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Beach Art

I guess in the middle of winter I have the beach on my mind. Here is another example of beach art. One could say this is just like street art - amazingly creative and very transitory.

http://incredibleworld.net/2009/12/daniel-burens-beach-art-the-illusion-of-a-forest-on-the-beach/


Daniel Buren’s Beach Art: The Illusion of a Forest On The Beach

Beach "Street Art"

From Incredible World website:
Andrew van der Merwe is a professional calligrapher and letter artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. In last six years of his work he was working on a developing his original technique of the beach calligraphy.

He considers himself as the world’s first professional beach calligrapher. His artworks are made by carving letters in the beach sand.
Here you can see some of his masterpieces that he recently produced. Sadly, his artworks doesn’t last for a long time so he also has to be a good photographer because that is the only way to show his art to a wider audience: by taking great photos of his artworks

A New Street Art Medium

Should we try this on the side of a building....?

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Advertising as Street Art?

Why is it that when a street artist creates art on the street it is criminal but when an advertiser does it, it is acceptable and even legal. Take the recent ad campaign from Mini Amsterdam.

Just after Christmas, the company created "trash piles" on Amsterdam streets of used ribbons, crumpled wrapping paper, and large cardboard boxes that appeared to be Mini Cooper packaging. As you can see in the video below, the boxes were definitely attention-grabbers....and street blocking garbage.

Graffiti Your Feet: Painted Sneakers Become Collectible Art

Keiji Ando is a young, trend-setting pioneer in the new art of Sneaker Painting. Using Reeboks and Nikes as unlikely canvases, Keiji meticulously hand-paints customized designs and illustrations on each sneaker, ultimately turning each pair into a work of collectible art.

Sneaker art has been around for a while but I haven't found anything as personalized as this that is being offered to the public. Bravo!


http://subwayfreshbuzz.mtviggy.com/video/457992

Street Art of Love

Just in time for Valentine's Day, I have just published a collection of NYC Street Art photographs with a love theme called Street Art of Love. It is available through Lulu.
Check it out:
Street Art of Love is a collection of NYC street art photographs with a love theme. Photographer Charlene Weisler captures these fleeting and evolving images as part of her Urban Montage portfolio.

Street Art and Tequila Cocktails in Brickell, Florida

The jury is still out on this concept for me. This is their plug. What do you think?


You like fine art. You like graffiti. You like nice restaurants. Gee, if only someone put them all together... Say hello to Baru Urbano, your new supper club with a splash of street art, opening tomorrow night in Mary Brickell Village.

A Musing on Sweethearts for Valentines Day

I always liked sweethearts candy - not to eat, but to save and use in collage. I liked the messages like "Love Me" and the pastel colors. Ah but all of that is changing apparantly. NECCO the makers of sweethearts has changed the flavors and the sayings to make everything so contempo. And so, I am filled with contempo too. Why change a good thing?

And they have also changed the sayings, now to include such romantic ditties as "tweet me" and "text me".
Oh how romantic!

Banksy Film at Sundance Film Festival

This just in from the LA Times:
The movie doesn’t appear anywhere in the Sundance Film Festival’s catalogue. Outside a small circle of ultra-secretive confidantes, nobody knows its director’s identity and whereabouts. And the film’s place in the Sundance schedule wasn’t even announced until last week. That hasn’t stopped acclaimed British street artist Banksy's “Exit Through the Gift Shop” from becoming Park City’s hottest ticket.

Outside Park City’s 446-seat Library Center Theater, Banksy fans started queuing up hours before “Gift Shop’s” 8:30 p.m. screening in 15-degree weather, even if their chances of getting in were slim. The screening, which was also a sales event for the film’s representatives, Cinetic Media, felt more like a feverish night club, with Jared Leto, Adrian Grenier and uber hipster Danny Masterson (of “That '70s Show”) in the packed house.

A film-within-a-film that begins as a chronicle of guerrilla art and its most prominent creators but morphs into a sly satire of celebrity, consumerism, the art world and filmmaking itself, “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is a nearly impossible work to categorize. That doesn’t begin to describe the contradictions that surround the new movie that’s both about -- and made by -- the controversial and hugely popular artist.


“Trying to make a movie which truly conveys the raw thrill and expressive power of art is very difficult. So I haven’t bothered,” Banksy said in a statement to The Times e-mailed from his publicist, Jo Brooks. “Instead this is a simple everyday tale of life, longing and mindless vandalism.”

An internationally renowned art world icon whose political, occasionally angry and mordantly funny pieces sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars to such big ticket collectors as Brad Pitt and Christina Aguilera, Banksy clings to his anonymity -- despite strenuous efforts of fans and detractors, no one has been able to unmask him. But he has legions of followers: A British show last year, titled "Banksy Versus the Bristol Museum," attracted more than 300,000 visitors.

The graffiti artist -- who left at least 10 works of art on the sides of buildings and utility boxes in Park City and Salt Lake City last week under cover of darkness -- has become infamous for his anti-establishment bent, running afoul of both the ivory tower ideals of art academics and local law enforcement for his all-public-spaces-are-my-canvas style: stencils of kissing policemen, or the Queen of England as a chimp.

“Exit Through the Gift Shop,” narrated by “Notting Hill” actor Rhys Ifans, opens with Banksy himself -- or at least a silhouette of him. Photographed in the dark, wearing a hoodie with his voice digitally disguised, the artist says “Gift Shop” is less about him than a guy who tried to make a movie about street art: Thierry Guetta, a French immigrant in Los Angeles who, since his mother’s death, videotapes everything in his life.


One of Guetta’s cousins is Invader, a French guerrilla artist who designs and furtively places mosaics inspired by the video game Space Invaders. Before long, Guetta is recording Invader’s installations, and is sucked into the riotous underground art world -- “It was not just illegal. It was dangerous,” Guetta says -- as it explodes in the early 2000s with the works of Shepard Fairey, Ron English and Borf, among many others.

As Banksy points out in the film, the work by its very nature is temporal -- as soon as it’s painted, glued or painted on a building or a billboard or a bus, the creations are removed by the authorities -- so it must be immediately documented to be shared and enjoyed by others. Guetta is in the right place at the right time to do just that. But as Fairey notes, Guetta is not only a filmmaker (an assertion called into question later in the movie), but also an accomplice.


Yet there’s one artist apparently beyond Guetta’s reach -- Banksy. In early 2006, though, Banksy travels to Los Angeles, needing an assistant. Guetta not only is familiar with Banksy’s milieu, but knows where the best walls are to deface and has a massive ladder -- “the perfect host,” as Banksy puts it.


Even though the artist protects his identity as if he’s in the U.S. Federal Witness Protection Program, Guetta keeps his camera going as Banksy (seen from behind or in shadow) creates his distinctive art in Los Angeles and England. Their friendship is cemented when Banksy (with Guetta videotaping) installs an inflatable replica of a Guantanamo torture victim next to a Disneyland roller coaster, as screaming families fly past.


“He was my guy after that,” Banksy says. But was Guetta actually making a movie, or just amassing a trove of tapes?


As his work generates more hype and money, Banksy believes a movie can correct the course of the cultural conversation -- back toward art itself, rather than its commoditization. Pushed to deliver a film, Guetta ultimately hands in a 90-minute movie called “Life Remote Control,” a documentary so cinematically schizophrenic it looks like it’s been forced through a food mill.

Banksy isn’t thrilled, concluding that perhaps Guetta isn’t really a filmmaker but “maybe just someone with mental problems who happened to have a camera.” Banksy decides to recut the hours and hours of video, while Guetta travels back to Los Angeles and, in an amazing reinvention, transforms himself into an artist named Mr. Brainwash.

“Mr. Brainwash is a force of nature. He’s a phenomenon. And I don’t mean that in a good way,” Banksy says of his former assistant as he prepares for his first show in Los Angeles.

“Gift Shop” becomes less of a movie about Banksy, his work and his complicated relationship with Guetta and more a study of how we see and appraise art -- either through some subjective aesthetic test or economic valuation. Do artists need to earn their fame, or is fame simply imposed upon them through some random algorithm? Is Mr. Brainwash’s work (he did the cover of Madonna’s new CD) derivative and contrived, and who’s to say if it is?

“Maybe it means art is a bit of a joke,” Banksy says near the film’s conclusion. Mr. Brainwash didn’t play by the rules, he observes, but there aren’t supposed to be rules, right?

Ultimately, the film offers a guerilla artist’s (if not documentary filmmaker’s) version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- by observing an action, you affect its outcome. And that, in a way, seems in keeping with the aesthetics of street art: It’s all about discovery and seeing.

Good Use For Old Graffiti Stickers?

Michael Anderson is a collector of graffiti stickers - the ones that you can pass on the street almost anywhere in NYC. What he did, however, is rather unusual. He would carefully peel them off and save them. Started in the early 1990's, Anderson has what he terms as the largest collection of graffiti stickers ever. Who can argue when he has over 40,000 of them?But then, what do you do with all these salvaged stickers? Enter the Ace Hotel on Broadway and 29th Street. They had a commission for a mural so Anderson tooll 4,000 of his stickers and transferred the designs onto silk paper to make a patchwork quilt of sorts for the walls of the hotel. The effect is fantastic.

Cool Blog - Artsindrom.blogspot.com

Mr. Rudy's blog on art (called Artsindrom) contains some graffiti and also some other street art / transitory art / people's art posts. Great blog - visit it often!

I looove the post on cappucino cream designs. Amazing!

A Street Art Blog - ArtsInDrom

Check out this great street art inspired blog.

Web Urbanist Site

I enjoy visiting the Web Urbanist site and just discovered a great retrospective of 3-D street art drawings. They say:

Three dimensional drawing nothing new – the concept itself dates back to the Greeks in the 5th Century BC – but employing perspectival techniques on such a huge scale and with such a broad scope is a much more recent innovation. Some 3D street art takes up dozens of feet of sidewalk to create illusions of depth and three-dimensionality while other mural works cover the entire sides of twelve-story buildings.

Use the link above to see some more of this astounding work.

42 Works of Geek, Temporary & Reverse Graffiti

Web Urbanist is a great website that covers urban activity in general and art in particular. This specific link takes you to a page of various street artwork - stencil, light and paint - that has humor, outrage and overall energy. Check it out.


"As graffiti and technology evolve alongside one another more and more innovative street artists are mixing media to create radical hybrids of graffiti art, design and technology. Some employ high-tech equipment to project giant graffiti murals while others use it to enhance their street art stealth and portability. Some use tech less directly – as a source humorously geeky inspiration and subject matter."

Beer and Graffiti?

Graffiti-Style Beer Ads Anger Parents

It used to be Joe Camel. Now advertisers are getting into graffiti type advertising to entice kids to use products. Graffiti-style malt liquor ads are drawing fire from parents and anti-blight advocates in a city known for its colorful murals.

Colt 45  is the most recent culprit. The ads for Colt 45 malt liquor show comic book-style characters clutching bottles and cans of booze. "Works every time," reads the slogan. I am very ambivalent about these ads, generally hating all advertising whether street art-like or not. As a photographer of street art however, I am outraged. I think it denigrades the art form. Okay, maybe that's just me.

Star Wars Street Art

Star Wars graffiti? What will they think of next?

Tattoos That Fail

In case of making a tatoo one Russian proverb comes in very handy. The proverb we are talking about is ” you must measure seven times before you start cutting”. In English there are similiar phrases like, ” score twice before you cut once”. (Although in Russian, they warn to think seven times before acting.) Thinking, scoring and planning are especially important in regard to a tattoo. For those who find it easier not to think seven times, their tatoos cause lot of laughs when are seen by someone for the first time.




Check out http://www.englishrussia.com/ for more examples of bad tattoos.

Listen to the Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art now offers their audio tours from any smartphone which means that you can either visit the museum and give yourself a tour or you can listen to the audio from the comfort of your home. Whichever way you listen, this is a great resource for understanding and appreciating art.
www.moma.org/wifi

Graffiti Artists in a new line of Work

Graffiti Artists, Kings of Walls, Now Dress Windows. Several graffiti artists have been recruited to create  graffiti based paintings as a backdrop to Lord & Taylor’s windows along Fifth Avenue, following in the footsteps of other artists like Red Grooms and Larry Rivers whose work has appeared at the flagship store.


This happened last year. I hope they do it again.

The Berlin Wall

Not only was it a massive wall, The Berlin Wall was also one of the major graffiti / street art venues of Europe if not the world. Yes it is good that the wall is down, but did so much great art 9much of it political) need to be destroyed? For the nilhillist in you, you can recreate the destruction at http://www.fallberlinwall.com/ where through texting you can knock down the wall yet again.

Bomb It - Street Art History in Los Angeles

Bomb It - the link is here -  is a great video about history of graffiti and street art in the city of Los Angeles.

25 Coolest Banksy Graffiti

Who doesn't know Banksy? He is an English graffiti artist who's work can be seen all over the world. I love this collection of Banksey British street art - some of which I have never seen before.

Incredible Time Lapsed Graffiti

A must view - Here is a great video on graffiti that is amazing and beautiful. Not only is it a range of amazing images, it also shows the ephermal life of graffiti in fast forward. Incredible, creative and beautiful images are paintd over in the span of seconds. Keep watching and you will alwyas see something new. Bravo to
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/
This video from the art group COMBO has awesome roving camerawork that documents huge great graffiti pieces being painted on the walls, floor and roofs of a derelict courtyard over ten days. And stop-motion animation techniques bring it all to life. Add weird layers of sound design and a looping pattern to melt your mind even more, and this stuff feels like the graffiti-meets-film making...
 

Graffiti Supplies

I never knew that they made spray paint specifically for graffiti. In fact I didn't know there was a need for such a product. A company in Barcelona Spain called MTN (Montana) makes specific markers and spray paint for graffiti and there is a store called Art Primo where you can buy spray caps designed to give you specific lines used in graffiti. Since graffiti is illegal in most places I wonder how these products are sold openly?  And since graffiti is a street activity that uses everyday items, I wonder if there is really a market for this.

Does anyone have more information?

Is Nothing Sacred?

I just read that Los Angeles is destroying what is believed to be the largest piece of graffiti in the nation.
A contractor for the US Army Corps of Engineers began painting over the gigantic "MTA" on the concrete bank of the Los Angeles River. "MTA" stands for Metro Transit Assassians" and is 57 feet high and one-third of a mile long.

Is nothing sacred??

Roomba Art

You know that wierd self propelling vacuum called Roomba? Well it is creating art. So let's file this not under "street art" but under "living room" art.



Roomba art. As far as we can tell, the trend started on a blog called Signal Theorist, who got the idea to set up a camera, turn off all the lights, and take a long-exposure photo of the Roomba's path as it "did its thing." The result looked like an awesomely psychedelic electrical spider web.
 

Visualizing Data

Now here is a new twist to art. Data visualization as conducted by supercomputers help illustrate very large databases and create fascinating and beautiful images. A full article on the subject was covered in The Futurist Magazine in July/August 2009 issue.
Isn't this gorgeous??

Photography Without Borders

Just like renegade street art that places art beyond the usual boundaries, I find the concept of forbidden photography compelling.

Check out strictly no photography which is a photo-sharing site for photographs taken where you are not allowed to take them. From the inside of the Kremlin to Kensington palace, from art galleries to war zones. Here you can see everything you've ever wanted to see that you're not supposed to. There are pictures that range from the ordinary to the profound. Whatever the content or the quality though we think that each one stands as a little piece of art in itself, as a little expression of personal liberty.

I remember once taking a photograph (complete with the flash) of a friend in the Houses of Parliment in London. There is a sign in the photo itself that says "No Photos" but what was even better, I captured the face of the guard peering at me from behind the wall as I took the photo. He threatened to expose the film but I was able to cry my way out of that.

One example from Stictly No Photography is a photo of the hanging monks of Oria. An order of monks that took care of the dead in the area. When they died, their bodies were boiled in oil (cloths and all) then hung in a nitch, in the basement of the local church next to the castle, in Oria Italy.

Philadelphia's Murals

I like Philadelphia and I like it even more now that I have discovered that they have a Mural Arts program that creates neighborhood murals throughout the city. Here it is, right from their site:

The Mural Arts Program works with more than 100 communities each year to create murals that reflect the culture of Philadelphia's neighborhoods. Mural projects often include stabilization of abandoned lots and revitalization of open spaces. Our community partners include block captains, neighborhood associations, public schools, community development corporations, local nonprofits, and city agencies. We strive to coordinate mural projects with existing strategies for community development, thereby leveraging grassroots social capital to build positive momentum and stronger results.

What a great idea! I wish we had something like this in NYC.....

Paralyzed Graffitist Able to Tag Using Eye Movement

Just read a great post on a blogger Tony Quan who suffers from ALS. His friends found a way for him to tag using his eye movements.

Here are the details:
The EyeWriter project is on ongoing collaborative research effort to empower people, who are suffering from ALS, with creative technologies. The project began in Los Angeles, Caifornia in 2009, when members of the GRL, FAT, OF and TEG communities teamed-up with a legendary LA graffiti writer, publisher and activist, named Tony Quan, aka TEMPTONE. Tony was diagnosed with ALS in 2003. The disease has left him almost completely physically paralyzed… except for his eyes. But, the ALS hasn’t touched Tony’s sharp mind, creative energy or his desire to write graffiti. In August of 2009, artist from around the world: London, Hong Kong, Madrid, Amsterdam and New York City, converged for 10 days in southern California, converted Mick and Caskey Ebeling’s Venice Beach house into a laboratory and began to work with Tony on a low-cost, open source eye-tracking system that would allow ALS patients to draw using just their eyes.

Tag On, Tony!

Digital Art

David Hockney is creating art ("small paintings") on his iphone. Other artists are using computers and other high tech techniques. Is digital art the next wave? The New York Times says yes, well sort of. There may be some pioneers - collectors, galleries and artists - who are working and collecting in the digital space but how is the art delivered? Currently through DVD's that need to be loaded onto a computer. Questions of authentication, protection, copyright etc all then come into play.

What is true though is that just like photography in the prior century and street art on walls today, digital is a new platform for art. And as such, still needs the creative eye to make it "a work of art". And that transcends platform.

Here is an example of Shane Hope's digital work currently at the Winkleman Gallery in NYC:

Street Art and Graffiti in Ireland

I just returned from a vacation in Ireland and found some nice examples of street art in both Limerick and Dublin. Here are some photos:

From a skateboard park in Limerick

 From the sidestreets of Dublin:

Great Flickr Graffiti Site

Spinstertoo has a great selection of graffiti photos - mostly from Australia, it seems. Check it out here: Spinsteroo

Light Graffiti

I have seen this in various forms - laser shows on the sides of buildings, for example. But I have not heard of light being used in a three dimensional type of way from a graffiti artist. I am not especially happy that this is linked to an advertising campaign but am sufficiently impressed that it looks so neat. It is your call, folks:

Photographer Michael Bosanko swapped spray cans for flashlights to graffiti British landmarks in a new set of images commissioned by TalkTalk to mark the launch of an advertising campaign that uses the same technique

Kevin Bauman

Street art by any name has to include houses and structures. So when I saw an article on Kevin Bauman's 100 Abandoned Houses series, I thought - "Yes - this is street art!"

Photographer Kevin Bauman embarked on an ambitious project. He began photographing Detroit's abandoned and deteriorating houses back in the late 1990s. His intention was to create a record of a Detroit past - a time of splendid homes and great architecture. He wanted to preserve these images before all was torn down. Many of these hosues are still standing, thanks to a recession that stopped redevelopment in that city. All 100AbandonedHouses are on his website KevinBauman.

You Say Street Art, I Say Graffiti. Let's Discuss.

Here is an article from the San Francisco Chronicle discussing the finer points of street art vs graffiti. As for me, I see little difference - unless you want to get nit picky. In my mind, graffiti is essentially spray paint while street art uses wheatpaste, stensil and stickers. However I think an argument can be made that says that graffiti is anything applied illegally or surreptitously in the environment while street art might be, like a commissioned wall mural, just another pices of art on the street. Read the article and decide.

Water Art?

Mark Mawson has a new twist on an established idea. Splashing paint around has been a standard artistic approach ever since Jackson Pollock made his name with it in the 1950s. But by dropping the paint into water instead of onto a canvas, Mawson has arrived at a startlingly new look.


The 41-year-old, from London, has been taking pictures for 22 years but only recently came up with the eye-catching way of creating stunning and beautiful abstract forms at random. His work has concentrated on underwater scenes and people, but now he takes different kinds of paint and drops them into a tank before snapping the outcome with his camera and using a strobe to light up the weird and wonderful forms. Different paints have different weights so a combination of paints creates differing effects. They are mysterious and beautiful.



Read more.

ArtSlant Reports on Great Paris Graffiti Show

Happy Bastille Day! What better way to celebrate the revolution than with a celebration of street art - art of the masses!


This link to ArtSlant offers a great article on a Paris gallery graffiti show. Paris has been an especially great place to exhibit street art as JonOne's exhibit at the Magda Danysz Gallery will attest.

Whenever I think of the French Revolution I can't help but think of my most favorite play. If you haven't read or seen Marat / Sade, you are missing out on a bit of great revolutionary theater. Here is a link to the book. The DVD appears to have been discontinued.

Street Theater as Street "Art"

I have recently discovered a street theater company who perform free for the public on the streets of New York City. Shakespeare in the Parking Lot is a troupe of accomplished actors who perform Shakespeare plays in a municipal parking lot on Ludlow Street and Broome Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

This is street art in a performance form - gritty, loud, expert and daring. Bring your own chair and catch them Thursdays - Saturdays starting at 8pm.

Glam Cams

Jill Magid decorates police cameras and calls them "Glam Cams". It is a great example of street art, akin to yarnbombing.

Here is an Introduction to her work:

I seek intimate relationships with impersonal structures.
The systems I choose to work with- such as police, secret services, CCTV, and forensic identification, function at a distance, with a wide-angle perspective, equalizing everyone and erasing the individual. I seek the potential softness and intimacy of their technologies, the fallacy of their omniscient point of view, the ways in which they hold memory (yet often cease to remember), their engrained position in society (the cause of their invisibility), their authority, their apparent intangibility− and, with all of this, their potential reversibility.

Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird

Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird is as close to street art music as I have found recently. Are they revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries? You decide:

Homebase IV Project on the Lower East Side

The Forward newspaper reported on an unusual art exhibition which asked the question, if you were to send us a photographical part of your body, what would that be?

It is called HomeBase and it is located in a dilapidated old medical clinic on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. HomeBase IV is a free exhibition and part of the 14th Street Y LABA Festival, in which a dozen former exam rooms in the medical clinic are the stage for artistic contemplations of personal and geopolitical identity. HomeBase project was founded in 2006 by artist and curator Anat Litwin.

I see this exhibit as bringing art from the street into the gallery space .. or in the medical examination room as it were.

Iz The Wiz, Graffiti Artist, Dead at Age 50

Iz The Wiz was a prolific graffiti artist plying his trade in New York City in the 1970s and ’80s. His work decorated the New York subways with a large “Iz the Wiz” tag. His work could be seen all over the subway system: fat capital letters spray-painted on a door, below a window, across an entire car or even along the full length of a train.

Iz the Wiz was a legend among graffiti artists, by almost all accounts “the longest-reigning all-city king in N.Y.C. history,” as the graffiti Web site at149st.com puts it. In other words, Iz put his name, or tag, on subway cars running on every line in the system more times than any other artist. No small feat!

Michael Martin — Iz the Wiz — died on June 17 in Spring Hill, Fla., where he had moved a few years ago. He was 50. The cause was a heart attack, said Ed Walker, who is working on a biography and documentary of Iz the Wiz.

“Look at any movie shot on location in New York from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, and you will very likely see an Iz tag,” Mr. Walker said. “He told me once that in 1982 he went out every night and did at least a hundred throw-ups” — letters filled in quickly with a thin layer of color. “People can’t fathom it.”

With the graffiti artist Vinny, Mr. Martin mounted an intensive throw-up campaign on the A line. In the late 1970s he branched out to other lines, spray-painting top-to-bottoms (graffiti displays extending from the top of a train to the bottom), burners (complicated works intended to dazzle the competition) and fully realized scenes, like his homage to John Lennon, painted after Lennon was shot to death in 1980. It was a two-car scene with a portrait of Lennon and a graveyard filled with tombstones.

With the photographer Martha Cooper, Mr. Chalfant published Subway Art(1984), recently reissued by Chronicle Books, and made the documentary film Style Wars(1983), which included Mr. Martin in its portraits of graffiti and hip-hop artists. He also appeared in the role of a transit police detective in the cult 1983 film Wild Style.






Mr. Martin was born in Manhattan and lived in a succession of foster homes after his mother was imprisoned for burglary. He did not know his father. He grew up in Ozone Park, Queens, and as a teenager lived in Covenant House on the Lower East Side.

The street art world has lost one of its forefathers.
Read his full obituary here.

Whole in the Wall 1970-Now

The Village Voice reports this graffiti based travelling art show. Check it out:

J'Aime Graffiti BY ARACELI CRUZ

Helenbeck Gallery curators and twin sisters Chantal and Brigitte Helenbeck have a distinct love for the French Revolution and contemporary art. So much so that they've decked out their galleries, based in New York and Paris, in certified antique Louis XIV furniture, crystal chandeliers, and the most radical graffiti works. This play on eras in Whole in the Wall: 1970–Now examines graffiti through this very comprehensive and traveling retrospective, from the local street-art pioneers of the '70s and '80s (Blade, Crash, Daze, Jonone, Quik, Lee Quinones, Rammellzee, and Sharp) to their contemporary European counterparts (Victor Ash, Banksy, Blek le Rat, Ikon, Sozy One. and sculptor Plateus). The group show also has photography pieces by Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant, Jamel Shabazz, and Silvio Magaglio.

The Top Ten Best Energing Artists Blogs

My list of the top ten best emerging artists blogs appeared on Blogs.com

It was very tough to choose but my favorites are:
1. Art Brut and Outsider Art
2. The Arteur
3. The Wooster Collective
4. New-Art
5. Post Secret
6. Artists Who Blog
7. William Wray
8. Happy Famous Artists
9. Caroline Marine
10. Other Things

The Beauty and Grace of Pure Scrawl

There is something to be said for the pure essence of graffiti. The "scrawls" and short tags that seem to crop up everywhere. I have to admit that I like some of them and am unimpressed with others. But there are a few that have a wonderful lyricism and grace. Here are a couple of examples:

Various and interesting Graffiti sites

Trolling through the internet yielded these interesting graffiti based sites.
In no particular order:

http://www.kontraband.co.uk/pics/15790/Geeky-Grafiti/

http://www.terracycle.net/graffiti.htm

"Recession" graffiti

The thing I love about graffiti is that it will reflect (or some might say drive) the times.

NPR just had a story about what they termed "Recession Graffiti" - how graffiti has taken on a political hue.

But I say "Recession Graffiti" is just another way of saying "Graffiti". All street art is political and relevant.

Bill Powers - Mosaic Artist

Bill Powers is a legend in the East Village of New York CIty. His beautiful mosaics adorn public lamp posts, street planters and even stoops and doorways. Bill lives a precarious existence however, having lost his apartment and living on the streets for a time. We met him on the corner of First Avenue and 8th Street with his dog Jessie Jane. Bill showed us his "Rudy Guliani move" - the move Bill did in front of television cameras with then Mayor Guliani. (Bill is guy with the moustasche...)



His art is amazing. Here are some examples but a better way to see them is to walk the streets of the East Village:

Gentrification with or without Exploitation

Just read this from Cool News. It used to be that artists were invited into neighborhoods as a way to speed gentrification, pushing out current residents and eventually, as the developers got involved, pushing out the artists too. Hopefully we are seeing some change in that process. Can't we all live together? Maybe this is the change we need:



"Artists have become the occupiers of last resort ... The worse things get, the more creative you have to become," says Robert McNulty in a Wall Street Journal piece by Alexandra Alter (4/17/09). Robert is president of Partners for Livable Communities, and he's commenting on what's happening in Cleveland and Detroit, where painters, sculptors and musicians are emerging as unlikely heroes amid the housing crisis, turning abandoned homes into studios and vacant storefronts into galleries.

The creative class has a long tradition of "gentrifying" shabby neighborhoods, but its latest push is being embraced by some urban planners as "a tool to revive neighborhoods reeling from vacancies and home foreclosures." Cleveland is investing $500,000 "to fund 50 citizen-led pilot projects to reclaim vacant property." Projects include "Pop Up City ... which brings performance artists into empty lots, vacant buildings and unused urban infrastructure." There's also a "$30 million drive" to rebrand a "former factory hub as entertainment and arts district."

Bob Brown, a Cleveland city planner, comments: "The next phase is capitalizing on the presence of artist and art-related businesses and using it as a lever for high-density development." Skeptics note that artists have a habit of displacing poor people and creating neighborhoods in which they themselves cannot afford to live. However, developer Brian Friedman says that won't happen if projects help artists buy the spaces they occupy. "Our chief goal is ownership," he says. "We don't want the neighborhood to gentrify them out."

Here is a great book on New York City on the subject: The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City

Adams Puryear

Who says that you can't get a street art feel from ceramics? Of course you can! Adams Puryear, whose fabulous ceramic vessels were on display at New York City's Greenwich House Pottery, has a great "low-brow art" (a term I personally object to but oh well) look to his work that is reminiscent of the vibrant creativity we see in graffiti and street art. See for yourself.

Michael Toenges

Michael Toenges is a Cologne, Germany based artist whose paintings make great use of color and light. As he explained at his solo exhibition at the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, MA a couple of weeks ago, he paints in twilight type of darkness. And indeed, when the gallery lights were lowered, the paintings glowed.

Michael said that he grew up in Germany where there is "northern light" as opposed to Italy where there is brighter "southern light". Although in Italy the light is diffused in a warm and sort of foggy way.

Michael's show is up until May 19, 2009 so if you are in Boston, stop by the Howard Yezerski Gallery at 460 Harrison Ave in the new Sowa arts district.