Year: 2012

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Star Wars yarn bomb

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The last time I wrote about yarn bombing, I criticized the lack of differentiation in the craft and was skeptical of it being classified as “street art”. Even with that bias, I find this R2D2 yarn bomb absolutely brilliant. The piece was up in Bellingham, Washington and created by Sarah Rudder for International Yarn Bombing Day. As cool as it is, the piece was only left up for the day before the artist took it back home to reuse it and improve it for next year (expect speakers and legs). That’s fair, I would probably want to hold on to something that looked that awesome too. “Even if I had left it out to weather the elements, R2D2 is made out of an acrylic yarn that wouldn’t bleed, fade, or stretch for quite some time,” the artist says on her blog. It’s great that she put that in that consideration, but the piece wasn’t left up so it doesn’t make too much of a difference. As incredible as it looks, this supports the criticism that yarn bombing is a “do it for the photo” method of street art.

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Photos by Sarah Rudder

Via Street Art Utopia

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Radio

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Radio and Sixe

Peruvian artist Radio aka Valentino Sibadon is an abstract muralist. His vibrant work ranges from complex to minimalistic. Here are a few of my favorite pieces by him. To see more, check out his Flickr.

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Radio and Sixe
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Sixe and Radio

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Photos by R A D I O

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Weird, kinda funny, maybe awesome: the art of Don’t Fret.

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This year, Chicago-based street artist Don’t Fret made it down to Miami for Art Basel and the surrounding street art and graffiti free-for-all. Here are a few of his pieces from down there. Don’t Fret is funny, but not the kind of witty, buzz icon, media satire type of humor that I’m accustomed to seeing in street art. It’s nice to see an artist focusing more on a simple concept than on displaying talent, but also not really focusing on concept that much either. I don’t know how much of an artistic background Don’t Fret had before he started doing street art, but he’s been at this for a few years and he definitely turns heads.

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Photos by Don’t Fret

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Book review: Billboard Bandits

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Adam Clark’s Billboard Bandits: Outlaw Artists in the Sky, published this year, is 208 pages of photos, entry level information on graffiti culture (i.e. What are throw-ups, pieces, and billboard backs?), profiles and personal anecdotes in the vernacular of true writers (which includes explicit language).

The book is divided into two sections by graffiti and street art, with “Billboard bombing” representing the graffiti camp of billboard interference, which seems to be a bit looser in definition given that many of the pieces were not on the ads directly, but above, below, on the walls behind, or on the backs of billboards. The street art portion, entitled “Billboard Liberation”, is a lot more limited in coverage but profiles some street art favorites like Ron English and Billboard Liberation Front. Clark’s distinction between the two subcultures is a necessary one for this topic since the motivation behind hitting billboards is entirely different: graffiti artists use billboards as a highly-visible platforms to proliferate their names, whereas street artists tend to utilize the space to express ideas. The common thread between both is the drive to deemphasize, interfere with, or eliminate the ubiquitous power of adverts.

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The content is fit for a niche audience of LA graffiti heads, with featured West Coast writers such as AM7 Crew, Augor MSK, Bleek CBS Mayhem, Fuct AL LGF, Jeloe US BKF CF, Naut One, Pharoe LCF SOB, Pysa MSK LTS, and Silencer. For those people who would truly appreciate seeing these artists, I think the content in this book would be better published in the form of a regularly-updated blog. Works on a billboard are typically short lived, so the book can show recent and past works by artists but can’t update readers on how long the pieces lasted which is one of the interesting part of ad disruptions.

You can get a copy of Billboard Bandits here.

Photos courtesy of Art Crimes: Graffiti News and Events

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Merry Christmas and happy new year from Luzinterruptus

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I am loving this piece by Luzinterruptus, a little Christmas gift for the citizens of Madrid. Here’s what they have to say about their latest intervention…

This Christmas, we asked Santa Claus to fix some things that are wrong with our city for us, a seemingly endless list that keeps on growing as the crisis becomes more serious and politicians reveal their worst intentions to us.

Santa told us that he couldn’t perform miracles, that is the jurisdiction of another union, but that he would work on our behalf so that one of our petitions would be granted.

Therefore, after Christmas day, the surveillance cameras in the center of Madrid were covered with illuminated hats that prevented them from recording what was happening before them.

Madrid is a city, in which, despite the existing rules, in practice, there is no real control over the monitoring devices installed on its streets and the citizens don’t have the possibility of accessing the record of what these cameras record 24 hours a day in the places where they are situated.

In 2007 it was suggested that there were more than 20.000 cameras looking out for our safety, but today, there are no devices capable of controlling those who control us, and while politicians don’t care about that they record and use images of common citizens, it seems that they have many drawbacks in that “they record and disseminate images of security agents in the exercise of their functions… if you put their person or the operation on which they are working at risk…”.

The action Merry Christmas to those who watch us took place on the night of December 26th and to carry it out, we used 20 cameras installed in the center of Madrid, mainly those that monitor the streets, other located on public buildings and some on private property.

We hope that our anonymous friends behind the cameras, appreciated the warm flashes of Christmas light which we presented them with on their surveillance monitors.

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Photos by Luzinterruptus

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SMoA brings guerilla curating to the streets of London

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The Street Museum of Art has launched its second venture in “guerilla curating” in London’s artsy district of Shoreditch. Like their first exhibition, it’s basically a self-guided street art tour with museum-like wall labels. The exhibition’s title, “Beyond Banksy: Not another gift shop“, is likely a tongue and cheek reference to the commercial attention that street art has received in London these past few years, with Banksy at the forefront of the movement. In all fairness, Banksy has become enough of a household name that he and Exit Through the Gift Shop are frequently my reference points when speaking about street art to people outside this niche community. For that, I am thankful that I get to SMoA advises that the name is not meant to undermine the work of the beloved stencil artist, rather it is to encourage those who have Banksy as their token understanding of street art to the diversity of the other talented artists on the streets. This exhibition highlights works by artists such as C215, Christiaan Nagel, Eine, Mobstr, Pablo Delgado, Phlegm, Roa, Run, Skewville, Space Invader, Stik and Swoon.

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The map of the exhibited works are available here and the hours are… well, unlimited.

Photo by Street Museum of Art

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Weekend link-o-rama

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Liqen. Click to view large.

Well, it’s a slow week, but not completely silent. Here’s a bit of what we missed:

Photo by Liqen

 

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2501 and James Kalinda

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Two frequent collaborators, 2501 and James Kalinda, produced these pieces this week in an abandoned factory in Parma, Italy (the work above was just 2501 and the figure below was a collaboration between the two). It’s a little morbid, but it works and 2501’s bird head is a great effect.

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2501 and James Kalinda

Photos by 2501