Moniker set-up: Monday

Village Underground is where it’s at this week. The Shoreditch warehouse off of Great Eastern Street is host to Moniker Art Fair. Hookedblog has a much better description of the fair than what I could throw together right now, but the fair opens Thursday night and it’s going to be a highlight of the street art calendar in London this year. Big names from around the world have are taking part in this fair and there’s lots of great art to see and fun events planned (including some tours led by me on Friday afternoon at 11:30 and 1:30). I’m on my way out the door to go see how the set up is going today, but here are some photos that I took yesterday as things were getting set up:

A certain British signpainter's installation...

Steve Powers aka ESPO is in town to paint a Love Letter
And he's been tagging up the building a bit...

Expect more photos tonight or tomorrow and hope to see people there on Thursday…

Weekend link love

Billboard by Mobstr

This link post is definitely going to be a weekly thing. Hopefully it will allow me to link to things that I just haven’t had the time to cover here on the blog, my Twitter or Vandalog’s Facebook page. So here’s what you may have missed in street art this week:

  • My Love For You Is A Stampede of Horses and Arrested Motion have two sets of amazing photos from Fecal Face‘s 10 year anniversary show at The Luggage Store in SF. This show has a pretty sick line up including Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Jim Houser, Swoon and Maya Hayuk.
  • Nychos’ solo show at Pure Evil Gallery (in cooperation with End of The Line) opened on Thursday. Go here for the press release sort of info or go here for photos from the opening.
  • That I May See, Matt Small’s latest solo show, opened last week at Black Rat Projects and it looks absolutely stunning. My family and I can’t thank Matt enough for his support of the Robert Shitima School in Zambia, which is where Matt and Black Rat Press have decided to donate 40% of the proceeds from this show.
  • Eelus, Logan Hicks, Eine, Lucy McLachlan and others are headed to Gambia next month for the Wide Open Walls project.
  • OFFSET has once again put together an interesting conference of creatives who will be speaking next month (October 1st-3rd) in Dublin. OFFSET 2010 will have presentations from Gary Baseman, Steve Powers, Marc and Sara Schiller of Wooster Collective and many more. Early bird tickets are available online for 150 euros (with discounts for students thankfully).
  • A very touching work of street art in Brooklyn.
  • Just Seeds has put together Resourced, a set for political posters that you can download and print at home. There are designs by Gaia, Armsrock, Chris Stain, Josh MacPhee and many more artists.
  • When I first heard about JR’s new Unframed project, I didn’t really care for it. Basically, JR is wheatpasting other photographers (often famous) photographs around in cities. To me, this sort came out of left field. I don’t mind when Blek le Rat does similar things, but with JR, I always liked the stories behind the photos as much as the images themselves. I thought that with Unframed, that aspect of the art would go away. Luckily, Angelo at FAME Festival reassured me in an email and said once I learned more about the project, these would be just as interesting as the rest of JR’s art. Because I trust Angelo, I waited and didn’t write anything about Unframed or JR’s piece at FAME Festival. Earlier this week, Hi-Fructose’s blog posted a better explanation of the project as well as some photos of Unframed taking place in Switzerland. As usual, Angelo was right and after reading that post on Hi-Fructose, I’ve been convinced about Unframed.

Photo by Mobstr

Moniker International Art Fair is going to kick Frieze’s ass

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating just a little bit, but I’ve been following Moniker’s progress for a while now and it looks like they are going to put on quite a show.

The Moniker International Art Fair is, I suppose, the first UK art fair for street/low-brow/urban art (and probably the first major fair of its kind in the world, though that could be debated). The fair is going to take place in London during Frieze week this October, so it will be a competitor/satellite fair in the same vein as SCOPE or (in previous years) Zoo. In fact, Moniker will be taking place at Village Underground, just blocks from last year’s Zoo Fair and the location of the show I put together last November.

The galleries involved in Moniker are practically a best-of of international “urban art galleries:” Patricia Armocida (Ericailcane, Jim Houser, Os Gêmeos…), New Image Art (Date Farmers, Shepard Fairey, Judith Supine…), Circle Culture (Pho, Dtango, Stefan Strumbel…), Carmichael Gallery (Dan Witz, Aakash Nihalani, Mark Jenkins…), Campbarbossa (Herakut, Case, Faith47…) and Black Rat Projects (Swoon, Matt Small, D*Face…). In addition to gallery booths, Moniker will also feature artist project spaces from Herakut and Steve Powers aka ESPO. Another little side note, Babelgum will be hosting a pop-up cinema at the fair, so expect to see a few videos from RJ’s Street Art London.

I’m sure that I’ll be writing a lot more about Moniker in the coming months, but put it on your calendars now: Moniker runs October 14th-17th.

Via VNA

New Steve Powers print at POW


This new Steve Powers print at Pictures on Walls is just awesome. It looks great (much better than his last print there), and it’s an edition of 300, so the price has been kept at a relatively affordable £99. Still available as of this post going live at Picturesonwalls.com.

Want a Steve Powers/ESPO tattoo?

Steve Powers says:

Hello,

Celebrating the release of “A Love Letter For You Brick Valentines On The Philly Skyline” book by Free News Projects, we’re doing a series of events in Philadelphia. The one I’ll tell you about here is I am taking over the Northern Liberties Tattoo shop for a week (more or less depending on demand), and the only artwork that will be on offer will be all Steve Powers, all week long. All your favorite icons, punchlines, poignant reminders of the futility of life, hilarious illustrations of our inadequacies, True depictions of true love from the Love Letter project, and of course, PIGEONS. Its all here, it’s cheap, its permanent. No, I’m not tattooing, no skills. I will, however, sign your arm and let one of the skilled pros on staff at Todd’s shop re-ink it, fair enough? Sometime during the week, we’ll be having a book signing at Exit Philadelphia Skateshop next door, watch the project blog www.aloveletterforyou.com for time and date. THANKS

Best Regards
Steve

Steve Powers’ A Love Letter For You book

Steve Powers aka ESPO recently put together an amazing project in Philadelphia called A Love Letter For You where he made a series of beautiful large scale murals (previously mentioned Vandalog, twice). Now you can buy the entire series of murals in book form from Gingko Press, so that’s exciting. I’m ordering my copy tonight. This totally makes up for his recent print release at Pictures on Walls (I think the image is less than awesome and only relevant to New Yorkers)

a-love-letter-for-you-front

You can buy the book at Gingkopress.com for $14.95

Correction, this book unfortunately does not seem to be for sale just yet but it should be out soon.