Category: Featured Posts

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5 artists with skull logos

Street artists love skulls almost as much as Dick Cheney enjoys shooting people in the face (God, that’s a really dated pop culture reference, isn’t it). Here are five pieces by artists who use some form of a skull as their logo:

1. Kaws

Maybe an ad disruption would be a ‘better’ piece by Kaws, I love the way somebody spray painted around this sticker. Very few stickers get that much respect.

Photo by Jake Dobkin
Photo by Jake Dobkin

2. Cyclops

You can’t mention London street art or graffiti right now without a nod to Burning Candy, and Cyclop’s skulls are in many of their best collaborative pieces.

Photo by bixentro
Photo by bixentro

3. Booker

Booker/Reader/Readmorebooks/Boans… This writer gets up under too many names to keep track of, but one of his many trademarks are these skulls:

Photo by funkandjazz
Photo by funkandjazz

4. Katsu

No discussion of skulls on the street would be complete without Katsu.

Photo by dreamsjung
Photo by dreamsjung

5. Skullphone

Don’t really know what Skullphone is trying to say with this image, but he’s said it all over the world.

Photo by Laughing Squid
Photo by Laughing Squid

So that’s five street artists and graffiti writers who use skulls as logos. Now the reason I started thinking about this post. This is a new piece by Elbowtoe that I’m really liking:

Elbowtoe

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ESPO aka Steve Powers in Philly

Steve Powers is going big in Philadelphia with a project called Love Letter. The website explains it this way:

Love Letter is a project by Stephen Powers with the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and is sponsored by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative.  Generous support provided by the Brownstein Group and Septa.

But what that means for you and me is Steve Powers is painting a bunch of huge spots legally! Here are a few examples:

Love You

Nice Dream

I hope these are around for a while, because I’ll be going to school outside of Philadelphia next year and it would be nice to have some ESPO around town to look at.

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Street art and advertising

There is often a very fine line between street art and public advertisements. They are both on the street, and often times they are both illegal. When that line gets very blurred though is when street artists start putting up advertisements as artwork or vice versa.

There are numerous examples of artists who put up wheatpastes or flyposted advertisements when they have a show about to open, but they also aren’t what I want to address today. I want to focus on a few more recent and blatant examples of street at as advertising and advertising as street art.

First, there is Kaws. He did some work for Kanye West’s new album, including this piece in Times Square:

Photo by JOE M500
Photo by JOE M500

For a guy who started as a graffiti writer and transitioned to a street artist who subverted (or at least changed) advertisements, he sure has come a long way. I’m not going to say it’s good or bad that Kaws is doing advertisements. I’d probably rather he didn’t, but I can’t blame him for wanting to make some money and get up in Times Square. People change, and I don’t think he’s shy about how he has changed. There isn’t a false front there. Kind of like Kanye himself.

Rappers don’t usually start out their careers by saying “I really want to rap and get a connection with fans and spread a message.” The stereotypical rapper justs comes right out and says “I wanna get really extremely rich.” By comparison, your average rock start has to worry about “selling out” and staying true to their originals and all that. Inside, that rock star is probably thinking “I really want to buy a mansion some day,” but they’d never be allowed to say that out loud.

Kaws doesn’t claim to be this anti advertising subversion king at all, so more power to him I guess.

And the important thing to keep in mind here is that Kanye’s record label paid for that ad. It’s not like that billboard is a wall which would have otherwise been taken and used by street artists or graffiti writers.

More after the jump… Continue reading “Street art and advertising”

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Blu at FAME

While Blu is working an animation for FAME festival with David Ellis, he also painted this wall (or maybe it’s part of the animation, I’m not positive). Amazing amazing amazing. I just love it.

Blu

Blu

And here is the story behind the wall, just as interesting as the art itself (via the FAME Festival blog)

If you’re new to FAME festival, you probably dont know that Grottaglie is 10 minutes far from Taranto. if you’ve been in Taranto, you probably remember that the city has a massive ugly factory called ILVA (one of the biggest steel factory in europe).this factory is destroying the territory and killing a lot of workers ’cause of its big lack of security measures and high environmental pollution. the direct consequence is that Taranto has one of the highest rate of death by cancer in italy.

As a plus, the smartest politicians from Grottaglie’s town council allowed, back in ‘96, the construction of a very filthy special wastes dump right outside the city. they did not inform the people, they did not ask anybody’s opinion, they just did it. i wish i could wonder WHY they did it.

this said,
i usually like to think that every piece of art can have different meaning, depending on who is looking at it and from wich perspective he is looking from. this time, i prefer to think that we’re all looking at a mere mirror of the actual situation we’re living in.

especially for our mean local politicians, none of them excluded. i hope that they can recognise themselves in these huge faces and feel disgusted for what they’ve done to their people.

Via Unurth

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Conor Harrington mural fixed

Thank God. Looks like all is back to the way it should be with Conor Harrington’s impressive painting in New York City. Here’s what happened.

First it was like this and everybody was happy:

Photo by laverrue
Photo by laverrue

Then NPA came along recently and made it look like this:

Photo by amolho4
Photo by amolho4

Nobody (except maybe Steely Dan and NPA) was happy about that.

Luckily, the law was taken into the hands of the citizens of New York City and now Conor’s painting looks like this again:

Photo by amolho4
Photo by amolho4

Thanks to PublicAdCampaign and DickChicken for getting rid of those ads. Always good to see a painting revived when I thought it was lost to adverts.

Also, I’ve emailed NPA asking for some information about this incident, so we’ll see if I hear anything back from them.

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Brazilian things

This is a very Brazilian week on Vandalog. Every day so far, I’ve posted something about Brazilian artists. On Monday, it was Sixeart’s solo show. On Tuesday I mentioned Tikifreak’s book launch. And today I have two Brazilian street art bits to write about.

First is the awesome gallery Choque Cultural‘s write-up in Newsweek. Choque Cultural is my favorite street art gallery that I’ve never visited. I guess that’s a pretty limited field, but that’s supposed to be a compliment.

São Paulo’s Choque Cultural Gallery prides itself on exhibiting works of pop art, photography, and sculpture by Brazil’s top contemporary artists. But its current exhibit, Coletiva Choque, featuring works by the artists Zezão, Jaca, and Presto, looks like it’d be more at home on the walls of a favela. It consists of large, colorfully embellished murals, known as street art, that have been transferred to canvases. More inspirational than angry, they’re a far cry from “tag” graffiti—hastily sprayed words on outdoor property that convey social and political messages.

São Paulo is not the only place where street art has made the leap from the inner city to the gallery. Exhibition spaces in Los Angeles, London, and New York City have all commissioned street artists to apply their talents to murals rather than on building façades or concrete barriers. Although the artistic style of the outdoor artwork is preserved, some argue that moving it indoors and changing its scale compromises its integrity and mission. Indeed, during Choque Cultural’s Trimassa! street-art exhibit last fall, vandals broke in and spray-painted pichação, or tag graffiti, all over the works to protest the mainstream marketing of the art form.

Read the full article for more about the transition from painting on the street to hanging work in a gallery.

And the other Brazilian street art thing I have to mention is worth bring up for how distinctly un-Brazilian it seems. Today, Unurth introduced me to Urso Morto. Just have a look at these paintings and try to tell me they look like they are painted in Sao Paulo.

Urso Morto

Urso Morto

Urso Morto

The only really giveaway here is the pichação. Urso Morto’s bears don’t seem to display any of the classic touches of Brazilian graffiti. For one thing, the usual bright colors are replaced with white, black and red. Nonetheless, I’m definitely enjoying Urso Morto‘s work. I’ve never really understood the appeal of Berlin’s Little Lucy, a girl who kills her cat over and over again, but Urso Morto’s bears I like.

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Very different street art

Here are two very original pieces of street art (if you can even call it that, I guess street intervention is more appropriate).

First up are Sean Martindale and Eric Cheung who have been making Toronto just a bit greener in their spare time.

posterplants

Plants

Plants

Sure is a lot nicer than a wall of advertisements. More on their blog. (Via CitySPK)

And then there is this sign in New York:

Photo by Jordan Seiler
Photo by Jordan Seiler

Jordan over at Public Ad Campaign says this about the flyer:

I took one of the phone numbers and promptly called. An answering machine immediately picked up and said the following before the familiar beep telling me it had begun recording. How Bizarre.

“Free yourself from your burdens.
Record your confession or secret after the tone.
There is not limit on the number or the length of the messages,
And its completely anonymous.”

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A Vandalog street art exhibition

Could I be anymore excited right now? Probably not. Finally, it’s time to announce what I’ve been planning quietly for a while now.

Vandalog Impressive

This November, I’ll be curating an exhibition of jaw-droppingly impressive street art in London. One day, street art will be in the Tate Modern and there will probably be a museum or two devoted to it, but for now, there is London on November 18th. This exhibition will feature original work by some of the top names in street art: Faile, Banksy, KAWS, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Herakut, Barry McGee and many more. Most of the work will come from private collections, but there will be a few brand new pieces direct from the artists. Naturally I’m bias about this whole exhibition, but I think it’s going to look pretty amazing.

Last summer, the Tate Modern put street art outside their museum, and this year the Bristol Museum let Banksy take over for a few months. Those are definite steps in the right direction, but I’m organizing this exhibition to show to the art world and the public that there are great works of art within the sphere of “street art,” and that street artists deserve a place in art history. Unlike any show that a gallery can organize (not that there’s anything wrong with art galleries), the goal of this exhibition is not to sell work, but to publicize it, and the vast majority of the work on display won’t be for sale. It’s on loan from collectors. To help extend that promotion effort even further, Drago Lab will be publishing a companion book to the exhibition.

You might be wondering, why it is that I keep saying “the exhibition” instead of whatever I’ve decided to call this project? I’ve decided to reach out to the greater street art community for suggestions on what I should name the exhibition. I had a few ideas myself, but I figure somebody out there must have a better name for it than I can possibly come up with. So if you have an idea of what I should call this project, just email it to rj@vandalog.com and let me know.  I don’t want to turn this into a contest, since it’s more about trying to reach out to the global community of street art fans, but whoever comes up with a name will definitely get a shout out on Vandalog.

The exhibition will be open from November 18th through the 22nd of November at Village Underground in London (54 Holywell Lane, London, EC2A 3PQ).

Also, if you’re a UK based street art collector and interested in getting involved with this project, I’m still looking for more artwork to borrow so just shoot me an email (rj@vandalog.com).