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A long overdue post: Living Walls 2012

Mon Iker

Last month, I was at the Living Walls Conference in Atlanta, but it’s only now that I’ve really had a chance to sit down and write about it. I thought that I was going to write this really long post, but the environment at Living Walls is difficult to capture in words, so this post isn’t nearly as long as I would have hoped.

Miso. Click to view large.

Living Walls is, as far as I can tell, the best mural conference/festival/program going on right now in North America. Living Walls doesn’t tend to just invite all the artists who are painting at other mural events around the world. They invite good artists. Sometimes those artists are guys like Roa who are everywhere, and sometimes it’s women like Miso who have only ever painted one or two murals. As a result, Living Walls sets trends among mural festivals.

Lex and Sten

For their main conference this year, Living Walls really bucked popular trends and tried to put street art on a new track by having a festival made up almost entirely of female muralists. While guys like Gaia, LNY and I were still invited to speak at the lecture and panel portion of the conference, the murals by Lex&Sten and Indigo&Andrzej Urbanski were the only two where male artists were contributing.

Martina Merlini

While the murals weren’t as amazing on the whole as they were last year and the crowd of artists wasn’t nearly as rowdy (although that might have been a plus), this year’s Living Walls did bring some great work to Atlanta and really showed that there are some underrated female street artists and muralists out there who could be on the mural circuit as much as guys like Jaz or Roa. My hope and expecting is that the top-tier of artists from the conference will get more attention brought to their work thanks to Living Walls and some will start getting invited to a lot more mural festivals. As I’ve said in the past, I do not generally get excited to give artists preferential treatment based on them belonging to some underrepresented group, but I can see why an all-female Living Walls may have been the right move for this year even if the quality of the work did drop slightly.

Jessie and Katey

This Living Walls conference had more artists than ever before who were either more on the community mural side of the spectrum or had never painted a mural before. The results of that move were mixed, but there were some artists like Jessie&Katey and Mon Iker who took the opportunity and absolutely crushed it.

Hyuro. This wall has since been painted over.

One thing I have to add isn’t so much about the art though. Whether Living Walls were inviting only artists that none of us have ever heard of before or stealing their line-up from Nuart, it would still be at least one of the best mural conferences in the world. That’s because Living Walls’ secret is in their amazing staff. Living Walls has best team of volunteers of any mural festival I’ve ever seen or could imagine. They are unbelievably dedicated to the festival and to getting more world-class street art and murals in Atlanta. Every day, the media team led by Alex Parrish was up until something like 4am putting together a video of what had gone on that day, and then they’d be back up at 7am to start filming all over again. Just last week, I was emailing with Keif Schleifer, their Logistics Director, who was spending her free time advising me on cherry-pickers. The day of the Vandalog Movie Night, volunteers showed up out of the blue to help us set up and run the show. Laura Calle and pretty much everyone else on staff who spent their own money to pay for the gas to drive myself and the artists around Atlanta. The drag queen who was a volunteer last year and this year helped arrange a drag show for the Living Walls Block Party. The artist assistants who stand in the hot sun alongside their artists all day long, offering any help they can. And of course, Monica Campana, the Executive Director of Living Walls, who is the amazing glue holding everything together without ever sleeping or slowing down. Everyone on staff or volunteering at Living Walls works at least as hard as the artists, and they were certainly working harder than me. After visiting two years in a row for just a few days each time, it honestly feels like I have family in Atlanta.

Olive47

Much more after the jump… Continue reading “A long overdue post: Living Walls 2012”

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The saga of Hyuro in Atlanta

On September 16th, Hyuro‘s mural in Atlanta was buffed by members of the Living Walls team. As I wrote last month, the mural that Hyuro painted for this year’s Living Walls Conference was the highlight of the festival, but it was considered controversial by some of the local residents. Of course, street art and murals cannot last forever, nor should they, but it’s difficult to not be at least a little sad about the swift rejection of this mural by the community. Creative Loafing Atlanta has a great slideshow going over the story of the mural from start to finish.

Both Hyuro and and (Living Walls co-founder and executive director) made statements about the mural and it’s removal.

Hyuro:

Each person can take it the way they want to, because it is for everyone …and at the end, if it gets painted over, know that the gray paint will not hide the fears of no one, but if anything It will make those fears more visible.

Monica Campana:

Paint on this wall made for a beautiful mural, people talking about it made for a beautiful conversation. A public space was created and all of a sudden this dead intersection became more human. The mural belonged to all of us, to the ones that liked it and to the ones that didn’t, it was our dialogue, it was our challenge, but now it’s gone. Now we are back to ignoring that space again, now we are back at thinking that erasing the evidence will make us think this never happened. It hurt so much to paint over the wall, to destroy something someone else put so much heart and passion into. It was a painful process, but what hurt the most was that for the first time I felt like I had to censor myself. It was a weird feeling, a confusing and ugly feeling that I never want to experience again.

Photo by Dustin Chambers via Creative Loafing Atlanta

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Tony Goldman, founder of Wynwood Walls, dead of heart failure at age 68

Tony Goldman was a developer and preservationist acclaimed for revitalizing neighborhoods in Miami and New York. Long after South Beach was considered past its prime, Goldman Properties turned the sleepy, moth-ridden strip into one of the most glamorous destinations in the United States. He has also been accredited with endeavors to salvage Center City Philadelphia and SOHO in New York. But what does the death and life of a great American businessman have anything to do with street art? Because Goldman’s interest in street art and graffiti late in his illustrative career has spawned some of the most prestigious and contentious mural projects in the world. One of Tony’s more recent rejuvenation projects is the Wynwood Walls compound: a museum of murals flanked by two upscale restaurants, cordoned off from the street and protected by security. This lush oasis or mausoleum, depending on your perspective, has been the beachhead for Wynwood’s transformation into an arts district fueled by the feverish energy of Art Basel Miami. In an interview with the New York Times, Tony explained that he felt Wynwood had “an urban grit that was ready to be discovered and articulated.”

This quote is perfectly representative of Street Art’s slow growth into a movement that manages to simultaneously encompass the smallest illegal act to the colossal legal wall. While the story of the avant-garde getting over and becoming the establishment is an old cycle that is endlessly vilified and reenacted, Wynwood Walls, the infamous Houston Street Wall and Goldman Properties’ recent collaboration with the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program are distinctly American approaches to mural making and Street Art. Tony Goldman not only recognized the potential in neighborhoods otherwise disregarded as blighted, but realized the exciting promise that sanctioned walls had for his properties.

Via the Miami New Times

Photo by Wallyg

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Hellbent and BSA bring you GEOMETRICKS and inexpensive art for students

Feral Child

Brooklyn Street Art are going to be organizing a series of shows at Brooklyn’s new gallery, Gallery Brooklyn. Vandal or Visionary Series has kind of a cool concept, where BSA will pick a different artist to curate each show in the series. The first show in the series is GEOMETRICKS, curated by Hellbent. The artists in the show are Augustine Kofie, Chor Boogie, Drew Tyndell, Feral Child, Hellbent, Jaye Moon, Maya Hayuk, MOMO, OLEK, Overunder and See One, so between that line up and the name of the show, it’s probably pretty clear that GEOMETRICKS is about work by people in the street art community who are leaving lettering and pop art behind and including somewhat abstract shapes and patterns in their work, kind of like a street-art friendly version of graffuturism.

Augustine Kofie

In addition to a great line up of artists, the thing I’m most excited about with this show is that their will be one wall of the show devoted to inexpensive and discounted works for students only. The Young Collectors Wall will only have work by the GEOMETRICKS artists priced under $200, and you’ll have to show a valid student ID to purchase any of the pieces. I have to applaud BSA for this idea. It’s rare that a gallery will have quality artwork or art products available at prices that are reasonable for students. So students, get to the show early, because I’m betting that these works will be gone quickly. You might get a real steal and suddenly have the best-decorated room in your dorm.

Here’s a little invite from BSA:

You are cordially invited to have a blast in Red Hook Brooklyn with BSA Saturday Sept 22nd, where we’ll present amazing new gallery works from 11 of the best Street Artists doing abstract GEOMETRICKS on the street right now, musical jams from John Breiner, and a special Young Collectors Wall where a limited number of works by the artists in the show will be on sale under $200 for students with a current valid school ID. After GEOMETRICKS walk a few blocks to party with us at Brooklyn Crab and take the free shuttle bus back to the subway when it’s all over. It’s a cool September night in Red Hook that you don’t want to miss!

The show opens September 22nd from 6-9pm and runs through October 28th at Gallery Brooklyn (351 Van Brunt St, Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY).

Check out BSA for more info.

Photos courtesy of Brooklyn Street Art

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The Street Museum of Art’s guerrilla curating in NYC

The Street Museum of Art (SMoA) has announced the debut of it’s first exhibit In Plain Sight. What that means is that some street art fan or fans have put up the outdoor equivalent to gallery wall labels in order to help identify, draw attention to and explain a few selected pieces of street art. ForIn Plain Sight, the curator(s) have included work by Sweet Toof, Faile, Gaia, JR and others.

This could really easily come across as ridiculous and cheesy, but I think the SMoA have pulled off one of the best actions demonstrating both the necessity and impossibility of displaying street art in a museum setting. On some level, wall labels for street art are absurd, but on another level they are quite useful. And rather than trying to create some sort of fake and inevitably lesser copy of the street indoors (like the installations by Neckface or Todd James, Barry McGee and Stephen Powers at Art in the Streets) or organizing murals that again emulate some of the look of street art but not the energy behind it (like the murals organized for Os Gemeos recently in Boston), the SMoA have just brought the museum to the street, as if to say “Here is the real thing. It cannot be imitated in a museum environment. But it is as valuable to our culture as what you might see in MoMA.” Maybe the SMoA will help people to see things that they haven’t before, and then maybe they’ll start noticing street art everywhere without the help of wall labels.In Plain Sight elevates street art both to make a strong statement about the art and benefit viewers. It’s like a mini version of the street art tours that Stephanie and I have offered in London, but free and self-guided. Great stuff.

The one disappointing thing I have found about In Plain Sight is that it takes place in Williamsburg. Of course there is a lot of great street art there, but I think a lot higher proportion of Williamsburg residents are probably aware of street art already. But hey, even a jaded hipster might be willing to learn something new about Sweet Toof if the text is right in front of her.

I’m curious to see what the SMoA does next.

Also, I’d like to compare what the SMoA is doing to what some street artists in Australia did last weekend.

The artist CDH organized a “Trojan petition” where a group of street artists petitioned the city of Melbourne and the government of Victoria because of unfair graffiti laws in Victoria. The petition was delivered as part of an installation to which 20 street artists had contributed artwork which surrounded the text of the petition. Essentially, these artists say that the laws regarding being found with spraypaint or markers on your person are unfair as they reverse the burden of proof to a presumption of guilt instead of innocence (this seems true), and that property owners who do not take care of their property effectively give permission for artists to paint it (an interesting argument). But they delivered this petition in a really weird way by dropping it outside of a major museum and, for some reason I don’t quite understand, seem to pit museums against street artists even though museums in Australia have been some of the strongest allies of street artists over the last few years (the petition states “Melbourne’s street art is consistently ranked among the top in the world [1-6], unlike any of Australia’s fine art institutions.”). The National Gallery of Victoria, where the petition was delivered, has actually decided to display the work until Friday. So, the gallery where the petition was delivered seems to support the street artists…

There’s more info and a more positive view of the petition over at Invurt, and I think Luke may be writing something about it as well in the coming days for Vandalog. But I just thought I’d bring up that comparison of two groups almost simultaneously trying to make a point about the legitimacy of street art as art that should be appreciated by people and supported by the state or institutions, and making that point in two very different ways. The Trojan petition seems to take a very negative approach and the SMoA takes a very positive approach. Which one do you like better? Although I can enjoy anger from time to time, I think SMoA made similar points a hell of a lot better by staying positive and improving the streets.

Photos courtesy of the Street Museum of Art

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Shepard Fairey gets off easy for falsifying documents and lying in court

On Friday, Shepard Fairey was sentenced to 300 hours of community service, two years of probation and a $25,000 after pleading guilty earlier this year to one count of criminal contempt. Fairey actually got off pretty lightly. Government lawyers believed that Fairey could have been fined up to $3.2 million and also argued that he should spend time in prison (he could have been incarcerated for a maximum of 6 months).

Here’s how we came to this point: In 2009, Fairey sued the Associated Press to show in court that his portraits of Obama were fair use of an AP photograph and avoid being sued by the AP himself for copyright infringement. Fairey and the AP disagreed over which photograph Fairey had used as his source image for the HOPE poster, but they both agreed that Fairey used an AP photo from the same event. Then Fairey realized that he was wrong and that he had indeed based his work on the photograph that the AP said he had used, so Fairey panicked and tried to cover his tracks by submitting falsified evidence and attempting to delete the actual evidence from his computer. He then went ahead for months in this case claiming something that he knew was false. Eventually, Fairey was confronted with evidence of his deceit and came clean. The lawsuit with the AP was settled, with Fairey paying the AP $1.6 million (although some of that is believed to have been covered by an insurance policy). But the federal government was still unhappy about Fairey’s lies, so he was charged with criminal contempt and plead guilty to that earlier this year.

I don’t generally believe in prison time for nonviolent offenders, but Fair Use is an issue close to my heart and damn that still seems like he got off easy, but not for the reason the federal prosecutors think he did. In a statement on Friday, Fairey said, “The damage to my own reputation is dwarfed by the regret I feel for clouding the issues of the Fair Use case. I let down artists and advocates for artist’s rights by distracting from the core Fair Use discussion with my misdeeds.” He’s exactly right: Fairey blew what could have been the biggest Fair Use case of the century. If this case had gone to trial, as Fairey seems to have originally intended it to, and he certainly has to be given some credit for not just settling from the outset, Fairey would have had one of the best legal teams in the country supporting him and hopefully striking quite a blow against overly-restrictive copyright law enforcement.

For more on the case and Fairey’s sentencing, you can check out these other articles:

Photo by cliff1066™

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Vandalog interviewed COST – Part two

Photo by Press Pause

This is Part Two of a two-part interview with Adam COST. You can read Part One here.

COST could sit next to you on a train, or brush by you on the street and you’d likely think nothing of it. I walked by him three times before I finally asked, “Are you Adam?” He is a regular guy. He just happens to have been one of New York City’s most wanted. In Part Two of our interview, COST discusses a number of things including graffiti as a form of rebellion, his relationship with REVS, and, to put it simply, Madonna.

V: How do you see the face of the graffiti writer changing?
COST: Hipsters, like they’re hip! They call them hipsters around here. My friends and I aren’t hip. We’re just like dudes. The older graffiti writers don’t look like the newer graffiti guys. Like REVS looks very working class; he’s very filthy. He’s a welder so he always looks filthy, like he climbed out of a manhole. Me, I try to keep myself clean. I like to present myself that way for aesthetic reasons, like what I do with my life, where I live and how people perceive me. Some of my friends look like nerds, and some of the newer guys we hang out with are real cool, hip-looking guys and fit right in in this area. The newer guys are all like that.

V: But weren’t you guys part of the fashion of the time in the 80’s? Wasn’t graffiti was a cool scene?
COST: I don’t know if we were so fashionable. Our attitude was more like “Fuck you and fuck the system.” We were angry, rebellious guys. There was a definite punk attitude to what we were doing. It was a “Fuck the whole system. Fuck the government. Fuck socialization.” We just revolted against the whole system. Fuck politics and all the politicians. Rudy Giuliani. Stuff like that. We were anti. The best way to describe what we did was like “We’re anti. We’re not artists, we’re anti-artists”. I consider myself an anti-artist if I’m an artist at all. That would be the best way to describe my art. It’s against the system. That’s why I want to show you the Bushwick Five Points wall I just did. At the bottom of the wall, the title, it’s says “You can’t turn rebellion into money.”
I didn’t go to the yard at 13 and say, “You know what? I’m gonna go write on these trains because I want to make money.” You know what I mean? So that’s what inspired the title of the wall. I went to the yard because I was rebelling, and my family situation was not a good one. Looking back, my family was splitting up, like my parents. The whole family was a mess and I was at that age where you get rebellious and I went into graffiti. Guys nowadays are doing graffiti and street art to make money. I don’t do art to make money.

Cost and Set KRT for Bushwick’s Five Points. Photo by Luna Park.

V: Speaking of the fucking of systems, fucking of establishments, and fucking the man….. Did you fuck Madonna?
COST: [Pause] I’m a little younger than Madonna, but I’ll tell ya, she used to hang out at a club called Danceteria. I knew her boyfriend, RP3, who’s dead now. If you look at her old videos, she used to wear a belt buckle tag around her waist that said “BOY TOY.” Boy Toy was that guy RP3. He used to write Boy Toy and RP3, and that was her boyfriend at that time. He ODed and he’s been dead for a long time, but Boy Toy was her tag that he gave her and that’s why she used to wear that in those early videos. I’m not exactly sure when he died. It’s been awhile since the posters, but I think yeah, he probably did see the posters. That poster was like the pop-poster of our campaign. It’s not like I planned it out that way though.

V: Okay, but you have avoided my question.
COST: Have I really? I tried to be as-

V: It’s a yes or no.
COST: Oh, Madonna? You don’t kiss and tell, right? Let’s just leave it at that.

V: Did Madonna ever say anything about it?
COST: I’m sure she knows it exists because she has a publicist. So everything like that is getting plopped on their table and I don’t think she has a problem with it because she was into graffiti and stuff back then.

V: Why did you do it?
COST: I don’t know if there was an exact reason. At the time it was just one of our obscure posters. We were producing a lot of just random stuff, and that one seemed hit the nail on the head for your ham-and-eggers, your average Joe’s. Everyone loved that one. We did many versions of posters and people always say that poster is probably the most recognized of the batches and batches we put out. That was the most accepted. And again, she’s an icon. Madonna is an international icon. She’s like a Michael Jackson or something. So I was using an icon as a prop, I guess.

V: That poster was extremely popular. Supreme turned it into a shirt in 2010.
COST: Yeah, certain posters like “COST Fucked Madonna” were very accepted by society. There’s a lot of knock-offs. There are stickers and posters out there like “ELVIS FUCKED MARILYN.”  I didn’t see that coming. I didn’t think it was going to bring such an acceptance with the public, but the public really absorbed that poster.

V: After years of turning down other offers, why did you choose to collaborate with Supreme?
COST: They put Johnny Rotten from The Sex Pistols on the cover of the magazine and that kind of appealed to me, as opposed to Lady Gaga on the cover. It was a little more my speed. More raw, less pop. They understood the direction that I wanted to go and what I wanted my work to represent, in a sense. They were good to catering to me as an artist, in the sense that they just let me be who I wanted to be within their repertoire and it worked, I guess. It was okay.

V: Now that you’re starting to go heavy with wheatpasting again, what’s different this time around?
COST: I’m definitely using new fonts and new slogans. At this point it’s like I’m kind of in phase 1 of probably a 15 or 20 phase period, and phase 1 is really just getting my name back out on the streets and letting people know that I’m here, I’m there, I’m everywhere. It’s just phase 1 of a slow steady process of probably a 20 phase period I call “moving forward towards death.” Continue reading “Vandalog interviewed COST – Part two”

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Contest: Win a copy of VNA 19

We’ve got 5 issues of Very Nearly Almost magazine’s latest issue to send off to Vandalog readers. I’ve been a fan of VNA since around the time I started Vandalog, and it’s a magazine that I always recommend as an alternative to Hi-Fructose and Juxtapoz.

For issue 19, they’ve got a great cover article on Anthony Lister, as well as interviews with Twoone, Remed and others. As it tends to be with VNA, my personal favorite part of this issue is not what you might expect (the interviews) but their photos of graffiti and street art in Newcastle. Of course the interviews are great too, particularly Lister’s.

We’ve got 5 copies of VNA issue 19 up for grabs, just answer this question in the comments: What country is Anthony Lister from? Out of those who answer correctly, 5 will be selected at random and sent a copy of the magazine. Answer by noon East Coast time on Saturday, September 8th. We’ll notify the winners via email shortly after that.

Photos courtesy of Very Nearly Almost

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They’re always gonna go wild

Sticker by Shepard Fairey. Photo by RJ Rushmore

This is an essay I wrote a couple of years ago for a book that was to be a collection of essays by a number of different people in the street art world, but the final product has not yet materialized, so I’m posting the piece here instead.

I don’t want to see the plan succeed/There won’t be room for people like me/My life is their disease/It feels good/And I’m gonna go wild/Spray paint the walls – Black Flag

Good subcultures get co-opted by the mainstream. That’s what happens. Punks and preps, hippies and hipsters, gangsters and geeks have all had parts of their cultures brought into the mainstream, and that attention usually harms the actual subculture.

Sometimes it can feel like street art is getting taken over the mainstream more and more every day. Plenty of people have told me that Vandalog contributes to that co-opting of the culture. The most obvious examples naturally also tend to be the most popular names in street art: Banksy and Shepard Fairey. These guys used to be the torchbearers of street art, but their newfound fame as household names has come at a price: they certainly aren’t the revolutionary artists they once were, and I would go so far as to say that in their outdoor work they are as much guerrilla marketers as they are artists. There’s plenty to say on that topic alone, but I won’t get into too much detail about the negative aspects of street art. I still have faith in the general movement of street art: Even as some artists “sell out,” it’s inevitable that street art as a whole will remain authentic, powerful and revolutionary for a long time to come.

Anyone who has read Norman Mailer’s 1973 essay The Faith of Graffiti has probably had a good laugh at Mailer’s suggestion that graffiti was already dying out. Street Art, a book by Allan Schwartzman and published in 1985, makes a similar suggestion about street art. Looking through Street Art, you’ll see the work of early street artists like Jenny Holzer, John Fekner and Richard Hambleton as well as many other names that have mostly faded from the history of street art. Most of those artists no longer make street art. Of course, street art didn’t die out, and Schwartzman was far from the last person to write a book about it, but something special is definitely captured in Street Art: The first generation of modern street art.

While most of that first generation has now moved on from street art into other mediums, they inspired future artists to start working outdoors. In the early to mid-90’s, artists like Phil Frost and Reminisce were members of a new generation doing work on the street. Frost doesn’t work outdoors anymore, and Reminisce only very rarely does. They and many (but of course not all) of their contemporaries have more or less moved on from their roots. Then in the 2000’s, new artists like Swoon and Leon Reid IV became involved in the movement with as much passion as previous generations. While both Swoon and Leon Reid IV are both still actively making work outdoors, they have somewhat moved away from street art’s anti-establishment roots: a good portion of their outdoor work is being done with permission and in cooperation with galleries, museums or arts organizations. Over the last few years, the internet has allowed street art to grow even further, and talented new artists from around the world are coming to light all the time. Artists like Roa and Escif were already well known among street art fans before they first painted outside of their home countries because people had seen their artwork online. That’s an oversimplified history, but hopefully it shows in a very general way that street art is always evolving.

Since the 1970’s, the media has lost and gained interest in street art numerous times. Naysayers often suggest that the interest of media and the injection of money can only serve to destroy street art culture, but each time this cycle repeats, street art is reborn and brought back to its core values by a new generation of revolutionary artists. Even as the most world-famous street artists stop making street art, there’s always a talented and idealistic artist just starting out with a can of spray paint or a bucket of wheatpaste, working their way up from the bottom.

Artists and even people who don’t consider themselves artists are interested in the opportunities that only street art can provide. Once the idea that street art exists is in somebody’s head, it can’t be taken away. Now that the idea of street art has become part of the collective mainstream public consciousness, it can’t be taken away from there either. Even as its general popularity may fluctuate, the idea of street art is always going to be resonating with somebody around the world, and that’s all it takes. People want to express themselves and communicate with the public, and there are few better ways to reach the public than street art.

Street art doesn’t discriminate. A trained artist in a studio with dozens of brilliant assistants can make street art, but so can a teenager with nothing more than a permanent marker and an idea. Practically any wall is an equally valid place for a piece of work for drunken men to piss on or for kids to be inspired by.

Tags by The Jellyfish. Photo by bitchcakesny.

The combination of almost no barrier to entry and the fantastic power wielded by street artists, a combination unrivaled by any other art form, is why the underground nature of street art will always triumph over any push to make the genre truly mainstream. It just takes one person with a crazy idea to shift the culture in a new direction, and there are thousands of those people out there trying out crazy ideas every day. You can’t make a culture mainstream if the thing is constantly changing, you can only make out-of-date segments of the culture mainstream.

And does it really matter if one segment of street art becomes mainstream? The fact that you can buy an OBEY shirt in a department store doesn’t diminish the power that street art has in giving a voice to any person who has something to say, and it doesn’t make it any harder to pick up a can of spray paint for the first time. Street art is a great way to buck the system, especially if that system is the street art establishment itself.

For the last three decades in particular, working outdoors without permission has fascinated artists, and they keep finding ways to do it differently. During that time, stars have been born and many have faded away. Media and art-world interest has waxed and waned. In the end though, the mainstream popularity of street art doesn’t make much of a difference. Artists will always have the drive make street art and the public will always notice street art. That’s not going away. Even if it’s just one artist reaching one other person, street art can change the world. Of course, it’s never going to be just one artist. From here on out, it won’t be less than an ever-evolving army.

Photos by RJ Rushmore and bitchcakesny

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See you at Nuart Festival 2012?

Skewville at Nuart 2009

This year’s Nuart Festival takes place later this month in Stavanger, Norway, and I’ll be there along with a really amazing group of artists and speakers. This year’s artist lineup is Aakash Nihalani, Dolk, Eine, Ron English, Saber, How and Nosm, mobstr, Niels “Shoe” Meulman, Jordan Seiler, The Wa and Sickboy. I’m excited to see the “mostly legal” work that those artists get up to.

I’ll be participating in three events at Nuart Plus, a 3-day international summit on street art taking place during the festival. Evan Pricco, Tristan Manco, Carlo McCormick and others will be speaking there too. Here’s what I’m involved in: On the 27th, Jordan Seiler and I will be giving a tour of some of the art (and ads) in Stavanger; On the 28th, Carlo McCormick and I will be at Martinique, a cafe and pub, to debate about whether or not one can truly appreciate street art on the internet; On the 29th, Evan Pricco, Tristan Manco and I will be on a panel about street art and the internet moderated by Eirik Sjåholm Knudsen. Sorry if I’m focusing a bit too much on my own stuff, but I’m really excited to be going to Nuart, especially since I’ll be speaking alongside so many of my friends and idols.

There will of course also be an indoor art component to the festival.

Nuart’s street work begins September 20th, the indoor show opens on the 29th at Tuo Scene and the panels and talks will take place on the 27th-29th.

Photo by RJ Rushmore