adding a deliberate massive social and economic dislocation
to the cauldron; one where nearly the whole of the middle class is sliding into
serfdom – and the police are acting like a military.
A street artist from one of the centers of this national uprising who goes by the name HOT TEA tells us about a project he just took to the streets.
“I had to do something for George, being that I live in Minneapolis and am so fed up with police harassment and injustice,” he says. We projected his image on very iconic Minneapolis structures. The feedback while they were being projected was overwhelmingly positive and everyone wanted to help. We need to stick together and make sure that change starts to finally happen.”
The streets are alive with street art and pointed political protest. NYC citizens are joining the cities and communities across the country who are demonstrating furiously over the newest examples of systemic, latent, and explicit racism and police brutality that have characterized our society for so long. Of course it’s just one fire that has been waiting to spark as economic conditions run parallel with social inequity. In the face of sky-high unemployment, unpaid rents, increasing food insecurity, a “rescue” program that gave the store to the rich, and the ever-growing gap between hyper-rich and the chronically poor/ newly poor, the summer here looks like it could be torrid.
We won’t need or see a large number of street art festivals for a while. This show of politically/socially inspired artworks and text messages is probably just warming up on the streets and you can imagine that artists won’t find it appealing to be sitting on panels and pontificating about the genesis of mark-making, the original roots of punk anarchy, or how they are incorporating being woke or inter-sectionalism into their “street practice”. The creative class, however you define it, has suffered a huge blow and many are out of work, and patience. Based on what we have been witnessing here these past few weeks, you may predict that the more aesthetically inclined will seize the opportunity to make art for the city, on the city.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring 1UP Crew, Adam Fujita, Almost Over Keep Smiling, Billy Barnacles, Combo-CK, Denis Ouch, Indecline, Jason Naylor, Lunge Box, Matt Siren, Mr. Toll, and Woof Original.
In what is possibly the first mural festival to take place in the world after, or during, Covid-19, BSA once again is proud to support Avant Garde Tudela International Contemporary Muralism Festival next month in Spain.
Miss Van (photo courtesy of the artist)
Commemorating a decade of existence as a quality cultural force with and exceptional lineup, it’s featured the works of artists some may consider part of a gold standard in public/street art interventionists and thinkers: Sixe, Mark Jenkins, Evan Roth, BLU, Ron English, Spy, El Mac, Escif, C215, Faith XVII, Vhils, Franco Fasoli (Jaz).
Mina Hamada (photo courtesy of the artist)
This years’ Avant Garde
Tudela event is curated by Jorge
Rodríguez-Gerada and BSA will be pleased to bring you exclusive behind
the scenes reportage as well as shots of the artists at work courtesy a BSA
frequent collaborator and photographer Fer Alcala.
Jeff McCreight AKA Ru8icon (photo courtesy of the artist)
Taking
place from the 8th to 14th of June, this year features a line up including Miss
Van, Mina Hamada, and Jeff McCreight (Ru8icon).
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “InkStemism” from Tinta Crua in Lisbon 2. STIK at Picadilly Lights in London: Hope & Solidarity 3. The PR Economy Shapes “News” and Perception 4. Big Joanie, “Fall Asleep”
BSA Special Feature: “InkStemism” from Tinta Crua in Lisbon
Portuguese activist, street artist and illustrator Tinta Crua says he hasn’t had a lot of action in Lisbon since the virus outbreak, so he’s been experimenting with animation and seeing his figures come to life across the screen. Today we have a look at the homemade video called InkStemism.
He says he’s been using wheat-pasting to display his hand-painted original acrylic pieces on construction walls or downtown shop windows. The style of figures and archetypes may recall for some the hand-drawn aesthetic punk/heavy metal fanzines: A stark wit and a bit of sarcasm – softened by an underlying sentiment of goodwill, romantic tendencies.
“I started back in 2008 when the crisis hit Portugal with its full impact. Lots of shops closed. People lost their jobs like me at the time and now again…but this window became my canvas!” says Tinta. Given the dire economic situation that appears to be headed our way, its safe to say there will be more artists working on the street soon, addressing fundamental issues in social, economic, and geo-political spheres.
“I don’t know
what will be the scenario post-pandemic,” says the artist. “I hope that
people will keep their jobs and that the
shops keep open. Well I’ll keep doing my thing – just have to walk more and
wait till I find a good place to paste.”
STIK at Picadilly Lights in London: Hope & Solidarity
A curious turn of events leads STIK to Picadilly. His forms unite in a warm glow, yet few are here to see it.
The PR Economy Shapes “News” and Perception
When you hear and see the same story repeated multiple times by serious faces in authoritative positions, does it affect your perception of a company, politician, poet, artist, businesswoman, race, war? Sidenote: Is this journalism?
Big Joanie, “Fall Asleep“
London based trio Big Joanie going from strength to strength. A great sound evolving from the DIY community and a fresh frank take on feminist punk.
Barcelona, Spain has begun
the process of re-opening the city from the confines of Covid-19. Lluis Olive,
a frequent BSA collaborator tells us that phase I of re-opening includes bars
and restaurants but only at 50% of their capacity. Stores under 400 square
meters are also allowed to re-open. Groups up to 15 individuals are permitted
to gather in public as well. For him this is a welcome relief for much needed
open air.
And what does a street art
fan and photographer do when you let him outside after weeks stuck in his home?
That’s right, he captures the voice of the artists in the public sphere.
Here Mr. Olive shares a few
shots on the streets of Barcelona – artists’ view on the pandemic.
“One paste up per month for the public health,” is the theme for this program called Le Mur, now on their 84th piece. In our time of self-imposed quarantines, invariably we feel our liberties are being infringed. Yet seeing this lad skipping down roof-tops of trains may provide the viewer an imaginary doorway to jump through – a momentary mental health break.
“I guess you could say that the boy running on the train reminds us of the innocent freedom to play that we don’t now have,” says photographer Martha Cooper of this youthful romp taken forty or so years ago. The original plan was for Martha to be there documenting Ella & Pitr at work pasting her photograph on the wall. Alas, Covid-19 thwarted those plans, just like millions upon millions of people all over the world have seen their own plans derailed, canceled, and postponed.
In the middle of a pandemic, artists Ella and Pitr succeeded in getting this image printed large format and pasted it here in St. Etienne. There is something reassuring about seeing this image persisting through time, emancipated into the public realm, waving its flag of self-directed liberation here on the street.
Brazilian street artist and public artist Narcélio Grud favors kinetic and sound-producing sculpture, preferably with your direct interaction completing it. What fun is a bell if you can’t tap it with your finger or bang it with a percussive drumstick of some girth?
Grud’s pieces are often on the street beckoning the passerby to use them to play music and we can see this new one could prove to be a thrilling prototype.
Adapting the
call bell, that metal dome that alerts the attendant behind the counter at a hotel,
Grud places shiny metallic cupolas all over plexi mothership one. Peal, peep, clap,
clink, ping! He says we need something like this to draw attention to what is
happening at this this moment.
“The alert
calls us at this moment to pay attention!” Mr. Grud says. “Which are the bells
that we can ring, and which are the bells that ring us?”
It’s September 1979, the creaking fissures of societal liberalism were being formed by a retrenchment of money into public coffers, attacks on labor, and to fund western war machines – privatization was afoot on both sides of the Atlantic and the punks were now in a full scream, those counter-cultural canaries in the coal mine.
We had the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, the USSR invading Afghanistan, the bombing by the IRA in England, Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the cold slap of Margaret Thatcher in the UK, 17% inflation for the UK.
CLET”s interpretation of the iconic photo by British photographer Pennie Smith of Paul Simonon of The Clash smashing his bass guitar at a concert at The Palladium in NYC in 1979.
New York and London were making common cause on the street
with a shared interest in this new music and its defiantly angry peacock
anti-fashion, and the London Palladium had a bill with Sam and Dave, the Undertones,
and The Clash.
A bloated middle-class decade of arena rock bombast and coke-fueled disco hedonism had left Boomer white youth with rage with a rumbling sense of emptiness. Rebellious Punk was a vehicle, ready to tear a self-satisfied commodified hippie system down, perhaps thinking someone else would build it for us later. The lore is that bassist Paul Simonon was frustrated and furious at the ushers telling people to sit in their seats, not stand. In a rageful heat, he smashed his bass on the stage, the act was captured by Pennie Smith, and it became the iconic cover of their album “London Calling.”
Here we find a Brooklyn “Do Not Enter” sign on the
street with artist Clet’s inspired tribute to that now-famous pose – a symbol
of blind rage that ultimately was self-sabotage. Simonon is quoted as saying he
wished he hadn’t done it to one of his favorite guitars “a shame because the bass I had to play for the rest of the tour was a
lot lighter and didn’t have any density to it when you played it.”
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Happy Memorial Day Weekend in the US. Happy Eid-ul-Fitr 2020 to all our friends celebrating it, wherever you are. Wash you hands, practice social distancing, don’t fight with people over small things. It’s not worth it.
This week we have some new art from the streets that appears purposeful and dense with meaning – not beating around the bush these days. Maybe there is too much at stake, and artists know it too.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Caryn Cast, Cheer Up, City Kitty, Dylan Egon, Gane , Glare Rakn, Hearts NY, Praxis, and Sara Lynne-Leo.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. SOFLES: Layers
BSA Special Feature: SOFLES: Layers
Without the pomposity and subtle class-conscious signaling that those Youtube ads for MasterClass use to coat their appeal with, here is Australia’s master of myriad graffiti styles, SOFLES, giving you the inside look at tools and techniques for his craft with confidence and flair.
Yes, he’s spraying and showing you the right caps to use, but if this hadn’t been abundantly clear before, this discipline is as much about choreography and parry and thrust as it is anything involving paint and hue. Here are the details, the product of knowledge and history, his 10,000 hours.
Technology has enabled the ease of this conveyance of knowledge in a way that early graffiti writers couldn’t have dreamed, and the classroom here is amply captured and framed for you by director/editor/artist/instructor Colin Mckinnon (@profetsone), but it is also the mindset of a generation so far removed from graffiti’s roots that enables SOFLES to instruct us this way as well as his personal character.
Generous in his instinct to share with you, SOFLES gives all
to his gesture, his handstyling, his tracing of contour, his building of
volume, application of dimension and texture, his sweep, his footwork. Did he
just perform a pirouette?
Have you noticed that the air and sky in your city is cleaner than you ever remember it to be? Car traffic is down, plane traffic is scant. Many polluting industries have had no workers in the last few months either. Mother Nature is happy.
Okuda “Mother Natura” for Justkids/Park MGM Las Vegas. (photo courtesy of Justkids)
One wonders about the connection between our outright
slaughter of nature and the fact that this virus is wreaking havoc on our
physical health and economies. Mother Nature inserts herself into every
conversation eventually – what fools we were to think that we were separate
from her.
Okuda “Mother Natura” for Justkids/Park MGM Las Vegas. (photo courtesy of Justkids)
Street Artist OKUDA San Miguel says that he has been inspired by Mother Nature in his new commission for that natural oasis Las Vegas. Creating 3 new sculptures and a mural inspired by Mayahuel, the Mexican goddess of agave and fertility, his fragmented pop surrealist dreams will great guests and invite them to gamble the future at this luxury resort. He created this installation in coordination with Justkids founder and curator Charlotte Dutoit and he’s calling it “Mother Natura”.
Okuda “Mother Natura” for Justkids/Park MGM Las Vegas. (photo courtesy of Justkids)Okuda “Mother Natura” for Justkids/Park MGM Las Vegas. (photo courtesy of Justkids)Okuda “Mother Natura” for Justkids/Park MGM Las Vegas. (photo courtesy of Justkids)Okuda “Mother Natura” for Justkids/Park MGM Las Vegas. (photo courtesy of Justkids)Okuda “Mother Natura” for Justkids/Park MGM Las Vegas. (photo courtesy of Justkids)Okuda “Mother Natura” for Justkids/Park MGM Las Vegas. (photo courtesy of Justkids)
Street art welcomes all manner of materials and methods, typically deployed without permission and without apology. This hand-formed wire piece …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
