This is a fresh piece in Santander, Spain by Sebastian Velasco. When Savage Habbit posted this piece, I was stopped dead in my tracks. I hadn’t heard of Velasco, and given the amount of ingenious creativity and masterful technical-ability that went into this piece, that seems absurd. Sebastian (or “Sebas”) Velasco works a wall like a dream journal. His illustrative style reminds me of work by members of the Paris-based crew Da Mental Vaporz, in that he playfully re-imagines cityscapes and the human form, and deliberately splices in graffiti.
Sebas Velasco is someone we’re going to be keeping on our radar. Follow him on Facebook, Flickr or his personal website, but no matter what- stay tuned!
Earlier this week, Olek and her team descended upon Little Italy for The L.I.S.A. Project NYC‘s first public artwork of 2014. Olek crocheted a message, a quote from Nelson Mandela, along a fence on Mulberry Street. The crochet mural said, “There is no such thing as part freedom.”
Unfortunately, it seems the 376 square feet of crocheting has been stolen as of Saturday afternoon. If you have any idea where Olek’s piece may be now, please contact The L.I.S.A. Project NYC.
At least we got a few photos before the work was stolen, so enjoy:
Artists in Montreal these days are stuck working in their studios or homes, since the last few weeks have been incredibly cold! So, what follows bellow were mostly done in the fall and early winter. Nearly too cold to paint on walls, Labrona and 500M managed to get outside for a few hours to paint a fresh piece, their first of 2014. Produkt also was very productive on the streets this fall, upping his street art game. And also works by HoarKor, Nixon (old piece, but great location) Gawd, FLN, Waxhead and Cryote. Stay warm.
Labrona, 500M. Photo by 500M.Labrona. Photo by Labrona.Labrona. Photo by Labrona.Produkt. Photo by Space27.Produkt. Photo by Space27.Produkt, Waxhead and Cryote. Photo by Space27.Produkt. Photo by Space27.HoarKor, “Make toys, not war!”. Photo by Aline MairetNixon. Photo by Aline Mairet.Gawd. Photo by Aline Mairet.FLN aka Futur Lasor Now. Photo by Aline Mairet.
An anonymous artist’s portrait of Edward Snowden, next to a Borf sticker. Photo by RJ Rushmore.
It’s been quite a year for whistleblowers. In the last six months or so, the information that Edward Snowden leaked has changed the world, but Snowden is still hiding in Russia, hoping that some country will grant him permanent asylum and a way to get there. Meanwhile, Chelsea Manning, the whistleblower behind what became the Collateral Murder video and so many other documents released through Wikileaks, was sentenced in August to serve 35 years in a military prison. And just a few days ago, the email of a US government whistleblower was hacked and documents essential to his case were deleted. With the US government taking such a harsh stance against whistleblowers, it is even more essential that we, the people, stand up to support them. With that in mind, I’ve started Whistleblower Art, a tumblr archive of art and design celebrating whistleblowers. Last July, I collected all the Snowden-related street art I could find for a post. Whistleblower Art expands on that post to include all whistleblowers (most notably Manning at this point) and art and design beyond just street art.
For Vandalog though, I’ve put together this update on my Snowden post: Pretty much all the street art, graffiti and murals I could find in support of whistleblowers.
DROID 907, SARZ TKG and AMANDA WONG in Atlanta, GA. Photo by SARZ TKG.Daniel Ellsberg by Thierry Ehrmann at the Abode of Chaos outside of Lyon, France. Photo by Abode of Chaos.
Wow! What a year it has been in Melbourne street art and graffiti, this is my 2nd last post covering 2013. December post coming soon. I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Years Eve whatever you got up to.
I’ll start off with this great talk Ghostpatrol gave at Renew NewcastleCreative Talks. GP talks about his current life as a full time artist, growing up and the influence and importance of street art on his current work. GP also mentioned the ABC documentary made about him (and his partner – Miso) which is also definitely worth a watch – available here.
Kaffeine used the All Your Walls event as a launching board for her latest project HEARTCORE. (I’ll be doing a separate article on All Your Walls Part 2 soon).
Kaffeine painted her 1st piece for her new projectHEARTCORE. For this amazing project Kaff is working with Berry Street, a child and family services organisation, and using real stories created by young people at the at Berry Street.
Kaffeine’s HEARTCORE sketch. Photo by Kaffeine.Kaffeine. Photo by Kaffeine.Kaffeine. Photo by Kaffeine.
From the Just Another Blog “Creative writing and poetry from young people in Berry Street School will be interpreted by renowned Victorian street and contemporary artist Kaffeine and painted as a series of large and small street art murals on walls across Melbourne; including one that will take up a whole inner-‐city laneway. A coffee-‐table book titled HEARTCORE will then be launched at the conclusion of the project, made up of professional and artistic photographs of the murals together with the writing”.
Plus here’s a great interview (via an article in The Age newspaper) with Kaff talking about the project/piece.
I’m really excited to see what else Kaff produces as a part of this project.
Max “Ripo” Rippon is the latest artist to visit Little Italy for The L.I.S.A. Project NYC, a mural project curated by Wayne Rada and I. When I heard that Ripo was going to be in town from Barcelona, I knew we had to take advantage of the opportunity. As I’ve said before, one thing that really excites me about The L.I.S.A. Project is when we can mix the old and the new, Little Italy’s history with contemporary art. With his love of handpainted signs and typography, I suspected that Ripo would fit perfectly with that combination. I suggested something site-specific about Little Italy and he immediately got the idea and improved upon it. For his piece on Mulberry between Hester and Grand streets, Ripo drew on neighborhood archives to create a collage-like portrait of the neighborhood.
Ripo says, “The fragmented texts come from research of New York Times news headlines relating to the history of Little Italy. Included are also a few treasures found in the archives at the Italian American Museum with headlines in Italian such as: “Gli Italiani Non Piu Considerati ‘Enemy Aliens'” (Italians no longer considered ‘Enemy Aliens’), and an extortion letter sent from the mafia, finishing with the line: ‘Our vendetta is about to begin.'”
All told, that’s 150 dummy CCTV cameras installed on one wall. SpY says they were installed “with the intention of not watching over anything.”
And yes, dummy CCTV cameras are a real thing that people install on their buildings. The fake cameras are just empty boxes and don’t actually record anything of course, but most people would never take the time to figure out the difference between an active camera and a dummy. If you like this piece by SpY, definitely check out Brad Downey‘s classic CCTV Takedown video where he goes around London looking for buildings where these dummy CCTV cameras have been installed and removing them.
PS, if you missed the reference in the headline of this post, see here.
There’s a raw idiosyncratic beauty to the street art that surfaces on the streets of Tel Aviv that continues to mesmerize me. Here’s a small sampling of what I saw on my recent trip:
Dede and LatziMr. DiMaggioZero Cents, close-upKlone, Foma, Know Hope — remnants of a long-running larger pieceDALeast, who visited in 2012
Iranian street artists and brothers Icy and Sot lived in the apartment where the murders took place. While they both survived, Sot was shot. Now, just a few weeks later, it appears Icy and Sot have taken to the streets to respond to the tragedy with the above mural, located on Allen Street near the corner of Allen and Stanton in NYC. While the artists have not made any explicit reference to the shooting in their posts online about the mural, the connection is clear.
When I first started documenting West Jerusalem’s street art scene a number of years back, it consisted – for the most part – of rather simple stencils, often religiously or politically fraught. These days it is visually richer, presenting an intriguing array of characters and more. Here’s a sampling:
Broken Fingaz, close-upJack tml and SignerJack tmlItmar PalogeCelja
