All posts tagged: Steven P. Harrington

Labrona and DB on the Road, Dispatch From Portugal

May 2, 2017 Artists

“I didn’t get invited to paint anywhere this winter so I made my own street art trip,” says Labrona of his new wheat-pastes in Portugal. “It’s sort of a throw back to before mural festivals, when we just did stuff on the streets.”

Is that Buster Keaton? Labrona and DB. Lisbon, Portugal. Spring 2017 (photo © Labrona)

A clear distinction is made thusly, between the multitude of public-private-commercial mural initiatives that artists are participating in these days and the practice of creating Street Art, which is necessarily self initiated, without permission, an autonomous performance or intervention in public space. To merge these terms and practices is to disregard the significance of the distinction between.

Furthermore, this is not new. There just happen to be a lot of mural festivals right now and organizers sometimes misappropriate the term “street art” when in describing events. We can help.

DB. Lisbon, Portugal. Spring 2017 (photo © Labrona)

But we’ve digressed a little from Labrona and DB, who took a trip to Lisbon and set up shop. “We rented a place and turned it into a studio for 10 days and made a bunch of wheatpastes,” Labrona says. The figurative, character-driven painted pieces began to appear in this city that is known today as much for its Street Art as it is for its hills.

A painter with a studio practice, DB hadn’t done Street Art previously, says Labrona, so it is interesting to see what choices DB makes for his work here in the public realm where it suffers the indignities of abuse and neglect. As ever, we are also interested whether the placement has a particular contextual component or whether he uses the existing architecture as a framing device.

Labrona and DB. Lisbon, Portugal. Spring 2017 (photo © Labrona)

It is also significant to some observers how choices are made for the new wheatpastes to interact with pre-existing graffiti – sometimes in tandem, to the side of or sometimes directly pasted upon it, possibly angering the graff writer, maybe not. Because of the temporary quality of wheatpasted paper, the aerosol work will probably outlive it anyway. Sometimes a big bubble tag seems like an intentional background or co-actor. Other times a quickly dashed tag looks like it is not considered at all.

These are all metrics and filtering devices, and subjective ones at that. How an aesthetic expression hits an individual in that moment of discovery is as real as it gets.

Their dual experiments ended after 10 days and Labrona says he carried on solo for the rest of his trip, with some pieces appearing to have been drawn directly on the walls or doors – which rather lessens the distance between studio practice and street practice.

DB. Lisbon, Portugal. Spring 2017 (photo © Labrona)

Labrona and DB. Lisbon, Portugal. Spring 2017 (photo © Labrona)

DB. Lisbon, Portugal. Spring 2017 (photo © Labrona)

Labrona. Lisbon, Portugal. Spring 2017 (photo © Labrona)

This may be Picasso staring angrily from the corner at Labrona’s amorous couple, we aren’t sure. Labrona and DB. Lisbon, Portugal. Spring 2017 (photo © Labrona)

Labrona and DB. Lisbon, Portugal. Spring 2017 (photo © Labrona)

DB. Lisbon, Portugal. Spring 2017 (photo © Labrona)

Labrona Porto, Portugal. Spring 2017 (photo © Labrona)

Working the Cornfields on a Santa Fe Facade with Jetsonorama

May 1, 2017 Artists

Just in time for May 1^st, International Workers Day, we find a young member of the Hopi nation planting in his grandfather’s cornfield, thanks to this new project just completed by photographer/street artist Jetsonorama.

Chip Thomas. Hawthorne. Santa Fe, New Mexico, Earth Day 2017. (photo © Chip Thomas)

18 year old Hawthorne Hill has learned the traditional Hopi farming technique called “dry farming” from his mom, according to Jetsonorama, and he places seeds in shallow holes, while his sister Metzli creates rows of wind blocks using nearby brush.

The photos are taken on Second Mesa on the Hopi nation, but the artist brings them here to Santa Fe as part of a project he’s doing with Biocultura Santa Fe.

A project originally conceived of as part of Earth Day, with a focus on where our food comes from and traditional farming methods, its good to think of who works to bring food to your table.

Chip Thomas. Hawthorne. Santa Fe, New Mexico, Earth Day 2017. (photo © Chip Thomas)

Chip Thomas. Santa Fe, New Mexico, Earth Day 2017. (photo © John Donalds)

Chip Thomas. Andrea Polli. Santa Fe, New Mexico, Earth Day 2017. (photo © Chip Thomas)

To learn more about Biocultura click HERE

BSA Images Of The Week: 04.30.17

April 30, 2017 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

“Resistance is here to stay, welcome to your 100th day” – said people in Climate Marches across the country yesterday to President Exxon-Lockheed. God, has it only been 100 days? It feels like 1,000. Nevertheless, there are a lot of new politically themed pieces popping up on the street regularly, along with completely apolitical and humorous ones. Either way, we always dig the conversation on the street.

Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring: Adam Fujita, Brolga, Carlos Colp, Jaune, Legend, Lost Hills, Lunge Box, Myth, Raf Urban, Taco, and Tatyana Fazlalizadeh.

Top image: Unidentified artist (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Adam Fujita (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Raf Urban (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Carlos Colp (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Raf Urban (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brolga (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Lost Hills in Aberdeen, Scotland. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Legend (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Tatytana Fazlalizadeh (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Taco (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Myth (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Lunge Box (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Jaune for Nuart Aberdeen 2017 in Aberdeen, Scotland. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. Spring 2017. Manhattan, NYC, April 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA Film Friday 04.28.17

April 28, 2017 Artists

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

Now screening :
1. Colouring The World. A Film By Okuda San Miguel
2. Borondo “Golden Gate”
3. Elbi Elem in Barcelona for 12+1 P
4. Chip Thomas in Santa Fe, New Mexico at Biocultura

BSA Special Feature: Colouring The World. A Film By Okuda San Miguel

The pleasing and bright geometry of Okuda has wide appeal to many audiences and he maximizes the effect with his choice of amiable animals and friendly themes. It’s a worldwide dance party for this artist and last year he took his public and commercial murals to many cities in places like Australia, Tahiti, and Thailand. And Miami, naturally.

Borondo “Golden Gate”

Dude, I told you – turn your phone so it’s landscape when you are doing video!

Just kidding. Here’s a video installation from a group show in March 2017 called COLERA in Rome’s Galleria Varsi.

Made as a stop action animation of a house on fire by Matteo Beradone with music by Enzo Pietropaoli. The multiple monotype prints by the Street Artist/Fine Artist Borondo are moving and crackling, inflected with gold leaf shadings, each different and evocative of the rapid flickering of fire, drowning in a reflective sea.

The group show also included Run, Canemorto and Michele Servadio during a two week residency at the gallery. You can see how the images were displayed in the photo from Borondo below the video

Elbi Elem in Barcelona for 12+1 Project

Here’s a process video of artist Elbi Elem at work on her mural for the 12+1 Project in Barcelona this spring.

To quote ourselves: ” ‘Break with the rectangle as the space to intervened,’ says artist Elbi Elem, the March painter for this wall curated monthly in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Spain. The abstract muralist says she began making kinetic sculpture in 2002 and has an interest in movement, composition and form.”

Chip Thomas in Santa Fe, New Mexico at Biocultura

Chip Thomas is a master at wheatpasting his large scale photographs, and has been doing this kind of art for many years now, usually with a genuine social mission and without great fanfare. This project is with Social Media Workgroup on the side of the Biocultura event space in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Swoon “To Accompany Something Invisible”

April 27, 2017 Artists

A good way to familiarize oneself with the additional dimensions that Swoon has taken on since you last caught up with her is the Street Artists show called To Accompany Something Invisible newly exhibited at Allouche Gallery in New York.

Swoon. “Sasu and Kasey”. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Whether it’s Edline or Moni or Dawn and Gemma who you came to see again, freshly colored and framed in mandella-ed ships or modest rectangular rafts, these living ghosts greet you on gallery walls, silent and familiar as you have become with them on city walls. On wood or on butcher paper, you are never far from the author or her subjects, even as they are flowered and leaved and ribboned and swagged and cut so that the light passes through organic and ornate patterning.

Swoon. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon’s process is here on display; drawing sketches, sometimes just outlines of ideas later detailed and drawn intricately and hand cut into linoleum. These are her hand-rendered personal journeys.

Now actually building walls with those same hands in Haiti for people to shelter within, Swoon is also readying works to display on walls at a major retrospective this autumn at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center. The invisible something may be the stories told and heard during the last twenty years of Swoon’s journey, voices that can be heard if you care to listen.

Swoon. The original sketch for Edline. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Invisible are your friendships, the lovers, the worries, the experiments, the artists milieu, the early shows in Brooklyn neighborhoods that now are transformed; reassuring and warm voices now glimmering in the buzz of an opening, like this one tonight here in the Meatpacking District – a neighborhood itself rife with the stories of people whom you first met on the street.

We stopped by the Allouche Gallery yesterday to catch a glimpse of Swoon’s magic world as she was preparing for her exhibition opening today. Here are a few process shots, as proper lighting was not yet in place and Swoon and her assistants were busy helping her build new environments.

Swoon. Detail of Edline in an environment created in an installation box. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon. Detail. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon. Detail of Yaya and Sonia . To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon. Ben. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon. Detail. To Accompany Something Invisible. Allouche Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Swoon’s To Accompany Something Invisible opens today at the Allouche Gallery in Manhattan. It is free and open to the plublic. Click HERE for details.

“Resistance is Female” Takes Over Phone Booths in New York

April 26, 2017 Artists, Interview

The decentralized Resistance, as it turns out, is a majority of Americans.

And leading the charge are women and girls.

So it makes perfect sense that a new grassroots takeover of telephone booth advertising in New York is a campaign called, “Resistance is Female”. Organizers and artists say that the ad takeover project is putting out a message that corporate controlled media seems to be quelling: keep fighting, keep speaking up, persevere.

The artists have put up a couple of dozen or so new art pieces in places where typecast women typically sell shampoo or fashions: a high-jacking of the advertising streetscape which the French and the Situationists would have called détournement in earlier decades.

Gigi Chen for #resistanceisfemale (photo © Jaime Rojo)

This act of “taking over” phone booth spots has become more popular in recent years as artists and activists seize the machinery and claim public space for public messages.

“The Resistance is Female idea came about after the Women’s March in DC,” says Street Artist Abe Lincoln Jr, a contributing artist and one of the few men in the collective. A well known name in the New York Street Art scene, Abe says not all the artists typically come from Street Art but all are now using the streets to get out their visual missives.

“This is a direct message to women (anyone who self identifies as female) and their allies to keep fighting,” he says. “It’s a general message of encouragement to resist the current ‘status quo’ of intolerance. Whatever your battle is, do it! We want to support you in persevering, speaking up, and fighting.”

Participants say they have many more actions planned for the coming months, and they are in it for the long haul, so keep your eyes peeled for the “Resistance is Female” moniker to pop up while you are waiting to cross the street, or on your way to the nightclub, or to do the laundry.

Kim Osborne for #resistanceisfemale (photo © Jaime Rojo)

We asked Abe Lincoln Jr. and Gigi Chen, another artist in the collective, about the new campaign.

BSA: Why is it important to get this message out?
Abe Lincoln, Jr. : The Resistance is Female is a project of visual signposts to encourage continued resistance. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by our unhinged president and it’s easy to get pulled in a million different directions by life. These are here to give support to give support and reminders to women to keep fighting.

BSA: Are all the artists participating in this campaign women and what’s the allure of using the platform of phone booths for the message?
Abe Lincoln, Jr. : No, its predominantly self-identified females, but we want to make it open to everyone, and to be as inclusive as possible. We also are asking people who aren’t necessarily street artists to make work for the project. It brings new voices to the conversation.

Shalini Prasad for#resistanceisfemale (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Placing this message in a space usually reserved for advertising can take people by surprise. It’s a disconnect; they’re expecting to tune out an ad for booze or some TV show and they get a message that says “Hey, keep it up! It’s far from over, and we got work to do!”

BSA: How do you see feminism and art in this polarized political environment?
Gigi Chen: I never used to be interested in politics when I was younger – even less so in artists who make political art who seemed more superficially interested in the topics for their visual shock value. In many ways, Americans are shielded from the actual brutality of war, famine and even the more severe forms of female persecution such as genital mutilation/female circumcision.

Artists are always the ones to really start a dialogue publicly. Feminism as a concept was debated so much in the follow up to the election. That term “Feminism” is something I have lately had to rethink and rediscover. This project “Resistance is Female” is part of that visual movement. If just taking a glance of a poster can start a debate, then indeed this “Feminist” art project is “Political.”

Dusty Rebel for #resistanceisfemale (photo © Jaime Rojo)

The poster project has become something that I have been thinking about everyday since my piece got put up. I wonder “Who am I even to make this poster and throw myself into this movement and debate?” And then I have to stop myself and wonder why I am questioning the validity of my own role in this dialogue to begin with.

I am after all, a hard working artist who has struggled and created and thrown herself into her own work for years. As artists, male and female, we have the capability to visualize and show our points of view in a way that one can understand and, hopefully, empathize with.

The HOPE poster by Shepard Fairy was a huge part of brand recognition for a blossoming Barack Obama campaign and the “WE CAN DO IT” posters mobilized our country during WWII. Even with all these political arguments among friends and strangers, I wonder how much of us generally consider ourselves actually “Political”?

Jack Adam for #resistanceisfemale (photo © Jaime Rojo)

According to organizers there are a number of participants from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines in Resistance Is Female so far, including Abe Lincoln Jr., Sara Erenthal, Maha Al Asaker, Jen Genotype, Kim Osborne, Valerie Lobasso, My Life in Yellow, Astrida Valigorsky, Gigi Chen, Shalini Prasad, Jack Adam, and The Dusty Rebel.

To learn more follow their Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/resistanceisfemale/

This article is also published on the Huffington Post

Skulls Reign On the Street and In Art Shows, Threatening and Humble Reminders

April 25, 2017 Artists

Skulls. We see them on the streets and recently many at art fairs.

The Memento Mori of the streets, these skulls reminding us that one day we all will be dead. Every single one. These are occasional, unplanned in pattern, surprising in appearance on the public stage perhaps.

Andrew Schoultz at Volta New York 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

But in a culture that glorifies violence and guns in movies, television, video games, rock and roll t-shirts, backpacks… the sight of the skull is old school. Here on the streets there are one or two skulls, not like the thousands in an ossuary underground in the Paris Catacombes.

Stephen Wilson at Scope New York 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Possibly these skulls appear in artworks on the street as an omen; meant to shock, or frighten, induce dread. Certainly uniforms have carried logos and insignia with skulls- from Nazis to US Marines to Pirates of Penzance to Cypress Hill the images of skulls are more of a threat, a promissory note, an invocation of warrior status.

Mexicans, on the other hand, eat them as sugar cookies for celebrations set aside every autumn called Day of the Dead, where people make peace with the loss of love ones.

Guy Richards Smit at Spring Break Art Show, New York 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In the end, perhaps it is not the warlike associations. It may be the great leveling force of death, bringing every person to one level, that fascinates us. Regardless of where your body is buried, the rains will wash your bones into the oceans of time, and that is all you will be.

Maybe too it is healthy to keep these facts in mind despite all the drama, the tribulations, the wealth, the status, the suffering, the ignominy. Jim Morrison said no one here gets out alive, which is obvious, and funny as hell.

Here are some reminders of that fact on the street and elsewhere.

An unidentified artist in Hong Kong. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Scott Campbell at Scope New York 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Damien Hirst at Art Central Art Fair 2017 – Hong Kong. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Epic Uno on the streets of Brooklyn, NY. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

An MSK Crew member on the streets of Brooklyn, NY. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

An unidentified artist at Scope New York 2017 . (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Henry Hussey at Volta New York 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Niloufar Banisdr at Scope New York 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Marina Capdevila Brings Her Seniors to the Winery

April 24, 2017 Artists

When muralist Marina Capdevila is in Miami her senior ladies are in a convertible heading to the beach and when in Brooklyn they buy a hamburger and fries on the sidewalk.

Now visiting a winery cooperative just south of her native Barcelona, the illustrator chooses men and donkeys.

Marina Capdevila. Gratallops, Spain. April 2017. (photo © lluis Olive Bulbena)

“The mural commemorates the 100 years of the Gratallops Winery Cooperative,” says photographer Lluis Olive Bulbena, who shares some images of the new mural.

“Gratallops is a small municipality of 250 inhabitants about 180 km south of Barcelona, part of the famous wine region of Priorat.” Absent Capdevila’s typical on-point observations of seniors encountering the modern world with irony, the characters and action here are more typical and straightforward, but still with a sense of humor.

Marina Capdevila. Gratallops, Spain. April 2017. (photo © lluis Olive Bulbena)

To learn more about the winery cooperative in Gratallops, click HERE.

BSA Images Of The Week: 04.23.17

April 23, 2017 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Boom! There it is! This is springtime and there is a lot of new stuff popping up like tulips and out like cherry blossoms. If you didn’t get to the Martha Cooper opening at Steven Kasher gallery this week it is open during the week- a great cross section of her work during the last four decades or so. Additionally the Richard Hambleton film “Shadowman” debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival Friday night and is making a lot of waves and you can see works of his at Woodward Gallery right now.

Also this week a group of New York Street Artists officially are suing McDonalds for using their street work in long-form commercials without permission – a story we first brought to fore and we subsequently discussed – including giving one of the artists who was deeply affected a platform to speak. It remains to be seen who is directly responsible for this infringement but that doesn’t stop the fabulous loose talk and salacious assertions. Some people are lovin’ it.

Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring: Add Fuel, C3, Cash4, D7606, Cope, Don Rimx, Hardened Lock, Hervé, Immaker, Isaac Cordal, Jaune, Julien De Casabianca, Lunge Box, Okuda, Order55, Phil, and Queen Andrea.

Top image: Collaboration with Add Fuel and Jaune (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Add Fuel and Jaune collaboration in Aberdeen, Scotland. Nuart Aberdeen 2017. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Raf Urban (photo © Jaime Rojo)

#missingobama (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Raf Urban (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Anna Maga for “12 + 1” Project In Barcelona

April 22, 2017 Artists

Saturday is a good day to get into your own creative projects and try stuff that you don’t have time to do usually. We always like to walk past the local walls to see what people are creating. Checking in on this community wall in Sant Feliu de Llobregat to see what’s going up in the neighborhood, we find this is the new intervention from Anna Maga at Kaligrafics.

A fan of graffiti jams, roller skating and figurative painting, Maga Anna is a local illustrator, mural painter, children’s educator, and commercial designer. The project is a part of a community wall initiative by Contorno Urbano in Barcelona called “12 x 1”. Have a look. Where are your paints?

BSA Film Friday 04.21.17 – Vids from Nuart Aberdeen 2017

April 21, 2017 Artists

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

Now screening :
1. ADD FUEL – Nuart Aberdeen 2017
2. Alice Pasquini – Nuart Aberdeen 2017
3. Isaac Cordal – Nuart Aberdeen 2017
4. M-City in Aberdeen for Nuart 2017 via BrooklynStreetArt.com

BSA Special Features: Vids from Aberdeen

Doug Gillen from Fifth Wall TV shadowed artists at work in Aberdeen, Scotland last week and began a series of videos that give you an idea about their art and their individual approach to it. Today we have the first three freshly released from Nuart Aberdeen for your enjoyment.

ADD FUEL – Nuart Aberdeen 2017

So, how do you get the party started in Aberdeen? You Add Fuel! The artists’ practice of tile making back home in Portugal is translated here by his study of local Scottish decorative motifs and tradition – with one layer tearing back to reveal another beneath it.

Alice Pasquini – Nuart Aberdeen 2017

Roman Street Artist Alice Pasquini has a color palette rather custom made for nautical scenes and seaside cities- and somehow brings a Mediterranean air of romance to this stormy Scottish city on the North Sea. Her figures and portraits seem to appear by surprise on small sections of doorways or corners of disused billboards – and this larger mural sized piece is rightly juxtaposed on Ship Row almost across from the Aberdeen Maritime Museum.Video by Doug Gillen/Fifth Wall TV.

Isaac Cordal – Nuart Aberdeen 2017

The Spanish Street Artist continued his indirect critique of corporate capitalists by installing his little grey-suited businessmen throughout the oil city that has been shaken by markets. For some reason, the scale makes the figures comic, and the context of the great wide world helps put these soldiers of white-collar shenanigans into a position of low impact. But we’re just kidding ourselves if we think they are inconsequential – they are the enablers of the machine. These are the human levers of the oligarchy who Isaac Cordal is perching on ledges, balancing on wires, placing on terraces staring intently at spreadsheets and stock numbers on their phones. Now his miniature worried men are perched all over Aberdeen. Can you spot them? Video by Doug Gillen/Fifth Wall TV

M-City for Nuart Aberdeen 2017. Video by BSA

Who would like to experience the slow ascent into the air on a cherry picker with M-City as you survey his new completed mural for Nuart Aberdeen? This short home made video by Jaime Rojo gives you a look at a street level perspective while travel mills around the freshly painted piece.

Many thanks to Doug/Fifth Wall for sharing his video work here with BSA readers. For for information about Fifth Wall please go HERE.

Twitter @FifthWallTV

https://www.instagram.com/fifthwalltv/

“Martha Cooper” Solo Exhibition Reveals Many Unseen “Action Shots”

April 20, 2017 Artists, Interview

An intrepid photographer who has launched a million dreams (and perhaps a few thousand careers) in graffiti and Street Art with her photography that captured crucial and seminal aspects of our culture that others overlooked.

That is just one way of seeing this brand new collection of images by Martha Cooper that is spread across one wall featuring artists at work, sometimes intimately. Here is where you see 102 individual shots of artists at work, a stunning testament to the range of art-making techniques that are practiced in the public realm, as well as a testament to the passion and curiosity of the woman behind the lens.

Martha Cooper. HE3 with His Notebook of Graffiti Writing, Lower East Side, New York, NY 1978 – 1980. Steven Kasher Gallery.

For Ms. Cooper’s first solo photography show in New York, Steven Kasher Gallery is featuring 30 new editions of her legendary street art photographs, the ones that have burned themselves into the collective memory of New York and of our streets in the 1970s and 1980s. While her photographs in the 1984 seminal “Subway Art” and her early Hip Hop street shots may be what she is most known for by artists and collectors and fans in cities around the world to which she travels, the new exhibit also contains more than a foreshadowing into the vast collection of important images she has not shown to us.

Clearly she could fill her own museum with the ephemera she has collected as well; the books, clothing articles, black books, stickers, personal drawings that capture her eye and invoke a conversation that happened in the street, under ground, in the train yards. Some of the ephemera is here in a vitrine, much too small to contain everything – for additional context and perhaps to burnish the “living legend” Street Cred that one gains by sticking in the trenches with artists over many decades.

This week during the installation of the show Ms. Cooper also shared with us the valuable history that illustrates the significance of some of the pieces.

Martha Cooper. Girls Dancing to Disco Music From a Bar Against Graffiti Walls, Lower East Side, New York, NY 1978. Steven Kasher Gallery.

Of a 1982 vest painted by graffiti writer Caine1, she explains that shortly after he made the vest for her he was shot – and the photo of the train with the skyline is a memorial to him. A photo spread of a train painted by graffiti writer Spin from that same year is accompanied by the original sketch he did for it in carefully drawn bold letters aimed at the New York Mayor who made war against graffiti, “Dump Koch”. The Keith Haring drawing and dedication in her note book we recognize because she brought it with her to the Haring exhibit dinner at the Brooklyn Museum a few years ago, occasionally bringing it out to show to other guests. Next to it a photo of Martha as a small child, camera in hand, the daughter of a photographer and camera store owner in Baltimore. These are objects and memories that have great meaning to her, and to many others who will see this collection.

This is not a retrospective but it is the first time a New York gallery has dedicated a serious solo show to a photographer whose work has received numerous tributes throughout the world, including the dedication of a new library in her name in the Urban Nation museum in Berlin opening this September. In many ways it is remarkable that aside from the Museum of The City of New York no major museum in New York has recognized the invaluable contributions her professional life’s work has made to the city, let alone to the history of graffiti, hip hop, Street Art, photography, popular culture.

Martha Cooper. Shy 147 Hanging From Wrecked Train in Yards, Brooklyn, NY, 1981. Steven Kasher Gallery.

As appreciable as the well-mounted collection here is, it is a small, potent sampling of Cooper’s careers as a photographer, documentarian, ethnographer, preservationist, and reporter worldwide over a half century of travel and investigation. Without these images, crucial information about the creators, techniques and culture of graffiti and Street Art and the culture of art in the streets would be unknown. Yet she’s eager to share more of her many excursions of study into other cultures and subcultures, like traditional tattooing in Japan, and a project comparing two neighborhoods in Baltimore and Southwest Township, South Africa, and a uniquely artful recycling program in Brazil. Even the simple practices of city kids at play has often captured her attention and she has documented it for decades.

The last few years have been a whirlwind of global travel for Ms. Cooper, including trips to nearly every continent for Street Art festivals, graffiti jams, museum and gallery exhibitions, and special events in her honor – she even gave a TED talk in Vienna recently. Taking a moment to cool her heels back in NYC, this show gives us a glimpse into the outstanding and valuable historical archives that Ms. Cooper is turning her attention to these days.

Martha Cooper. Vitrine display. Ms. Cooper as a young girl holding her Brownie Camera. A dedicated sketch book by Keith Haring . Steven Kasher Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

“This show is important to me at this time because I’m at a point in my life where I want to shoot less and organize my archives more,” she tells us. “I’ve been a professional photographer since 1968, almost 50 years. Exhibits help me think about how my work fits together. I want people to see me as a photographer first, not only a documenter of graffiti and hip hop.”

“Having a show at a gallery that specializes in photography helps accomplish this goal. Although I was never interested in being a fine art photographer, I’m happy and somewhat surprised to see that my photographs have a collectible value.” Modest about her talents as usual, even Martha appears to not realize the value of her contribution to so many and so much of the culture.

BSA: Is this your first solo exhibition in NYC?
Martha Cooper: Not really. I had a solo Street Play exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York in 1980, I had a lot of exhibits that Akim Walta organized when Hip Hop Files came out in 2004. I also had the NYCasitas show in East Harlem last year, and there have been others. However it’s my first solo exhibition in NYC at a photography gallery.

BSA: Is this sort of a retrospective?
MC: Again–not really. Although there are photos from 1970 (tattoo) to 2016, there are major projects that this exhibit doesn’t include–for example all the documentation I did for City Lore, or in Baltimore. My archive contains many, many more topics and projects than are included in this exhibit so I don’t want to call it a retrospective. This show is heavy on graffiti and street art with a couple of photos each from Tokyo Tattoo and New York State of Mind.

Martha Cooper. Vitrine display. “Dump Koch” train by Spin and the original artist’s sketch. The first edition of Subway Art . Steven Kasher Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Martha Cooper. The action shots wall. This wall includes 102 photos with as many artists (there are a couple of shots with the same artist) and when one notes the artists’ nationalities and the countries in which the photos were taken the wall spans more than 22 countries. This might be the most personal work of Ms. Cooper from the whole exhibition, with many of the shots never made public until now. Often shot in close proximity, the shots are intimate and personal. Some of them depict the artists hamming it up for the camera and others show the artists immersed in their work or adopting a serious posture. Steven Kasher Gallery. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

For further information on Steven Kasher Gallery MARTHA COOPER today’s opening please click HERE

Martha Cooper
Exhibition: April 20th – June 3rd, 2017
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 20th, 6-8PM

Steven Kasher Gallery
515 West 26th Street, NYC

Books In the MCL: ESCIF “Los Cimientos De La Armonia Y La Invencion”
January 15, 2026
Reprinted from the original review. Spanning twelve years of studio and mural work, public interventions, installations, and collaborations, Los cimientos …Read More »
Go Big or Go Home: Amsterdam’s Mick La Roc Paints Wild Style in Bushwick
January 13, 2026
New York has long acted as a magnet for graffiti and street artists from around the world—not just because of …Read More »
BSA Images Of The Week: 01.11.26
January 11, 2026
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week, our first of the year. We started 2026 with a Wolf Moon, which …Read More »
ONLY HUMAN at Wynwood Walls: Murals, Memory, and the Hand-Made Mark in Miami Art Week
January 8, 2026
Wynwood Walls made its presence felt throughout Miami Art Week this December with a familiar mix of new murals, established …Read More »
Buff or Delete Elfo? The Last One For ’25, the First One For ’26
January 6, 2026
Elfo isn’t wrong, as they like to say these days. This photograph shows the phrase “You can remove graffiti with …Read More »
Photos of BSA 2025 # 1
January 4, 2026
Street art doesn’t only regale walls, it often reflects us, cracks and all. Call it protest or simply commentary, this …Read More »
Photos of BSA 2025 # 2
January 3, 2026
Street art welcomes all manner of materials and methods, typically deployed without permission and without apology. This hand-formed wire piece …Read More »