Fun story behind NDA‘s mural Fathers and Sons, which was painted last month as part of the Staufferstadt Artist Residency in Strasburg, Virginia. NDA explains, “The bottom half is a photo I found of a man in town from 1932. He had a prominent last name and after four phone calls we had tracked down his son (featured on the top part of the mural).” Of course, that son is now in his 70’s, so you end up with a portrait of a man in his 70’s combined with a portrait of that man’s father in his 20’s.
Fancy spray paint with a dozen different caps. Professional photographers. Scissor lifts. Street art doesn’t have to be so complicated. Just take Dave the Chimp. His little characters, “human beans” as he calls them, are generally simple and small figures, but because they’re site-specific, they’re more surprising than most bombastic murals.
Dave’s beans respond to their environment, whether it’s acting shocked at strong language (or perhaps at the buff) or offering a joint to another street art character, Berlin’s walls are Dave’s playground.
Since the best thing about Dave’s work is that there’s the potential for surprise in real life, the potential to look at a wall or a tag in a different way, it feels a bit silly to say this, but Dave only just got on Instagram, and I’d suggest giving him a follow.
And can we all agree that we need more of this? Is site-specific street art, something beyond wallpaper, too much to ask?
A new photo series by Alan Ket is a quiet and beautiful, but still extremely potent, form of activism at a time when it’s desperately need.
As it seems new headlines comes up almost every day about another person murdered at the hands of the police, more than a few people have taken to memorializing the victims by simply writing their names in public. Sometimes the message is a major production, sometimes it’s small and rushed. Lately, Ket has been photographing some of these small memorials, just tags in black ink, during his commute around New York City.
The act of writing these names is important because it helps get them into our limited head-space: Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald, Delrawn Small, Tamir Rice, Anthony Hill, Freddie Gray… of course the list could go on much longer. But these are tags on New York City subway trains. They won’t last long. They’ll be buffed quickly, because that’s how New York City deals with tags on the subway. They don’t want commuters to see any of it. Which is what makes Ket’s photographs all the more important. They serve as a document that these names were written, and might even inspire others to pick up a marker and start writing.
As too many police departments try to sweep misconduct under the rug and wish that we’d all just stop saying, writing, and seeing these names, clearly the thing to do is the opposite. These tags won’t last, but Ket’s photos will. Here are a few more, and you can see the full series on Ket’s Instagram:
This afternoon, Caroline and I had lunch at Sea Wolf in Bushwick, at the heart of The Bushwick Collective. Unfortunately, we couldn’t enjoy the meal. We were seated right below the most sexualized painting of Lisa Simpson I’ve ever seen. Lisa is eight. I cannot imagine how The Bushwick Collective or the artist, GIZ, thought this was a good idea. Because the mural is NSFW and potentially triggering, I’ve cropped it in the above photo, but you can scroll down to see the full image.
Chris Tackett was, as far as we know, the first to call out The Bushwick Collective for this mural. He wrote an letter to Sea Wolf and The Bushwick Collective on Instagram:
Dear @seawolfbk,
Lisa Simpson is an eight-year-old child. It seems a bit creepy to have her showing her ass on your wall.
As listed on her Wikipedia page, “Lisa is a vegetarian, a strong environmentalist, a feminist, and a Buddhist. She enjoys many hobbies, including reading and playing the baritone saxophone.” She has been an inspiration to young girls for more than 20 years. A mural showing her doing any of these inspiring things would be far more fitting of your fine establishment. By allowing this to remain on your wall, you insult Lisa and make this precocious youngster into a sexual object. It’s weird.
If I may offer a suggestion, I think it’d be a welcome change to replace this with something less pervy, both for the people of Bushwick that have to look at it every day and also so people don’t feel like creeps when enjoying drinks on your lovely patio this summer.
As a huge fan of @thebushwickcollective, I don’t like complaining about something I love so much. But this one just feels off and worth reconsidering.
PS: I should add that I was there last night sitting at the table to the right. I was with four friends and their two infant girls. We had a great time, but it was that moment of sitting there with 4 of my favorite women that I was inspired to send this note. We were all talking about how weird it was. I’m always a little sad to see #bushwickcollective murals rotate out, but I can’t imagine there is anyone at all that will be bummed to see this one go.
Caroline has a great solution: Buff the mural and replace it with a portrait of a breastfeeding mother. I’ll pay for the paint for Caroline’s mural, if goes up in the next week. I’ve reached out to The Bushwick Collective and made that offer, but haven’t heard back yet.
Just in time for the summer street art rush, Reed Bmore visited installed a few of his trademark wire and mesh sculptures in Brooklyn. As usual, he’s hung the sculptures from electrical wires. Would love to see more artists taking a page out of Reed Bmore’s book and finding new spots to install their work.
Dr. D‘s latest project, a collaboration with Disobedient Films, takes his ad busting beyond billboards. Sly TV, a parody of the British satellite TV company Sky (a part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire), is perhaps most visible as a series of wheatpastes in East London.
Sly TV has its own website, and Sly’s ad campaign extends from street art to digital advertising.
It’s amazing what kind of targeting powers digital advertisers have. For as little as $10, you can buy an ad on Facebook and narrow your audience so that it’s only seen by wealthy young British men who go to university and love classic rock. Or just about any other audience you can imagine. Similar thing on Google. Want to reach people thinking about buying a new car? You can buy ads that display when people search “how to buy a car.” What if you want to reach people who are thinking about Sky TV? You can buy ads that display when people search for “Sky TV,” “Sky News,” or “Sky box.” And that’s just what Dr. D and Disobedient Films did.
Now, if you search any of the above search terms, there’s a chance that an ad will appear for the Sly TV website. Here’s what that ad looks like:
Sly TV bought similar ads for Facebook. So, if you fit their target audience (English-speaking men who live in the UK), keep an eye out for Sly TV in your newsfeed.
Gotta love 722 – 481 BC, Faith47‘s new piece in Manchester. The mural is part of the Cities of Hope project, which is inviting street artists to address a variety of social justice issues on Manchester’s walls, and to connect with local organizations while they are in town painting. Faith47’s mural celebrates LGBT rights. I’m optimistic that the Cities of Hope project can bring some political edge into the street art festival circuit, but it’s probably too early to say much about how that will go. The other reason this mural caught my eye is the lighting.
Faith47 worked with Thingking to design custom lighting for the mural. I’ve got mixed feelings about lighting murals, but I think Faith47 has done a great job with this one. The lights don’t just make the mural visible at night, they add to the composition.
And of course, here’s the full mural during the day:
In an internet-age twist on Steve Powers’ famous ESPO shutters, Spain’s MVIN has painted a massive piece across 99 shutters in Barcelona. Like Powers, it appears that MVIN painted his shutters in broad daylight with a high-vis vest, acting like the buff man. And individually, each shutter does look more or less like a half-finished buff job. Collectively though (and with the help of the 100th shutter, a camera)…
The Memorial Day weekend heralds the start of summer. A quiet moment on a windswept beach where ‘a clear view equals a clear mind’ has changed radically in recent years.
Life begins and ends where the ocean’s tide and sands meet. A stranger on the shore arrives from distant places. Beaches that previously glistened with laughter in the sun have become solemn and tragic: a sad journey’s end for thousands of forgotten migrant families on the run.
Idyllic locations where one might momentarily breathe deep and forget the real world are now faced with a relentless bombardment of social, political and environmental issues. Explores, invaders, refugees, the innocent boys killed at Gaza Beach by war missiles, intruders, and perhaps, even time travelers and aliens from other worlds. All are strangers in search of a new land. New people, like new art, have the power to provoke, agitate, engage and question the status quo.
Digital glitch art has about as much appeal as a loud, buzzing, broken and flickering, fluorescent light. New digital art draws from an old punk aesthetic: ‘three chord art that anyone can play’. Keep it brief; a few seconds at most, simple and fast, annoy and provoke with an uncanny and unique power to engage the viewer. Within a vibration zone of motion-triggered unexpected juxtapositions, digital images are hot-wired, quivering and spatially unsettling with a nonsense/sensibility that evoke the non-commercial, experimentation of No Wave artists associated with that brief scene in downtown New York in the late 70s’/early 80s’.
In my wildest scenarios, I could never imagine the words glitch and beach in the same sentence. While on their vacation this Memorial Day weekend, artists and partners Ryan Seslow and Monique Spier, spontaneously created some new glitch gifs that resonated with me on multiple levels. Their work exists as a refreshing reflection: hinting at the cautionary freedom that permeates the world today.
Ryan Seslow 2016, “Time travelers” gif animation
New media, a combination of visual and audio tools, echo the progressive experimentation of artists like László Moholy-Nagy almost a century ago. In Seslow and Spier’s gifs, there exists a lingering sense of reminiscence that evoke Yves Tanguy’s lonely landscapes of desolate gray sky beaches that transform, transport and confuse the viewer in the same moment. An expectation that maybe something better might happen just beyond the horizon.
In the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes, the last scene and dialog is shot at Point Dume on the Californian coast. The promontory is ‘matte painted out”, replaced with a rusted Statue of Liberty, informing the viewer that this is New York City in the distant (maybe near) future.
“Oh my God. I’m back. I’m home. All the time, it was… We finally really did it. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
Ryan Seslow 2016, “Ghost at the Coast” gif animation
The ebb and flow of our oceans is less about growth and more about erosion due to radioactive tides, floating trash that pollute pristine coastlines with plastic carcinogens, accidental oil spill sludge, as well as flooding, hurricanes and other natural disasters due to global warming and climate change.
And never forget… the constant reckless beachfront overdevelopment by greedy real estate moguls.
We’ve reached a critical juncture where both our beaches and our politicians are extremely toxic and polluted. Let’s work to protect our beaches so they continue to be places of peace and remain a natural habitat for all living things instead of an arid and lifeless landscape for future generations.
Ryan Seslow 2016, “Time-Travels” iPhone digital photograph.
Iranian street artist FRZ has a simple and beautiful truth for the world, written on a wall in Tehran: We are all immigrants and refugees. If only we could get that through our heads, things might be a lot simpler.
