Vinchen is a really underrated street artist from Columbus, Ohio who I haven’t given nearly enough attention to. Vinchen is one of the few politically-minded stencil artists besides Banksy who can consistently interest me. Here are a few Vinchen pieces that I really like, although they aren’t all particularly recent:
Continue reading “A long-overdue Vinchen update”
Doyle New York has organized the first art auction in NYC based around the work of street artists and graffiti writers. The auction will take place on Tuesday, October 16th. Some of the highlights of the auction include work by Richard Hambleton and LAII, Margaret Kilgallen, Date Farmers, Shepard Fairey, Todd James, and Bast. And I’m curious to see how Adam Neate will do seeing as he has only shown in the UK and Asia. Should be an interesting evening.
Photo courtesy of Doyle New York
In part 3 of my series of posts about this year’s Nuart Festival (here are parts one and two), I want to highlight some of the less traditional outdoor work at the festival. While mural festivals like Nuart are known for, well, murals, three artists went a different direction for their outdoor contributions to Nuart: The Wa, Jordan Seiler and Aakash Nihalani.
Aakash Nihalani’s work was, as usual for him, tape-based. While it was 2D like a mural and could have theoretically been painted in the same spot with similar results, the tape reinforces the idea that street art is ephemeral. You couldn’t preserve one of his pieces outdoors even if you tried.
The Wa installed a series of small sculptures resembling pools of oil in one of the main squares of downtown Stavanger, with the oil leading a path from the sea (where there is a lot of oil) to the nearest ATM. Again, a temporary intervention, but also a sculptural one. Nuart has had sculptures before, but it’s still not all that common at other, similar, festivals.
Perhaps the most shocking of all were Jordan Seiler’s ad takeovers. He replaced around two dozen public advertisements (two large billboards and the rest bus-stop ads) with his own art. Like Aakash, that’s pretty much Jordan doing what he usually does, but it’s something that not many other mural programs seem likely to embrace, particularly programs like Nuart that get government funding. Nuart’s ballsiness is certainly to be commended. That said, it’s important to note that Jordan did something similar but on a much smaller scale in the early days of Living Walls. Unfortunately, only the large billboards lasted more than about 12 hours. Those bus-stop ad guys are quick.
More photos of work by Jordan Seiler, The Wa and Aakash Nihalani after the jump… Continue reading “Nuart part 3: The odd outdoor bits”
Rome’s 999 Contemporary gallery suggested that I have a look at the work of Borondo, and I’m glad I did. Definitely reminds me of Guy Denning, and a few others, but on the street. Here are a few of his walls from the last year.
Continue reading “Someone new: Borondo”
Here’s part two of our FAME Festival mural coverage, thanks to Henrik Haven and his photos. Part one can be found here. In a two-part series, we’ve selected some of our favorite pieces from FAME 2012. For part two, we’ve got walls by Conor Harrington, Lucy McLauchlan, Cyop & Kaf, MOMO, Boris Hoppek and Bastardilla.
Continue reading “Murals from FAME Festival 2012, part two”
In my second post about Nuart 2012 (part one here) I’ve finally got some finished pieces to show. While Nuart is known for the outdoor work that they organized, the artists probably spend just as much time, some of them more, on the indoor installation component of the festival. This year, work was installed in a series of old beer halls at Tou Scene, a venue in Stavanger that Nuart has used a few times. These aren’t all the installations that Nuart had this year, but here we have the finished installations by Eine, Jordan Seiler, Saber, Ron English, Aakash Nihalani, How and Nosm, and Sickboy. Thanks to Ian Cox for all of the great photos coming out of Nuart.
Continue reading “Nuart 2012 part two: Indoors”
This year’s edition of the Moniker Art Fair opens in Shoreditch this Thursday. This year, Moniker will be more focused than ever before on installations rather than traditional art fair gallery booths. Actually, the show will be entirely installations. Niels ‘Shoe’ Meulman, Ludo, Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada, C215, Remi/Rough, Ben Slow and others will be there.
Moniker opens on Thursday from 7-9pm, and will be open Friday and Saturday 11-7pm and Sunday 11-5pm.
More info on the Facebook event page.
Photo courtesy of Moniker Projects
Last week, I was in Stavanger, Norway for this year’s Nuart Festival. It was a blast, but I’ve been really slow about posting about it. I was at Nuart as part of the Nuart Plus conference, the lecture and panel discussion side of Nuart. Some of the other speakers included Tristan Manco, Carlo McCormick, Ron English and Evan Pricco. Hopefully soon, the video from Nuart Plus will be online, but in the mean time, I’m going to have to focus on the main part of the festival: The art.
Nuart is one of my favorite mural festivals, along with Living Walls and FAME, because they have consistently and for many years brought together the street art community to improve a city otherwise would not have all that much street art or graffiti (there are a handful of local writers and and street artists who should not be discredited, but Nuart’s work certainly dominates the city). The argument can be made that the annual street art invasion might be insensitive to local residents, but I’m a big fan of turning cities into temporary playgrounds when art gets left behind.
In this first of probably 3-4 posts about this year’s Nuart, there are just images of the set up and the work in progress. While Nuart leaves Stavanger with great new murals and installations every year, one of the great things about Nuart (and many mural festivals) is what happens between the artists and the festival staff behind the scenes. Every evening, there were group dinners at Food Story, and usually some light drinking followed. In this way, Nuart ends up facilitating conversations and friendships that go beyond the festival and may carry over into future work.
There are two components to the art production side of Nuart: Indoor installations and outdoor installations (mostly, but not entirely, murals). This year’s Nuart artists were: The Wa, Aakash Nihilani, Eine, How and Nosm, Ron English, Mobstr, Niels “Shoe” Meulman, Saber, Dolk, Jordan Seiler, and Sickboy. A very solid line up with a few heavy hitters and a few talented but underrated guys.
The indoor installations were in the old beer halls of Tou Scene, a venue that Nuart has used a few times before. Tou Scene is a great space for Nuart’s installations, because the beer halls are basically these big beautiful archways like the arches that the London galleries Black Rat Projects and Arch 402 are in. The outdoor installations take place all across the city.
There was some amazing work made this year, with highlights being a murals by Ron English and Shoe, and the indoor installation by How and Nosm. Expect many more photos over the next week or two.
Continue reading “Nuart Festival 2012 – The setup”
Stencil pioneer Logan Hicks has a solo show opening this week at Opera Gallery‘s Paris location. The show opens on October 11th at 6:30pm, and runs through November 3rd.
As I mentioned back in July when Logan had a show in London, he’s been someone I admire as both an artist and a friend for many years, but with this show the Vandalog team got two more reasons to be especially excited: 1. One of the new pieces for this show is a portrait of Vandalog’s Caroline Caldwell. 2. That piece, along with portraits of Keith Schweitzer, Jordan Seiler and others is on anodized aluminum, which is my favorite kind of stencil-work from Logan. These pieces are basically solid pieces of aluminum that have been etched into chemically, if I half-remember the process correctly. Coincidentally, the first time one of Logan’s anodized aluminum pieces was shown was at Up Close and Personal, a show that Keith Schweitzer, Mike Glatzer and I curated.
Logan’s work really does need to be seen in person, so I highly recommend checking out this show in the flesh as soon as it’s open.
Photos courtesy of Logan Hicks and Opera Gallery
The Frenchman Roti is the latest artist to paint for the Living Walls Concepts mural series. Here are a few photos of his wall.
Photos by Dustin Chambers
