All posts tagged: Zahra Sherzad

The People’s Art: Billboards as Commons, Protest, and Celebration

The People’s Art: Billboards as Commons, Protest, and Celebration


SaveArtSpace 10th Anniversary Public Art Exhibition & Gallery Show
– Opens May 30, 2025

SaveArtSpace marks its 10th anniversary with The People’s Art, a sweeping public art initiative and gallery exhibition that brings together some of the most urgent and incisive voices in contemporary art. Curated by an influential panel of curators and cultural leaders grounded in the study of graffiti, street art, and public art — Anne-Laure Lemaitre, RJ Rushmore, Zahra Sherzad, Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo, and Travis Rix — this year’s exhibition takes the streets of New York City as its canvas and its airwaves as amplifier. Selected from a competitive open call that drew nearly 500 artists from across the country, the final group includes over 50 creators whose work explores money, power, and the poetic disruptions of public space.

Opening May 30, 2025, The People’s Art debuts with billboard takeovers throughout New York City, featuring works by Walter Cruz & Lamar Robillard, Tod Seelie, Anastasios Poneros, Jonathan Yubi, Itzel Basualdo, Matthew Morrocco, Kip Henke, Tariq AlObaid, Wen Liu, and Gordon Hull. The works will occupy advertising real estate typically reserved for commercial persuasion, instead offering pointed, personal, and public reflections on inequality, representation, and collective memory. Complementing these installations, Satellite Gallery on Broome Street will host a one-night-only opening reception, showcasing work by more than 40 artists selected for the gallery component of the exhibition.

Tod Seelie. Raft Manhattan. Selected billboard artist. SaveArtSpace: 10th Anniversary – The People’s Art. (photo courtesy of the artist)

The event will also include a live public performance by Autumn Breon, who will pull a mobile billboard truck through the Lower East Side while animated censorship incidents flash across its screens — a confrontation between voice and silencing in the most physical sense. Breon’s body becomes a vessel of resistance, and her performance, animated by Brindha Kumar, anchors the evening’s commitment to calling attention to what we too often try not to see.

Anastasios Poneros. Selected billboard artist. SaveArtSpace: 10th Anniversary – The People’s Art. (photo courtesy of the artist)

This year’s featured essay by cultural critic Carlo McCormick sets the tone for the project, articulating a vision of art that rejects the insularity of luxury culture in favor of a raw, public vernacular. “This is the art of the commons,” McCormick writes, “that shared space between the tyranny of privatization and the compromise of collectivity.” His essay, presented in full below, will frame a series of images from the exhibition — an offering not just to the art world, but to the street, the sidewalk, and the people who walk them.

The People’s Art

The People’s Art is an art of, and for, the people. In a town like New York City, we’ve got plenty of established spaces – galleries, museums, lobbies and the like – to showcase the art that exists as trophies and baubles in the marketplace of luxury products, or to serve the glut of cultural production like sewer drains in a deluge. This is a project, in however many billboards it takes to get a gesture out there that can dance in the public imagination without becoming a brand, that is all about the space between polemics and poetics, how we communicate in this crowded place without screaming, like the way we somehow know how to walk the busiest of sidewalks without running into one another. It’s a folkloric choreography of lover’s leaps and slapstick pratfalls, talking out loud because you think your phone gives you permission to occupy the bandwidth of everyone around you, or because you’re just fucking crazy. It’s a way of looking as well as representing, the terms of engagement where we try not to stare but aren’t afraid to wink.

Signs of the times, the veritable zits of our zeitgeist, we’ve demeaned and damned billboards at least since Lady Bird talked her hubby President Lyndon Johnson into enacting the Highway Beautification Act (HBA) back in 1965 – the idea being that beauty would make America a better place to live. No doubt the time is nigh for some new assault on this ongoing ugliness (the equivalent of late night TV ads on the cultural landscape), maybe we can call it MABA, but until then let us celebrate billboards as the old-fashioned eye-sores they truly are – neglected vestiges from an early outbreak of a visual rash – the residual old scar tissue of corporate co-option and commercial coercion that has since all but subsumed the society of the spectacle.

An art of the people needs to speak a lingua franca and there can be no more common language than the come-on. We don’t shoot the shit in Latin or iambic pentameter; we communicate in the vulgar vernacular of persuasion. Wherever the artist’s billboards of SaveArtSpace appear like deranged interventions in the quotidian, they do not so much bust out of the normalcy as weave their idiosyncrasies into it, joining the din of optical overload like an odd harmony in an ancient Greek chorus, queries and quandaries in the surface of surety, alternatives to the obvious not afraid of eschewing subtlety for the sake of commanding attention. This is the art of the commons, that shared space between the tyranny of privatization and the compromise of collectivity. In a medium dedicated to telling the people what they want, SaveArtSpace allows us to occupy public space as a personal place where we can imagine what we need.

Carlo McCormick

Itzel Basualdo. Fourth of July in Chicago. Selected billboard artist. SaveArtSpace: 10th Anniversary – The People’s Art. (photo courtesy of the artist)
Walter Cruz, in collaboration with Lamar Robillard. For Las Mina’s Sake. Selected billboard artist. SaveArtSpace: 10th Anniversary – The People’s Art. (photo courtesy of the artist)

To see all the artists’ work selected for the billboards and the gallery exhibition, learn about the artists, curators, and SaveArtSpace click HERE.

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“The People’s Art”: Taking It to the Streets for 10 Years

“The People’s Art”: Taking It to the Streets for 10 Years

For a decade, SaveArtSpace has transformed New York’s streets into open-air galleries, reclaiming advertising spaces as canvases for public expression. As jurors for The People’s Art, we’re proud to celebrate this milestone 10th-anniversary exhibition, continuing the tradition of putting art directly into the streets—where it has always belonged.

From the earliest graffiti writers to the street artists of today, creatives have long turned to public space, short-circuiting the existing system and taking their work to the streets. The billboards in this exhibition honor that history, bypassing traditional gatekeepers and giving artists a direct line to the city itself. No red tape, no VIP lists—just the raw, immediate impact of art in the urban landscape.

SaveArtSpace co-founder Travis Rix has been a driving force behind this direction in the last decade, ensuring that artists—regardless of background or formal representation—have access to some of the most visible walls in the world. This year’s exhibition continues that mission, giving up to 50 artists the chance to showcase their work across New York.

We invite artists of all ages and talents to submit their artwork between March 3, 2024, and April 14, 2025. A $10 donation per image submission helps fund the project and is tax-deductible. Selected artists will be announced after April 28, 2025, and their work will go up on billboards starting May 30, 2025, staying on view for at least a month. The celebration doesn’t stop there—chosen works will also be exhibited at Satellite Gallery (279 Broome St, NYC) with an opening night anniversary party on May 30, 2025, from 6-9 PM.

This is a street-wise event, a New York tradition, and a tribute to the artists who take their work straight to the public. Below, we look at a few past billboards that turned the city into a gallery—proof that art in the commons isn’t just possible, it’s necessary.

CLICK HERE TO APPLY

SaveArtSpace is proud to present our 10th Anniversary celebration The People’s Art, a group public art exhibition on billboard ad space in New York, NY, opening May 30, 2025, curated by Anne-Laure Lemaitre, RJ Rushmore, Zahra Sherzad, Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo, & Travis Rix.

The selected artists will also be exhibited at Satellite Gallery, 279 Broome St, NYC, with a one-night opening reception anniversary party on May 30, 2025.

CLICK HERE TO APPLY

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BSA Images Of The Week: 03.11.18

BSA Images Of The Week: 03.11.18

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Art was popping up like crokuses and animated robots all week here in NYC with a plethora of art fairs gathered under Armory Week, a number of fresh green gallery openings, and the welcome sign of perturbed perennials appearing on the street.

Although it is not surprising in any way any more, Street Artists are represented across all three of those options today, like Pixote, Swoon, and Ian Strange (Kid Zoom) at Spring/Break. Also John Matos, aka Crash One, and Lady Aiko in conversation with cultural critic and curator Carlo McCormick moderated by Harrison Tenzer of Sotheby’s at Scope. And you can’t forget the gallery openings of Buff Monster with Dalek, and the first solo show of Brendan Fagen (the artist formerly known as Judith Supine).

You try to see as much as possible, and of course a number of non-Street Art installations caught our eye like the top image of Fernando Orellana‘s animated “Robot Protest”, which you can participate in HERE, and see a video of at the end of this post. For the actual street we’ll mention some new art in ad places from Abe Lincoln Jr and Swiss Miss as a dominatrix in pink latex and Trump as the submissive on bus shelters.

Socio-political themes continue to erupt wherever you look, including the street-side demonstrations against the Sackler family and their connections with the opiod crisis and institutional art patronage that took place in front of (with a “die-in” inside) the Metropolitan Museum yesterday. If these are the early signs of spring, what will it look like in full bloom?

Here’s our weekly interview with the streets (and elsewhere), this week featuring Anna Kustera, Annette Bragasuma, Danielle Mastrion, Demsky, DrscO, Eric Mistretta, Fernando Orellana, Ian Strange, Jonathatn Rosen, Laura O’Reilly, Abe Lincoln Jr. LMNOPI, Megzany, Pixote, Praxis VGZ, Sarah Walkco, Screw Tape, Stick N Twisted, Stylist of the Lambs, Swiss Miss NYC, and Turtle Caps.

Top Image: Fernando Orellana’s “You’ll Never Know We Were Here” at Spring/Break Art Show 2018. Curated by Sarah Walko. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ian Strange. Burn Series at Spring/Break Art Show 2018. Curated by Zahra Sherzad. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

#DOMMINGDONALD Phone booth ad takeover in collaboration with Abe Lincoln Jr., Swiss Miss NYC, NYC Hookerand Annette Bragas. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

#DOMMINGDONALD Phone booth ad takeover in collaboration with Abe Lincoln Jr., Swiss Miss NYC, NYC Hooker and Annette Bragas. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Lock Him Up: A custom made jacket worn by Stylist Of The Lambs. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Meta messages collide in this new slap from Screw Tape. Andre the Giant wears a Shepard Fairey design in the style of Obey while Obey posters feature Fairey over “Defy”.  (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Danielle Mastrion (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Jonathan Rosen. “Double Life” at Spring/Break Art Show 2018. Curated by Laura O’Reilly. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Turtle Caps and some classic cartoon characters (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Unidentified Artist (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Pixote. “Future Primitive”. Detail. Spring/Break Art Show 2018. Curated by Zahra Sherzad. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Pixote. “Future Primitive” Spring/Break Art Show 2018. Curated by Zahra Sherzad. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Praxis VGZ (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Unidentified Artist (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Demsky (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Stick N Twisted (photo © Jaime Rojo)

LMNOPI (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Eric Mistretta. “The Wrong Place” Spring/Break Art Show 2018. Curated by Anna Kustera. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Megzany (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Drsc0 (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. The Paramount Building. Times Square, NYC. March 2018. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

 

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Ann Lewis + StudioSpaceNYC Leave Things “Unspoken” in Manhattan

Ann Lewis + StudioSpaceNYC Leave Things “Unspoken” in Manhattan

Some existential thoughts and questions are left UNSPOKEN in our lives. A new collaborative exhibit in a 14th Street pop-up space offers you the opportunity to engage with some of yours. Of course, you need not say anything.

Ann Lewis + studioSPACEnyc “Unspoken”. Manhattan, NYC. February 2018. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Street Artist/conceptual artist Ann Lewis has been working with the design team of studioSPACEnyc to create and interactive an experiential installation incorporating linear digital rainstorms of light-mapped emotion and memory for you to lay beneath and look up into as it glitters and trickles and flickers across your mind. You may also just wish to walk around them as they flicker in geometric masses, easily punctuated by your hand or body.

Lewis invites you to contemplate weightier (or loftier) matters of impermanence and infinity with toe tags hanging at the end of these 115,000 feet of reflective strings. To further engage with the immersive installation, you can leave your mark on one of the toe tags by filling out short answers to some of life’s magnificient and somehow elusive questions.

Ann Lewis + studioSPACEnyc “Unspoken”. Manhattan, NYC. February 2018. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

We spoke with the artist and the curator, Zahra Sherzad, of Killer Media, who produced the exhibition that runs through February 15th.

Brooklyn Street Art: You have used toe tags previously in your work. What do they symbolize for you.
Ann Lewis: Toe tags carry the weight of our lives on them. As much as their 5 or 6 lines can define a person they’re so impersonal but infer this inevitability to the living. I have used them in the past to humanize the data surrounding those who have lost their lives to police brutality, or drug addiction. They have, up until this point, symbolized a finality.

Brooklyn Street Art: As an interactive exhibit, viewers are invited to contribute their answers to rather existential questions like “ Do we actually exist” and “What is the ultimate freedom?” How did you arrive at these questions?
Ann Lewis: While developing this project the curator Zahra Sherzad and I lost a mutual friend to drug addiction. I spent a lot of time considering her death and began to recognize for the first time that the only reason I’ve ever feared death is because of the loss I associate with it when others have passed. Then I began to consider what if death is an amazing adventure? Just because it’s an unknown doesn’t mean it has to be feared. I went down a meta wormhole wondering if we’re even alive right now! It’s so great not to have the answers

Ann Lewis + studioSPACEnyc “Unspoken”. Manhattan, NYC. February 2018. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: Immersive exhibitions usually have to strike a balance between leaving you alone and engaging you to participate. How do you plan for the variety of responses?
Ann Lewis: In my opinion good installation art must really consider how a participant will flow through the space. It must offer space and time for reflection as well as opportunities to engage. I like to offer those opportunities at the beginning of the experience and if possible create a movement throughout the space that is nonlinear which lends itself to personalized, unique experiences that in turn become strong memories that stay with the participant long after she leaves the space.

Ann Lewis + studioSPACEnyc “Unspoken”. Manhattan, NYC. February 2018. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: When you work on the street do you ever think of elements or people in public space as part of your exhibition?
Ann Lewis: That’s the first thing I think of even before I know what the work will be. A good percentage of the work I’ve put outside has been site specific. Scouting is such a fun part of the job. One must recognize the context in which the work will be viewed in order to really have the opportunity to create an impactful experience for the viewer.

Brooklyn Street Art: What would be a good outcome for you if you could chose a viewers experience at this show?
Ann Lewis: I think having a participant leave the space questioning her understanding of her own perception of our world would be very exciting.

Ann Lewis + studioSPACEnyc “Unspoken”. Manhattan, NYC. February 2018. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Brooklyn Street Art: How did you select Ann Lewis and studioSPACEart for this exhibition?
Zahra Sherzad: We wanted to create an interactive art installation, around the conversation of dying with dignity for the TV series “Kill Me”. We chose Ann as a multidisciplinary activist artist using painting, installation, and participatory performance. She has an ongoing work called “…and counting”, an interactive installation made with hung toe tags.  We brought the StudioSpaceNYC boys in with their projection mapping strings to add a cinematic experience and as a way to transport people into another world.

Brooklyn Street Art: Your projects have a social mission that runs parallel to your exhibits you curate. Are there particular symbols here that resonate with that mission?
Zahra Sherzad: “Unspoken” is a way to provoke thought around how we view death, which is what the series “Kill Me” is about.  We are not telling people what to think nor are we asking them to take a definitive position on the issues around mercy killing and dying with dignity. The viewers of the exhibition are asked to participate by filling out a questionnaire tailored to the shows script on the toe tags that asks questions about their relationship and experience with death.  As the days tick forward the installation grows as participants add new tags.

Ann Lewis + studioSPACEnyc “Unspoken”. Manhattan, NYC. February 2018. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ann Lewis + studioSPACEnyc “Unspoken”. Manhattan, NYC. February 2018. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ann Lewis + studioSPACEnyc “Unspoken”. Manhattan, NYC. February 2018. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

 

Ann Lewis + studioSPACEnyc “Unspoken”. Manhattan, NYC. February 2018. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Ann Lewis + studioSPACEnyc “Unspoken”. Manhattan, NYC. February 2018. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

 


UNSPOKEN

Ann Lewis + studioSPACEnyc

January 18 – February 15, 2018

Killer Impact, a Killer Content company, is pleased to present “Unspoken” – a collaborative exhibit between artists Ann Lewis and studioSPACEnyc, curated by Killer’s Director of Visual Art, Zahra Sherzad at
149 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011.

 

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Swoon: “Pearly’s Beauty Shop” in LA Helps You Be a Glamorous Philanthropist

Swoon: “Pearly’s Beauty Shop” in LA Helps You Be a Glamorous Philanthropist

SWOON and “Pearly’s Beauty Shop” are back!
Heliotrope Benefit!
Buy your TIX for Saturday 5/21 in Los Angeles HERE!

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BSA was an early and fervent supporter of the very first Pearly’s Beauty Shop nearly four years ago in Long Island City, New York: Swoon herself was there painting nails and the brand-new Braddock Tile architectural model was on display amongst all the lace-paper cut constructions, hair dressers, stylists, costumers, swirling lights and DJs.

This Saturday in downtown Los Angeles the 2016 Artist-Run Soiree named “Pearly’s” will dwarf that first one in star power, sponsors, co-hosts, DJs, guest curators, performance artists, hair dioramas, costumes, glitter, and rouge.brooklyn-street-art-swoon-pearlys-beauty-shop-superchief-gallery-web-1

Hosted by Superchief Gallery and benefitting Swoon’s Heliotrope Foundation, you are invited to re-imagine fantastically your personal aesthetics with a bevy of talented professionals at the ready to help make dreams come true – and to fund Heliotrope so it can help communities to heal after natural disasters, economic blight, and other urgent social crisis.

Juxtapoz’s Evan Pricco has curated a list of cool artists for an exclusive Pearly’s 2016 print release, Shepard Fairey will be at the wheels of steel, and Brooklyn babe now Hollywood bombshell Marsea Goldberg is curating a special exhibition called “Vanity”. Also, an auction curated by Raina Mehler and Andrew Lockhart.

Also, surprises. That’s all we can say.

West Coast Represent!!

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SWOON invites you to Pearly’s Beauty Shop
Saturday, May 21, 2016
7 pm to 1 am
Superchief Gallery
739 Kohler St, Los Angeles, California 90021

TICKETS: Tickets start at $50 and can be purchased at bit.ly/pearlys2016
DRESS CODE: Come as you are

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PURCHASE YOUR TICKETS BY CLICKING ON THIS LINK: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pearlys-beauty-shop-tickets-24667609484

  • HOST COMMITTEE: Swizz Beatz • Jane Golden • Sallyann Kluz • Andrew Lockhart • Karmimadeebora McMillan • Sandra Powell • Zahra Sherzad • Anthony Spiegel • Ryan Nuckel • KT Tierney • Natalie Kates • Bill Dunleavy • Edward Zipco • Marsea Goldberg • Als Kenny • Ryland Behrens • Tamara Goldstein • Lisa Shimamura • Andrew Edward Brown • Liat Cohen • JL Sirisuk • Raina Mehler • Alex Fanning • Afrodet Zuri • Andrea Fiona Pagliai Londoño • Siovan Hope Ross • Adam Lehrer • Kristin Sancken • Charlotte Reed • Kurt McVey

Pearly’s Beauty Shop 2016 thanks Jefferson Projects; Juxtapoz Magazine; Lagunitas Brewing Company; Stolen Rum; Gary Lichtenstein Editions at Mana; Art Report; ArtLeadHER; and Red Flower for their generous support. Pearly’s is pleased to partner with LAMP Community, a Skid Row-based organization seeking to end homelessness and foster self-sufficiency among those living with severe mental illness.

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