JR is in LA putting up some murals. The LA Weekly has plenty of photos. Also, his new book, The Wrinkles of the City – Shanghai, that I mentioned a few days ago is available now on Drago’s website. Fair warning: The book’s not cheap.
Photo by Shannon Cottrell of the LA WEEKLY
Back in November, Steve Powers spoke at a TEDx conference in Philadelphia about his Love Letters and what he’s been up to recently in Brazil. Very cool.
Via Nuart
While Graffiti Brasil (by Tristan Manco, Lost Art and Caleb Neelon) is probably the benchmark against which other books about graffiti and street art in that country are measured, that book has been out for a while and it’s about time for an update on the scene. Nuevo Mundo: Latin American Street Art by Maximiliano Ruiz (author of Graffiti Argentina) looks like it may be that update, as well as an expansion on the concept since it covers all of Latin America. The book comes out in April or May of this year depending on where you live, but there’s already some preview pages on Gestalten’s website.
Photo courtesy of Gestalten
A lot of people were first introduced to street art through Banksy and his rats. Then, you learn that Blek le Rat was painting stencils of rats back in the 1980’s. What people don’t often realize that one of street art’s early pioneers beat both of those artists to stenciled black rats. The Rat Patrol project by Christy Rupp, from 1979, consisted of wheatpasting images of rats all around New York City. Street Art, a book from 1985, is the invaluable resource that first introduced me to Rupp’s artwork, but since then, I don’t think she has been acknowledged for her work as one of the first street artists, and possibly the first street artist to use rats extensively, a character that has become iconic within the movement.
Here’s how Rupp describes the project:
Life size image of a rat placed amongst accumulated garbage. I started pasting these up during the 3 week garbage strike in May of 1979. Never intending to defend rats, I wanted to point out how we had created a habitat for them, and they would naturally occupy it. The city has it’s own ecosystem with a delicate balance. Rats were very visible in those days where I lived in the Wall St. area. Especially around dusk when the human traffic would abruptly taper off leaving all the days harvest for the first rats to discover. During this time I studied rat behavior and found them to be similar to people in many ways, not least of which was the ability to work together as a community, making them possibly better suited to living in NYC at times. Also it has been said that rats possess a culture- if you define culture as the ability to pass information through generations without direct experience- such as a fear of predators and pesticides. Humans are the only other species that can do that.
Also, there were even Rubble Rats, which took the form of sculptures:
Rupp’s artwork is a piece of street art history that should be longer be ignored. Certainly something that should be kept in mind with LA MOCA‘s upcoming street art show.
On her website, you can purchase a print of the 2nd photo in this post.
Also, I was looking around the rest of Rupp’s website and there are a number of other cool artworks worth checking out.
Photos by Christy Rupp
Attempting to walk that tightrope which keeps corporate sponsorship of art cool and not simply corny, Cirque de Soleil has recently gotten interested in street art. Their Safewalls project begins this week in London with a launch even at High Roller Society. At each stop on the Safewalls tour, artists from that city will be designing alternative posters for Cique de Soleil shows. In London, Jon Burgerman, Glenn Anderson and Sweet Toof (see above) have designed the posters for a show called Totem. I love what Sweet Toof has done for this project.
The posters and prints will be for sale online today and there will also be a launch even on the 17th at High Roller Society. The posters will be limited to 300 copies and screenprints of the same designs will be limited to an edition of 50. I’ve got to say that I love the idea of posters. As far as I can tell, posters are basically the same printing technique at giclée prints, but they are on a material that is better suited to the ink instead of some archival heavy paper that makes so many giclée prints look terrible. Plus, I’m guessing the posters will be more affordable that a similar giclée print would be.
A series of videos have been made interviewing the artists involved in the event. The first one is below, and here are links to the next two:
SAFEWALLS | LONDON 2011 (1/3) from SAFEWALLS on Vimeo.
Photo courtesy of Safewalls
Some of my favorite London photographers will be showing some photos of street art and graffiti at the London ICA next week for the show London Walls. Definitely worth checking out if you like photos of street art and graffiti.
This project by Octopus and Pauer is great. A. I love the song that they’ve used in the video and B. It’s that fantastic kind of street art that just makes people smile and have a better day without asking for anything in return. Press The Button took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Here’s the video:
Press the button project from Ergosum on Vimeo.
There’s been some speculation and wild guesses when it comes to how Banksy might possibly accept his Oscar, if Exit Through The Gift Shop wins this year for best documentary feature. An article on a NYTimes blog might have the answer. Supposedly, the Academy has arranged that producer Jaimie D’Cruz will have to accept the award on Banksy’s behalf, to avoid any monkey business that Banksy might try to pull otherwise.
And yes, one reason I’m posting about this is that I can make that bad pun about monkey business.
Photo by mermaid99
