Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. DETOKS & GENOM, “NOT BIGGER, NOT BETTER …BUT MORE” 2. RERO @ Espace D’art Montresso in Marrkesh 3. Virgil Was Here. His Last Collection for Louis Vuitton in Miami Beach. November 30th, 2021
BSA Special Feature: DETOKS & GENOM, “NOT BIGGER, NOT BETTER …BUT MORE”
“Detoks and Genom form a deadly duo that has been claiming prominent highway spots around Barcelona for some time now.” And with guys like this, there is always so much more to the story.
DETOKS & GENOM, “NOT BIGGER, NOT BETTER …BUT MORE”
RERO @ Espace D’art Montresso in Marrakesh
“It’s about getting rid of the superfluous and focusing on the essential,” says RERO as he describes his new exhibition at Montresso Foundation.
Virgil Was Here. His Last Collection for Louis Vuitton in Miami Beach. November 30th, 2021
Get in, get out, no one gets hurt. Our few days in Miami were full of adventure on the street and at parties and receptions for artists. The party rages on tonight and this weekend at the fairs and in the galleries and bars and streets of course, but our last events were interviewing Faile onstage at Wynwood Walls last night, going to the Museum of Graffiti 2nd Anniversary party/opening for FUZI, and, well there was this thing with Shepard Fairey and Major Lazer and a guy proposing marriage to his girl before the crowd…
But really, where else but Wynwood do you see Blade and his lovely wife Portia on the street, or sit with Ron English and his son Mars on folding chairs directly on the street in front of his new pop-up, or have a hug with ever-sunny Elle in front of her lift, or hide in the shade with seven 1UP dudes across the street from their massive new space piece, or talk with Ket in the back yard with “Style Wars” playing on a large screen behind him and the DJ while a florescent colored Okuda marches by, or chase Lamour Supreme while he tries a one-wheel skateboard around a parking lot, nearly crashing into Crash who is in his cherry picker with Abstrk painting a wall? The dinner at Goldman Properties Monday night? Dude.
Faile. Artists Panel. Wynwood Walls/Goldman Global Arts. Wynwood, Miami. December 1, 2021. (screengrab courtesy of Wynwood Walls)
We’re not really name-droppers, you know that, but honestly it was like a family reunion dinner with perfectly punctilious attention to detail over at Wynwood Walls this week – after two years of Covid fears killing everyone’s buzz. We saw Daze, Shoe, PichiAvo, Bordalo II, Jonone, Shepard Fairey, 1Up, Add Fuel, Case MacClaim, Nychos, Faile, Martha Cooper, Nika Kramer, Mantra, Ken Hiratsuka just to name a few – cavorting with collectors, cultural workers, fanboys, journalists, bloggers, academics, critics, bankers, gallerists, curators, museum people, real estate folks, photographers, dancers, silk climbing aerialists and hustlers of many flavors – and all the class of ’21 artists whom Jessica Goldman invited to paint this year. A Miami mélange, we’ll call it.
Faile. Artists Panel. Wynwood Walls/Goldman Global Arts. Wynwood, Miami. December 1, 2021. (screengrab courtesy of Charlotte Pyatt)
We were even having dinner with Martha when a local stencilist named Gregg Rivero sat in an empty chair at the table with us to offer an array of small stencil works featuring graphically pornographic scenes – to choose from as a memento of Miami indubitably. Naturally, we carefully perused his entire collection of 20 or so spread-eagles, doggie-styles, Shanghai-swans, Mississippi-missionaries, Dutch-doors, bobbing-for-sausages, and lord-knows-what-else. After careful consideration and we each selected a favorite stencil and he autographed it. Just not sure what room to hang it in…
Faile. Artists Panel. Wynwood Walls/Goldman Global Arts. Wynwood, Miami. December 1, 2021. (screengrab courtesy of Wynwood Walls)
Our treasured part of the Miami art vortex ’21 was meeting some BSA fans and Faile fans mixed together at the artist talk hosted by Peter Tunney at GGA Gallery last night. An action-packed hour of pictures covering their 35 year friendship was on offer for the assembled – focused mainly of course on their 22 year professional career. What an amazing career of image-making it is too – and even though we were prepared, there are always surprises with such dynamic dudes who have parlayed an illegal street art career into a well-respected and pretty high profile career with intense collectors and fans of their simplest silk screens and works on paper to their wood puzzle boxes, wood paintings, toys, ripped paintings, and their very new, completely radical approach that breaks their own mold for this “Endless” exhibition. And need we say it, Faile have already released a number of NFTs of course – which some in the audience didn’t know that Faile had – but could have guessed since Faile pioneered interactive digital games that accompanied their analog works as early as 2010 when most people still didn’t even have a smart phone.
But we digress. Back in New York now and it’s grey and cold and unwelcoming, and of course we love it. Thanks Miami! See you soon.
The image below was taken in Wynwood, Miami. At the panel, with Faile, they talked about the process of making their art and one of the subjects was about ripping up posters from the street…. – and how their original name was Alife. Two blocks away we found these ripped posters advertising Alife.
The street art can double as advertisements, the advertisements can double as street art, and all of it has been supplanted by fevered talk about NFTs, as if the speaker whom you’ve been accosted by invented them. For a scene that likes to consider itself to be on the bleeding edge, this is all a bit disappointingly 2017 to hear, but there you have it.
Yet we are still pleased to see that the neighborhood is popping with more fresh new creativity than last year and you again feel like new things are to be discovered around almost every corner. Oh sure, there are many cultural looters here, but that’s always been the case. It’s good to see that some new transgressive pieces, eye-opening missives, and dripping wet tags are scattered here among the permission-based walls and ghosts from December past. No one knows what the socio-economic future holds, but for now, Wynwood’s holding steady.
Here are a few shots from Jaime Rojo as he made a few laps among the streets.
“We tried this time to organize like really fucking German way,” says one of the 7 anonymous graffiti writers from Kreuzberg. Positions on this massive 10 x 60 meter wall in Wynwood are spread far and wide, and it is astounding that 1UP has accomplished this much in only two days.
Graffiti crews may typically work fast and furious if the painting is illegal, but when Mana Public Arts gives you one of their largest and somewhat infamous walls during Art Week Miami 2021, the level of discipline and planning ratchets up another level.
“The crew worked 14-15 hours a day,” one tells us. “We paint into the night. Actually we have really super good street lights here. We also have some tripod lights, ’ he says as he recounts the list of requirements for materials they submitted to organizers before they could start this moonscape of the future. “Lights, three lifts, paints in organized colors, brushes, ladders.”
The massive letters are rising from the sand (a nod to the beach town locale), and within the next three days those letters will probably be filled with tags and tributes to crews abroad and local – “Like the MSG over there is from Abstrk, for example,” says one of the 1Uppers about the guests who are joining in to bring the full roster to about 13 artists.
“Finok (VLOK), our friend from Brazil, is here,” he starts, “GIZ from New York, Fuzi UV TPK crew from Paris…” Naturally, some of these guys are in town for other events – Fuzi for example is in his own show opening this week at the Museum of Graffiti just a couple of blocks from here entitled “DEFACED” featuring a 360 degree fully painted immersive room with his signature figures and faces.
But right now, all eyes are on 1UPs massive wall in Wynwood.
“So it is kind of a movie planet, we don’t know which planet it is,” says one of the 1UP guys, “But it is a planet of the future – and there are all these Metro’s coming up out of the sand along with pyramids and street signs and figures… It’s growing now. I think that we have three more days to paint.”
The opportunity to be inspired by visual culture is indeed endless on the street, which explains the 22-year career of Brooklyn’s Faile, the street art duo who has parlayed their practice into prints, collage, video, sculpture, paintings, NFT’s, galleries, and museums.
As they keep the momentum from a new direction they pioneered last year at Magda Danysz in Paris, the Patricks continue their endless exploration of icons; pop, punk, and religious. Now, perhaps even more impressively, the artists are applying the model of collage to painted techniques, textures, proportions, even dimensions, for their new show at Goldman Global Arts Gallery at Wynwood Walls in the Wynwood District of Miami.
Now considered a cornerstone of the nextgen of street art that turned the century, the duo has never stopped innovating or experimenting with ways to flatten the hierarchy of imagery – perhaps predicting the modern age. Whether the source or storyline is authentic or artificial is of little difference – if the image and the technique resonate, it’s worthy of re-mixing, endlessly.
In “Endless”, we see that it is not just images that need recombining, it’s techniques of art-making do as well. New forms of borrowing and recontextualization means that canvasses may feature references to Warhol’s last screenprinting methods of the 80s happily alongside photorealistic fruit and juicy lips, 2-D cartoon cut-outs, and gradient fills and fonts from your favorite 80s music tour t-shirt.
It’s true, this work honors the skewed norms of modern heroes of deconstruction – Richard Hamilton, Jacques Villeglé, even Kanye West – but Faile’s unique fluidity and mastery among different media again are challenging you to reach further. In an era when thousands of daily images overwhelm your social feed and respected institutions transform before your eyes in cheerful and sometimes discomfiting ways, this exhibition appears very contemporary.
This week we’re headed to the Miami Art Week – and we hope to see you there. We’ll interview Brooklyn Street Artists Faile onstage at Wynwood Walls Wednesday if you want to make sure to say hello. We’re excited to see a new slate of graffiti and street art and mural work – and have heard of some surprise installations sure to garner attention. Not that Miami is about garnering attention…
Our interview with the street today includes ASAP, Cramcept, De Grupo, Duster, Huckleberry Fuck Up, Marycula, Modomatic, Nat At Art, Pear, Sam Crew, Soli, Ultramarine Dream, and Wild Boys.
The Turin-based illustrator Guerrilla Spam began in Firenz in 2010 and has since travelled to do large scale murals and posters and installations across Italy and into places like Bruxelles, Bristol and Berlin. They like to refer to their work as “a spontaneous, unauthorized form of resistance and protest in urban spaces” – which reminds you of the rebellious ethos of graffiti writers blended with the consciousness of designers and activists eager to evolve society forward. In this case, topics range from education, the penal system, and immigration, among others.
For this “usable monument” in Santa Croce di Magliano, Guerilla Spam is aiming to share people’s history, specifically the uprising of those here who fought to claim their land in 1955.
“The day laborers of Santa Croce di Magliano,” says Guerilla Spam, “supported by the women (who lined up in front of the police), by trade unionists and communist leaders, succeeded in obtaining the reallocation of the land. The memory of this event is imprinted in the writings, drawings, and colors of the monument (the colors remind of the ones of the countryside).”
Bright and optically entertaining, the game is welcoming and accessible, bringing with it the possibility of edification through education. Unusual for unsanctioned public art, normal for those who seize public space for free speech. “Even a passer-by can undertake this path,” says Guerilla Spam, “which looks like a game, but is actually a march towards the awareness of man’s rights”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Nadia Vadori-Gauthier / Une minute de danse par jour / Danse 2504 2. Os Gemeos: Secrets – Ep. 04
BSA Special Feature: Nadia Vadori-Gauthier in an Autumnal Dance
As if a response to the excesses of many Thanksgiving celebrations yesterday, here is dancer and performer Nadia Vadori-Guathier with a new autumnal “minute de danse” to inspire us all to get off the couch and at least go for a walk – or a dance, or fall to the ground in a pile of leaves.
Nadia Vadori-Gauthier / Une minute de danse par jour / Danse 2504
OsGemeos: Segredos – Ep. 04
And now, Back to Skool with OSGEMEOS in Episode 4 of their new series.
We take this moment to wish you and your family and friends a Happy Thanksgiving today.
Thanksgiving is an American holiday, yet as a practice in life, everyone eventually knows that it is necessary to find gratitude, a way to see and appreciate those people, events, lessons that have led and guided, and cared for us.
It’s a short life, and we are thankful to BSA readers throughout the world for your support over the years.
“Nature, colors, spirituality, self-knowledge, beauty and the power of black women and ancestral matrix cultures,” says Criola about the things that inspire her.
The Brazilian muralist is in downtown Las Vegas to paint a bold diptych called “Black Girl Magic,” for the 3-day Life is Beautiful Festival.
She says she’s happy to pursue aesthetically pleasing projects while being aware that there is always the burden of the past that has formed this Afro Brazilian woman from “a matriarchal family of black women who were forced to be strong and resistant because of structural racism since the colonization of my country.” The portrait that looms above people walking through town here is elegant and proud and full of splendid ideas that pop around her head, like so many cosmically exploding afro-puffs.
Criola says she gravitates toward painting black women “to exalt and represent, in a positive way, an aesthetic that should be positioned in a place of honor and appreciation. It also means being a protagonist in the evolution process of my individual consciousness, and collective consciousness, which involves the use of my power and artistic exploration games to deconstruct systems of oppression that are still very much present in Brazil.”
Miami awakens from a Covid-19 stupor this year with a bonified Art Week, featuring associated fairs and events like Wynwood Walls that are activated by the Art Basel behemoth. Some of the high-profile organizers of yesteryear may be on the ropes this time but you are sure to see many of your favorite and familiar art dealers, drug dealers, street artists, graffiti writers, djs, taco sellers, and lucite stiletto slide-ons. Cold weather birds love to fly here for the art fairs and a quick suntan and a Pina Colada just after Thanksgiving every year – it’s equal parts breezily laid back and sketchy and only slightly hedonistic, the gritty-glam blocks of Wynwood know how to keep it real, unless it was silicone to start with.
We’ve heard some solid talents are going to be in the neighborhood, of their own volition or by invitation, as is usually the case. Wynwood Walls is offering 11 artists painting the outdoor space and the Brooklyn art duo Faile mounting a large indoor exhibition of new works that are sure to shock and thrill new fans and those who have watched them from street to museum in and elsewhere in between in their 22 years as visual alchemists. We’re also interviewing them live onstage at Wynwood Walls Wednesday December 1st at 7 pm. We’d love to see you there and talk with you so please stop by and say hello!
With a theme of “Agents of Change” Wynwood Walls is bringing AIKO (Japan), Diogo “Addfuel” Machado (Portugal), Bordalo ii (Portugal), David Flores (United States), Scott Froschauer (United States), Joe Iurato (United States), KAI (United States), Kayla Mahaffey (United States), Mantra (France), Ernesto Maranje (Cuba), Greg Mike (United States), Farid Rueda (Mexico), and for the first time, Wynwood Walls will open one wall to a local artist in an “Open Call” competition.
Madrid public artist appears to be on a winning streak this fall, thanks perhaps to so many detailed plans he laid during lockdown with COVID. This night light show called “DATA”, which he did for the International Festival of Light called LUZMADRID this fall maximizes a slim slice of the urban nighttime view, and he intends it to be an immersive audio-visual experience.
We’re excited to hear about Spain’s first light festival – and we have a little friendly advice: Don’t let the advertisers take it over the curatorial decisions because before you know it they’ll be project toothpaste tubes up this alley. No one will listen to us, but we feel better saying it.
DATA, says SpY, “offers a reflection on the rapid and widespread inclusion of algorithms in numerous aspects of our lives. In this audio-visual work, digital abstraction is used to explore and interpret how predictive tools operated through algorithms and artificial intelligence are highly beneficial in terms of aspects such as communication, research, and medicine, but can also lead us to lose some of our freedoms if they are not used ethically.”
Which was precisely what you would have guessed, right?
SpY tells us that he wanted to explore new tools like holographic fabrics to alter the graphics, saying that they somehow appeared “weightless”. He created a 15-meter high screen made from this fabric and installed it in one of the smaller streets, embuing the experience with something magic, and possibly otherworldly for the audience on the street.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
