New Imminent Disaster and Blanco In New York

Props to Guero on the photos. It is nice to see some new work in this neighborhood. This spot especially has had an interesting history. As you can see there was an old old swoon piece right next to that pipe running along the wall, and an elbowtoe poster down the block. About two years ago I put up that horseman once the swoon piece was torn down and then everything fell apart. There was one individual who pursued every street piece in the neighborhood and effectively destroyed them with brown and orange spray paint. Considering how rich Gowanus was with street pieces, this was actually quite a travesty in my opinion. It went beyond the understood weathering of time and interaction to a place of unfortunate destruction. Whatever the intentions of the perpetrator were, they most definitely deterred anyone from going back and since then these streets have witnessed a real lull in new work. Check out this page on streetsy to see all of the defaced pieces by elbowtoe http://www.streetsy.com/streetsy/tag/elbowtoe/13

Given this background, it is wonderful to see Imminent Disaster and Blanco returning and I hope that the threat of "the brown burner" has finally subsided. I love how the paper cut over the old cheekz piece reveals the paint of that hateful individual.

Magnificent Minds

Why hasn’t this new piece by Eine been making it around the blogosphere already? It was painted in WEST London and not EAST London. Anyway, that’s a discussion for another day. This is a cool piece and it’s good to see Eine painting outside.

Eine

Photo courtesy of Eine

Dale Grimshaw on the streets of Shoreditch

Dale Grimshaw

This piece, The Fool by Dale Grimshaw, appeared recently in Shoreditch. First of all, it’s a cool piece. But it is part of a larger point I’d like to make/question I’d like to ask. It seems like woodblock and lino-blocks are pretty popular in the USA, particularly NYC, but almost unheard of here in the UK. On the other hand, stencils seem much more popular in London than elsewhere. Why is this?

I think it has to do with Banksy and Swoon. Swoon is an American artist and she’s probably more popular in New York than London. She’s been wheatpasting for a long time now, and a lot of artists have been influenced by her. And in the UK, Banksy is a household name, and a lot of street artists picked up stencils after seeing Banksy’s work. But that’s just my take.

Any other thoughts?

The awesomeness of SpY

He’s been called The Spanish Banksy because the media are lazy and feel the need to label artists like that, but honest to God he does some really cool stuff. SpY has popped up in a few places this week, and so I thought it was about time I jumped on the bandwagon.

Here are some of my favorite pieces by SpY. I particularly like how his style is constantly changing.

spy

Spy

Spy

Spy

All images from SpY’s website

NYSAT2

 

NYSAT2 struck the streets of New York yesterday morning, whitewashing over 100 illegal street level billboard advertisements and adorning them with work from various artists. Despite intense NPA harassment and a major police crackdown that resulted in a few arrests, it seems that every artist had the chance to at least get their work up for a few hours. Unfortunately, NPA made a tremendous effort to reclaim all of their space so I think it is safe to say that nothing has lasted into this morning. But fear not, the whole process was documented so incredibly well that it was staggering. Here is the flickr account from last year! http://www.flickr.com/photos/37774782@N05

For a more detailed account of the activities yesterday, check out the New York Times article that ran in the paper today in the New York Region section written by reporter  COLIN MOYNIHAN who I had the pleasure of rolling with most of the day.  And of course http://www.publicadcampaign.com/ will be releasing more in depth coverage and documentation.

Here are the pieces that I hit up yesterday with ClownSoldier. We ended up taking two billboards and concluded the route with a revisit to a classic spot in Chelsea that I haven’t put work up at in a minute. Was super nice to be back in New York for a couple days but now back to school