If you follow Elisa Carmichael on twitter, you may have noticed that she’s been dropping some hints recently about a big secret show that they’ve been planning. Well here it is: Re-Creation II features artwork from Will Barras, Simon Birch, Boxi, Ethos, Mark Jenkins, Labrona, Aakash Nihalani, Nina Pandolfo and WK Interact. I know Seth and Elisa have been working like crazy to pull this all together, and it sounds like it’s going to be amazing. They’ve flown some of their favorite artists to New York to work on installations in the space, and with the show running for so many months, plenty of people will have a chance to see what’s created.

In collaboration with Carmichael Gallery, Ogilvy & Mather New York will host Re-Creation II, a global exploration of emerging art, from March 5^th through July 2010.

The exhibit will be held at the new Ogilvy & Mather headquarters on New York City’s West Side at 636 11^th Avenue. Re-Creation II will showcase some of the most important emerging contemporary artists from around the world.

Large-scale murals, installations and original canvas, sculpture and mixed media works will be on display from Will Barras, Simon Birch, Boxi, Ethos, Mark Jenkins, Labrona, Aakash Nihalani, Nina Pandolfo and WK Interact. Many of these artists, who are based in the UK, Hong Kong, Germany, Brazil, the US and Canada, have never shown in New York before, and have never shown together.

Ogilvy & Mather will transform five floors and the lobby space of its new headquarters in The Chocolate Factory into a museum-quality exhibition space. As viewers ascend each floor, they can experience the upward momentum of the artwork. Re-Creation II is the second exhibit to be hosted by Ogilvy & Mather in its new space.  It follows the inaugural Re-Creation exhibit, which featured the work of 12 emerging artists who use recycled materials to create unique forms of art. That exhibit will also be viewable through the end of March.

The opening reception of the exhibit will be held on Friday, March 5 with several of the artists in attendance at Ogilvy & Mather. The exhibition will run through July 31, 2010. Opening on March 5th in the middle of the Armory Art Fair week, the exhibition will run through the end of July 2010.

Doors are open to the viewing public, by appointment only, Tuesday-Friday 10am-5pm by contacting Jun Lee at jun.lee@ogilvy.com.

On a side note, this is the 1000th post on Vandalog. Almost a year and a half in, we’ve averaged over 2 posts per day, posting almost every single day.

The backend of the Vandalog site is going really screwy. So this is all I can manage to post today. Hopefully this issue will be fixed soon. If anyone knows a lot about WordPress, your help would be appreciated. Just email me (rj -at- vandalog.com).

Anybody looking for a free D*Face print? Look no further. Vandalog has one special edition of Very Nearly Almost issue #10 to give away. But more on that in a second.

Frankly, VNA is my favorite art magazine (yes, I like Juxtapoz, but it rarely beats VNA), in part because they get better with every issue. Issue 10 is a real milestone issue for VNA. There are the usual photos of street art in London and around the world, interviews with Shok1, D*face, Dalek and more, and other bits like product reviews. Basically, it’s the usual great mag for a price of just £4.

And about that D*face print…

VNA did a special promotion with D*Face for this issue. He designed the cover, and at the launch party they had a special edition of 150 screenprinted covers available. They also made just a few of those covers in a blue colorway (as seen above). That’s what I’ve got sitting on my desk right now, and it’s available for one lucky Vandalog reader who can answer this question: In what American state did D*face recently paint the “Ridiculous Pool”? Just email your answer to rj(a-t)vandalog(dot)com before Tuesday the 26th at 4pm London time. I’ll randomly select a winner from the people who answer correctly. This is a pretty unique opportunity, because only a few of these blue covers were printed, and they aren’t available for sale anywhere.

Oh, and if you don’t know about the Ridiculous Pool, here it is:

You can buy Very Nearly Almost in store or online.

Don’t ask me how it happened, I’m still not entirely sure, but if you happen to pick up a copy of Vogue Italia this month, you’ll find an article about me and street art on page 96. I don’t speak Italian, but based on Google’s very rough translation, the article seems to be about The Thousands and me proselytizing street art as “museum quality.” So that’s pretty cool. And, because a. I’m no fashion icon, and b. it was an article about the virtues of street art, instead of photos of me taken by a famous photographer, the article features some pictures from The Thousands book of work by Burning Candy, Skewville, Elbow-toe and Chris Stain, so be on the look out for next year’s line of Skewville inspired tshirts at H&M.

This month on Vandalog, I’ve organized a few giveaways.

The first of those giveaways starts today with two copies of Jon Naar and Norman Mailer’s seminal graffiti book The Faith of Graffiti. When it was first published in 1974, The Faith of Graffiti was the first book to take a serious look at graffiti. In 1974, Jon Naar’s photos and Norman Mailer’s essay gave the graffiti movement some mainstream legitimacy, as Mailer was one of the first to call writers artists. Looking back now, the book acts as an important historical document, preserving the very first generations of New York graffiti. Mailer’s understanding of graffiti was unparalleled at the time, and his writing is still an important starting point when looking at graffiti in the context of art history and art criticism, while Naar’s photos, taken at a time when few other photographers were paying much attention to graffiti, are invaluable evidence of how widespread and powerful graffiti culture was in the 1970′s

For years, it hasn’t been easy to get a copy of The Faith of Graffiti, as it was out of print, but last month it was reprinted in an expanded edition. This book is an absolute must-have for fans of graffiti and street art; my 1st edition is one of my prized possessions.

So how can you get a free copy of The Faith of Graffiti? Easy. HarperCollins has given me two copies of the paperback edition to give away. To enter the contest, you can either comment on this post (make sure to include your real email address, otherwise you can’t win because I won’t be able to contact you), or go on twitter and tweet a link to this post along with the hashtag “#vandalog”. But you have to enter before 6pm (GMT) on Wednesday, January 13th. After that, I’ll randomly pick two winners. Good luck.

Of course, not everybody can win, so if you’d like to buy a copy of the book, just go to Amazon.com.

Photos by Jon Naar

Recently I’ve been posting some videos here from Babelgum.com. This week was the launch of my show there, RJ’s Street Art London. About two episodes will go online each week. So far I’ve interviewed Luc Price, filmed Roa painting, given tours of The Thousands and wandered around numerous art openings in London.

You can visit RJ’s Street Art London at www.babelgum.com/rj

Oh, and thanks to Jon Hammer aka ELATE for painting the logo.

It looks like the whole Vandalog team will be together in Miami in a few weeks for the art fairs.

Congratulations to Gaia, a fellow blogger here on Vandalog, for not only being included in SCOPE-Miami with Irvine Contemporary, but also for getting the opportunity to create a 40 foot long mural the the fair’s entrance.

Elisa Carmichael will also be at SCOPE at the Carmichael Gallery‘s stand where they will have artwork from Boxi, Hush, Mark Jenkins, Nunca, Simon Birch and Sixeart.

And I will be in Miami to check out SCOPE, Basel, Primary Flight and all the other events and fairs.

Happy birthday to Vandalog. October 15th is the 1st birthday of Vandalog. In the last year, there have been 600-some posts from 7 different writers (not including the Great in 08 series), the addition of Gaia and Elisa Carmichael as contributing writers, interviews with artists like Veng and Matt Small and a bunch of other bits. Well over 1000 people are reading Vandalog every day, and next week I’ll be launching an internet tv series. Basically, it’s grown a lot this year and been extremely fun to write.

Photo by Kelly Sue

Enough self-congratulations. I really want to thank everybody who reads Vandalog and has been supportive of what I’m trying to do with it. And if you haven’t emailed me before, please know that I’m pretty good about responding to just about any email within 24 hours, so if you need any street art related help, do not hesitate to ask. Interaction with the art community is why I post here.

Here’s something from Hera for you to think about:

I’ll be back from FAME Festival on Monday.

PS, I can’t wait to see what Herakut paint for The Thousands.

It’s been pointed out that there was something very important that I missed in yesterday’s post about Banksy’s auction results.

WallKandy, on WallKandy’s forums in fact, noted this morning that Lyon & Turnbull, the auction house whose representative is quoted in the original Bloomberg article, kind of had it coming and shouldn’t be suprised that their Banksy pieces failed to sell. Those works were pieces taken off the street and authenticated by VERMIN, not Pest Control (the official Banksy authenticators). Sorry to have written that long post yesterday based on that information, though I guess now my critisism of the article is even more valid as Banksy work hasn’t been doing as bad at auction as some Bloomberg readers now think.