Another massive month in Melbourne in April with some great events, shows and work on the streets. This month I’ve also decided to include a bit more on graff and also some work off the streets in some of Melbourne’s awesome abandos.

There’s been an explosion of panels running in Melbourne recently, including a couple of whole cars. Whilst some of the pieces are not the best in quality it’s still rad to see so much graff on trains again lately. Are the authorities asleep? Or is it our lack of trains to meet demand to blame so they HAVE to run them? The best of Melbourne graffiti Facebook page is a good place to keep up with what’s running, they cover anything running each day on the Melbourne rail network (good and bad). Here’s my favourite flick from the page for April. Read the rest of this article »

Category: Featured Posts, Gallery/Museum Shows, Interview, Photos, Random, Videos | Tags: Acclaim magazine, Adnate, Andrew Montell, April 2013, Arty Graffarti, backwoods gallery, Blends, CARBON Festival, Choq, Conrad Bizjak, Creature Creature, Dabs Myla, Darbotz, David Russell, Deams, Dean Sunshine, Deb, does, Ecstasy in the Abyss, Eddie Huang, Endless Perspectives, Flea, graffiti, Hancock, Heesco, henry chalfant, insa, Itch, jaw, Jeff Hamada, Karlosh, Lawrence Schlossman, Luke McManus, makatron, Mark Drew, martha cooper, Melbourne Monthly Madness, Nior, Nock, Ohnoes, paris, Peril, phibs, Putos, rone, Ronnie Fieg, Shawn Stussy, Shida, Simon ‘Woody’ Wood, slicer, Stabs, street art, The best of Melbourne graffiti, Will Robson-Scott

Yesterday MOCAtv (MOCA Los Angeles’ YouTube channel) announced an open call for content for the channel. Jeffrey Deitch, Carlo McCormick, Martha Cooper, Ethel Seno, and I will be reviewing content on YouTube with “#MOCATVUPLOAD” in the video title and then selecting the best of those films for inclusion on MOCAtv. Read more about the project here.

I can’t wait to see what gets submitted.

Category: Featured Posts, Vandalog Projects, Videos | Tags: carlo mccormick, ethel seno, jeffrey deitch, martha cooper, mocala, mocatv

For the last week or so until today, we’ve been in the process changing Vandalog’s web hosts. No need to get into the technical details, but now the site should run more smoothly and with less downtime. Unfortunately it means that we haven’t been able to write anything new on the site since that process began (everything that’s gone online was pre-scheduled). So this is a mega-link-o-rama combining the usual weekend link-o-rama content with stuff that I could have written about last week even if I’d had the time.

• Martha Cooper turned 70 this weekend, and the graffiti community came together at Bowery and Houston to give her a giant surprise birthday present (pictured above). How and Nosm told Cooper that they were planning to repaint their piece at Bowery and Houston and told her to come by at noon on Saturday, but they didn’t tell her how they were going to have to piece repainted. They brought together a bunch of new and old graffiti legends and painted a giant blockbuster tribute to Cooper. BSA has plenty more great photos of the piece in progress and a perfect shot of Cooper reacting to seeing the mural.
• WK Interact’s pop-up show in NYC is absolutely fantastic, a must-see show. Think it this way: This show, as I understand it, is a retrospective but it’s made up of the work that WK had in his studio, not work borrowed or on the secondary market from collectors, so this is a lot of unsold work. And yet, the show is still one of the strongest I’ve seen from any artist in quite a while, and the work holds up just fine next to anything else by WK. Even the work that has been sitting in the WK’s studio for a few years is just masterpiece after masterpiece. Good stuff.
• I love this t-shirt designed by Snoeman for Carnage (Snoeman is the zine’s featured artist in their latest issue).
• Sick new Dabs and Myla mural in Melbourne.
• Mr. Brainwash has lost another lawsuit by a photographer upset with MBW’s appropriation. Basically, it boils down to MBW’s work being too similar to the original photograph, with no original contributions to the work by MBW.
• Aiko’s installation at the Japan Society in NYC is beautiful. Can’t wait to see it in person.
• Sounds like Logan Hick’s show in LA was a big hit. Here are photos of the finished and installed work.
• Some crazy walls from Abik.
• This year’s OFFSET lectures in Dublin will include JR and Faile.
• NYC has some amazing graffiti on trucks.
• A quick Overunder tag.
• Os Gemeos talk about their show at the ICA Boston and their massive mural there from last summer (if you can spot me in the video, you have eagle eyes by the way).
• It appears that Phil Frost hit a massive billboard in LA, and then the billboard was stolen. But the whole thing seems like a shady PR scam for Ace Gallery. Melrose&Fairfax has the full story, but one point they don’t make is that Ace Gallery has a history of controversy, so that makes me even more doubtful that this billboard and its theft are real. Also, let’s face it, there’s a good chance that the billboard is illegal anyway since this was in LA, so who cares if the ad was stolen off of the billboard?
• Is this new David de la Mano piece a comment on the removal of Hyuro’s Atlanta mural?

Photo by Luna Park

Category: Art News, Books / Magazines, Gallery/Museum Shows, Photos, Products, Random, Site News, Videos | Tags: abik, ace gallery, aiko, bio, CRASH, Dabs Myla, david de la mano, daze, faile, faust, freedom, how, how&nosm, hyuro, ica boston, Jay "J. Son" Edlin, jr, Lady Pink, logan hicks, martha cooper, nosm, offset, os gemeos, overunder, phil frost, snoeman

Back to school on Tuesday. Actually, I’m okay with that. And of course, it means more time blogging because it means more time procrastinating. Here’s some of what we missed this week while Caroline and I were on vacation:

• New print from Ron English of his Obama/Hulk custom toy.
• If you’re a fan of Remi/Rough, you should have a look at his new book.
• Vhils has a new mural.
• And Elbowtoe put up a huge new wheatpaste based on one of his collages.
• Martha Cooper and Ian Cox discuss photographing the Paris edition of The Underbelly Project.
• Dan Witz has a show coming up at Lazarides’ Rathbone Place location.
• Zeus (British, not French) also has a show coming up in London.
• And then there’s the show with Nice One and Lucx at Chicago’s Galerie F which opened on Friday night.
• Complex.com has some advice for success as a street artist from Kid Zoom, How&Nosm, Eric Haze, and others. Kid Zoom’s tip? “Don’t be a street artist.”

Photo by Ankles

Category: Books / Magazines, Gallery/Museum Shows, Photos, Print Release, Random, Videos | Tags: ankles, dan witz, elbowtoe, lazarides, martha cooper, remi/rough, ron english, underbelly project, vhils, zeus

This video is spellbinding. Roa’s show Dominant Species ran from September 15th to November 3rd in San Fransisco’s 914 Geary Gallery and MOCAtv produced this video as one in a series of artist biopics for the Art in the Streets section. It’s cool to get some context of Roa’s work and to hear his thought process. The gallery has great photos of the show.

There’s another cool video including Martha Cooper talking about Roa’s work in South Africa for I Art Joburg and Roa himself speaking about his time there.

Category: Videos | Tags: Dominant species, martha cooper, moca, mocatv, roa

Earlier this week, I hosted a movie night at The Wren’s Nest in Atlanta for the Living Walls Conference. Living Walls asked me to put together a list of some short films to show, and I ended up with 27. A few people have asked me to post those films online to share with friends or just to see a film that they missed while they were getting some food, so after the jump you’ll find embedded versions of all 27 films that were screened at the movie night (many of which have appeared on Vandalog before). Enjoy! Read the rest of this article »

Category: Featured Posts, Festivals, Videos | Tags: Akay, blu, brad downey, catlanta, dave the chimp, diego bergia, ever, felix morelo, filthy luker, james jessop, jason eppink, jeff greenspan, jordan seiler, joshua allen harris, katsu, keith haskel, living walls, lush, martha cooper, nysat, paul insect, posterchild, public ad campaign, saber, sebastian haslauer, sweatshoppe, sweet toof, sweza

Earlier this month, Labrona and Troy Lovegates aka Other came down from Canada for a few days. Their first stop was Haverford, the small Philadelphia suburb where I go to college. At Haverford College, they painted a mural on the same building that Gaia painted last year. Then, they spent less than 24 hours in Baltimore, but took advantage of every second for painting and getting up. In Baltimore, Martha Cooper invited them to paint in SoWeBo, a part of town where she has been photographing the residents.

Check out more photos from Haverford and Baltimore after the jump… Read the rest of this article »

Category: Featured Posts, Photos | Tags: gaia, jaz, Jetsonorama, labrona, martha cooper, troy lovegates

LNY was in Baltimore recently to check out Open Walls Baltimore (exactly what Caroline and I are doing right now actually). He had quite a time while there and put up a couple of very Baltimore-specific pieces. Here’s what he has to say:

So I got a story to tell you and some pics to share, see I ended up making these drawings in Baltimore by randomly running into this group of urban horseback riders galloping down an East Baltimore neighborhood while visiting Gaia and Nanook. It was Sunday so what would be better than to go on a horse ride right? So I took some pictures and then made some work to later find out that they are part of this old Baltimore tradition of Huckstering, basically going around in a horse drawn cart selling vegetables. These guys are also called Arabs, which comes from the term “street Arab” as in an abandoned kid who roams the slums, and I was lucky enough to find a stable in South West Baltimore where horses are bred and taken care of by the community. All of which blows my mind because these guys were so happy and excited about my posters as I was about meeting them and discovering this otherwise invisible history of a city I am completely alien to. As I was putting the work up I got a lot of feedback from the neighborhood and they read the images in so many different ways that I had never even considered; we talked about resilience, beauty, vision, excellence, dead space, gold, bling and the efforts of Sowebo to rejuvenate the neighborhood from the inside. I feel totally overwhelmed by the way the work was able to engage and be fulfilled by having this conversation with the neighborhood. All of this thanks to Martha Cooper who introduced me to Sowebo and has been constantly engaging and documenting the area, these are her pictures and a lil clip I took of the spot.

Photos by Martha Cooper

Category: Festivals, Photos, Random | Tags: lny, martha cooper, open walls baltimore

Thanks to Open Walls Baltimore and also Martha Cooper, there are a lot of new murals coming up in Baltimore these days. Here are a few from Maya Hayuk, Swoon, Nick Mann aka Doodles and Interesni Kazki for Open Walls Baltimore and a wall by Never2501 and Pixel Pancho organized by Martha Cooper.

Photos by Martha Cooper and courtesy of Open Walls Baltimore

Via Street Art News

Category: Featured Posts, Festivals, Photos | Tags: 2501, doodles, Interesni Kazki, martha cooper, maya hayuk, open walls baltimore, pixelpancho, swoon

In 2010, Rizzoli published the definitive book on stickers and sticker art. That book is Stickers: Stuck-Up Piece of Crap: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art by DB Burkeman and Monica LoCascio. DB seems to be the ultimate sticker fanatic, and his book tells the history of stickers in a way that only someone completely obsessed could possibly pull off. If you don’t know anything about stickers, you can skim through and get an introduction. If you’re already interested, Stuck-Up Piece of Crap gives a behind-the-scenes look at everything from early graffiti stickers to stickers in the music world to the homes and minds of sticker collectors. Of course, DB has quite a sticker collection himself. A small chunk of DB’s collection will be on display starting tomorrow at Maxwell Colette Gallery in Chicago, alongside a few other sticker-related events (and he and Martha Cooper will be signing books at the gallery on Saturday from 1-3pm). I spoke with DB last week…

RJ: Why do you think you are drawn to stickers?

DB Burkeman: It’s changed over the years for me, but now the simple answer is they are simply tiny portable works of art. That may have a different answer for each person.

RJ: In your collecting habits, do you differentiate between “art stickers” or “graffiti stickers” and stickers intended as advertisements?

DB: Never really thought about that, but I’m less drawn to stickers that are obviously advertisements. I’ve also become more picky since overdoing on the damn things : )

RJ: How many stickers do you have in your collection?

DB: Somewhere between 4000-6000 & growing, much to my family & friends annoyance. It can take a long time to get down the street with me, I keep stopping to check out lampposts etc. Read the rest of this article »

Category: Featured Posts, Interview | Tags: db burkeman, martha cooper, maxwell colette