Worried that voting rights are being stolen from black and brown people in a systematic way across the country? Let Mitch McConnell put your fears to rest.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street in NYC and Miami, featuring Beautiful Mind, Bella Phame, BK Foxx, Claudia La Bianca, DAK PPP 907, Dek2DX, djaRodney, Gina Kiel, Gold Loxe, JJ Veronis, Lady JDay, Melski, Rumba Art, StyleOne, Tee Pop Art, and Tutto & Niente.
It was sunny that particular day in Wynwood, Miami in November of last year. The air was fresh and the humidity mercifully low. The sun rays weren’t piercing one’s shoulders. It was what winter in Miami is supposed to feel like. Dreamy.
That’s how we were feeling; dreamy – when we turned the corner and saw them. A motley crew of five or six men taking on a gargantuan wall in the less noisy part of Wynwood. The congenial 1UP Crew is the Berlin-based masters of the mixed message – here to vandalize, but politely. In this case of course the wall is completely legal, but associates of this notorious crew have been credited/blamed for leaving their marks on walls, trains, water tanks, elevators – anything that strikes their fancy in multiple cities across many continents.
The wall was still in progress that day with many more aerosol cans to go. We chatted, took photos, and reported on the encounter HERE. By the time we had to return to NYC, the wall wasn’t completed yet – so we returned to the winter paradise weeks later.
We were glad we pulled ourselves away from the ocean to see this in all its glory. Judging from the description below from one of the 1UP Crew members we think that this wall has it all.
“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.”
Up to 13 artists joined in to complete it including members of 1UP Crew and members of the MSG Crew as well as Vlok, Giz, and Fuzi UV TPK crew from Paris.
Welcome the first BSA Images of the Week of 2022! How are you feeling? You’re looking great!
The street art parade marches on, perhaps ever clearer in its intent to reflect the mood, the zeitgeist, the intellectual meanderings of the artist class. In the process of demystifying the graffiti and street art scene over the few decades, we’ve long realized that there always will be surprises, no matter how much of the scene you have decoded. That’s what keeps it FREEEESSSSSSSSHHHH!
This week, as the snow is falling in dirty old NYC and as people are rescinding into their homes for another de facto Covid “lockdown”, we discover that artists are hard at work getting out their message, their id, their frustrations, their aspirations, their wit.
May this adventure never end, and may this trail never go cold.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Adam Fujita, Anderson Bluu, Dorothy Gale, Ernesto Maranje, ERRE, Ethan Minsker, Fake Banksy, Gold Loxe, Ill Surge, J. Cole, Johann Art, Marka 27, Miss 17, NEST, Praxis VGZ, Salami Doggy, and Winsten Tseng .
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. The weather is tropical this weekend, like we’re expecting a hurricane – ominous and windy. Maybe its our ongoing fear of runaway inflation, which Fed Chair Jerome Powell is trying to make us forget he called ‘transitory’. That should be the word of 2021. Transitory. Like fanny packs worn diagonally across the chest, or Dua Lipa.
The city’s vaccination rate is 78, and the mayor is requiring more vaccine and mask mandates in private companies and schools. Let’s hope it works, brothers and sisters.
So here’s our regular interview with the street, this week including 4SomeCrew, Buff Monster, Calicho, DAK 907, DOT DOT DOT, Drecks, ERRE, MIDABI, Not Banksy, Paper Monster, Paul Richard, Praxis VGZ, Roachi, Swrve, Urban Ruben, and Zexor.
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.
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.
It’s definitely quieter here in Wynwood when there are no art fairs. But there is still so much activity. The daytime neighborhood is pounding with construction and new buildings and restaurants/bars have a steady flow of guests every night, Monday through Sunday. Thump, thump, thump. The daily foot traffic is diminished, perhaps because the sun and heat have chased everyone inside during the day, but this week we saw hundreds of people whizzing by on scooters, and some large interest with a fleet of workers was preparing for a large music event in an empty lot – with tents, food trucks, stages, lights. Now that Art Basel 2021 is officially kicking off at the end of November, no doubt there will be big things happening in Wynwood again.
So of course we went to the beach to see the never-ending blue waves. The storm on the horizon was dark and funnel-like for an hour before it disappeared and the sun coaxed a half rainbow to glimmer and shimmer brightly. The seagulls gathering near your chaise lounge are clearly there with an air of expectation, however – miserly looking over your ziplock bags with sandwiches and potato chips as you carefully peel back the paper towel to steal a bite. They are cute, true, but ever focused on your moves.
Otherwise, the Wynwood district is just chock-a-block with art – permissioned and otherwise. The faces that watch as you walk are entreating, entertaining, flaunting, peering, taunting, speaking their own impenetrable speeches and poems. The neighborhood is still in movement, still liquid, still poised for revelation. The local names are liberally sprinkled with ones you recognized, many international. If the impulse to walk one more block in search of a jewel captures you, follow it because you are invariably rewarded.
Our interview with the street today includes Anthony Lister, Bird Seed Anthony, Dan Kitchener, Disem305, Greg Mike, Gregg Rivero, Hiero Veiga, Melski, MSG Crew, Narco, NM Salgar, RACE, Sipros, and Tabue.
“Gurl, I Just Came For the Sunburn” is the cleverly worded T-shirt design we just conjured, but didn’t see in any of the many stores selling “Miami”-emblazoned memorabilia this weekend. New Yorkers are from a colder climate where sexy college girls are already wearing tight turtleneck sweaters and leggings and handsome boys are sporting corduroy and blazers. Not here in Miami Beach or Wynwood, where less is more, and naked is a matter of opinion.
It’s Carnivale weekend so the streets and hotels are bursting with Brazilian and Trinidadian and otherwise Caribbean influences, including phenomenal costumes, dancing, trap music, and raucous peels of laughter. After some time on Miami Beach surrounded by bathing beauties and dodging freelance vendors selling Pina Coladas, margaritas, marijuana edibles, and other drugs from their backpacks, we caught an energetic and sexy floor show featuring earth-shaking amounts of bouncing beauty and a lip-synching rendition of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Girls in the Hood” that served so much twerking abandon that the fishnet stockings industry ran out of inventory by 3 am Sunday.
Here on the streets this quick sample of shots gives you an idea of the messages and palettes now greeting visitors all over this neighborhood of Wynwood– with some faces lifted from posters so you see how you’re supposed to be stylin’. Call it a survey of local color to ease you into the Miamian week BSA will be sharing with our readers. Bienvenidos!
Our interview with the street today includes Askew One, Atomik, Binho, Claudia La Bianca, Krayzie Bone, Guillermo Zanches, Irene Lopez Leon, Marina Capdevilla, Milu Correch, MSG Crew, Osorno, Pixel Pancho, and Rodo.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week and Ramadan Mubarak for all our Muslim brothers and sisters this week. We all know that we have to keep a safe distance and wash our hands, even during holy days – science is science whether its Jesus or Mohammed or Timothy Leary whom you worship.
Overall this pandemic is disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable around the world. If you are okay, please share what you have. This week we recommend The International Rescue Committee.
If you, or someone you care about, are feeling overwhelmed with emotions like sadness, depression, or anxiety, or feel like you want to harm yourself or others
Call National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255.
The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, was a U.S. program providing aid to Western Europe following the devastation of World War II. We need a Marshall Plan for everyday people right now and the next year. Instead, we have a circus.
In other news, we’re still quarantining inside so we thought you would enjoy these cool instant classics shot in Miami recently. Please send us your art in the streets! We love to hear from you. Spread love!
So here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Bubblegum, Carolina, Dicesar Love, Friks84, Inphiltrate, Jodi Cox, Joshila Dhaby, Le Doers Club, Outrank Brand, Oz Fua, Ric Azevedo, Roger Peet, Smogeone, The Suited Racer, Toosphexy, Tomer Linaje, and Toysnobs.
From Bosch to Beckmann to Bacon the multi-paneled presentation of the barnacled and beatific has commanded the attention of art fans for centuries. Here on a backlot in the swampy section of Miami that’s now known for public painting, we find a trio of uniquely stylized female sitters, one slightly more robotic than her flanks. In a darkly storied and neglected neighborhood now painfully clamoring for attention, it was this partially obscured wall that adroitly captured ours.
Commanding your eyes, and then your
heart, these three hold court in the scruffy sod with complementary hues,
blinkered by a tree that blocks and reveals according to the breeze and the
sun. Calling to mind altar paintings from the Middle Ages as well as pensively
poetic video panels at the Venice
Biennale, this maximizing of an easily overlooked opportunity skillfully attracts
the discerning art fan, leaving you satiated, slightly stirred.
In Street Art and graffiti news, New York has had some “whole car” pieces on the subway line recently, including one that looked like a whole train! Old timers were rubbing their eyes. According to a local media outlet, legendary graffiti artist Chris “Freedom” Pape gave his assessment; “..based on the artist’s philosophy, he gives it an “A” but based on the quality of the graffiti on old subways, he gives it a “C”. Also a new film about New York octogenarian Street Artist Robert Janz opened this week at the Anthology Film Archives. Janz in the Moment is the passion project of Filmmaker Joanna Kiernan that features many corners and crazy details of New York’s streets that are familiar to us – and probably to you.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Miami, and this time featuring Add Fuel, Atomik, Bisco Smith, CRKSHNK, Dal East, Feik, Hysterical Men, Jilly Ballistic, Kai, Mr. June, Pure Genius, Rick Azevedo, WCKT, What Will You Leave Behind, Will Power, and Winston Tseng.
Maybe its because animals are safe subjects to paint and make it
past the neighborhood censors, maybe its because they are handily metaphoric
when it comes to communicating a complicated or difficult idea. Maybe it is
just because they are cute and everybody on Instagram is going to offer a
clever rejoinder on your new painting in Miami, you cool dude/dudette.
From unicorns to hippos to lions and alligators, the street is
full of them right now around every corner in the Wynwood District and you can
still enjoy them until the neighborhood becomes so developed that they kill
them all. Well not all of them. One or two will still be creeping up on you in
the occasional abandoned lot that has a high tax bill or a hefty remediation of
toxic soil that still makes it too pricey for potential investors.
All of that wild conjuring aside, here is a selection of currently
running creatures of the gritty urban jungle in this humid and hot southern
city for you to marvel at.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
