Category: Photos

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Sunday link-o-rama

"the beauty of un-advertising" by VladyArt in Catania, Italy
“the beauty of un-advertising” by VladyArt in Catania, Italy

Got a few things that caught my eye recently, so I’m going back to the old link-o-rama format for a day:

  • A group of anonymous artists installed a bust of Edward Snowden at a park in Brooklyn, but the piece was almost immediately taken down by the city. Luckily, as the artists noted to ANIMAL, “The fact that a risk was taken, the fact that an image comes out of that event that can be passed around can never be undone. So you can rip the statue out, but you can’t erase the fact that it happened and that people are sharing it.” It’s all a bit reminiscent of when the British government forced The Guardian to destroy hard drives containing files leaked by Snowden, even though there were other copies of the files outside of the UK. Of course the sculpture wasn’t going to last. Take it down or leave it up, it hardly matters. We have the photos.
  • Faile and Bast are showing at the Brooklyn Museum in July. So I’m looking forward to that, and you should be too.
  • But if you’re looking for something up now in NYC, definitely stop by Roa’s solo show at Jonathan Levine Gallery. ANIMAL very cleverly made a series of GIFs of the show. I had a pretty similar reaction to this show as I had to Roa’s show at Stolenspace last year in London. Basically, I went in with a negative attitude of thinking I’d seen the work before, and I left happy as a kid in a candy store because Roa’s pieces are so damn fun to experience and play with. It’s a really stupid fear/attitude that I have about Roa’s shows, and it’s one that the work always seems to overcome, proving my preconceived notions wrong. Good stuff, as always.
  • And if you’re in Paris, Know Hope just had a show open there.
  • Check out this spot-on anonymous critique of crappy stencils in Shoreditch by terrible street artist Bambi.
  • It’s great to see Aakash Nihalani getting some love from Juxtapoz for his interactive work.
  • Niels “Shoe” Meulman is retiring his use of the term “Calligraffiti”, because he feels his work is now better represented by the term “Abstract Vandalism,” now that his work is moving away from letters and becoming more abstract. Okay, he’s evolving as an artist, but really: who cares? That’s a pretty standard evolution these days for artists coming out of graffiti. Two reasons this is interesting. First, he’s published a short manifesto of Abstract Vandalism, which I love, and I highly recommend picking up a copy for the great little tidbits like “The difference between art and vandalism is only in the eye of the law upholder.” Second, Shoe is giving up admin control of the Calligraffiti facebook page, which has over half a million likes. In a few days, Shoe will be selecting new admins for the page, artists whose work he feels is in line with Calligraffiti now that his work is not. You can learn more about that, and suggest yourself as a new admin, here.
  • Gotta love Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada’s latest pieces.
  • I’ve never really cared for MTO‘s realistic figurative murals, even though they do play with space in an interesting way, but he’s really piqued my interest with a new piece for Memorie Urbane 2015 in Gaeta, Italy. The piece is a conceptual look into the future, a future where Google controls what information we have access to (oh wait, maybe this isn’t so futuristic…) in public space. The mural is a response to the Google Cultural Institute’s Street Art Project, which ostensibly acts as a digital archive for street art and murals. The project is highly curated and controlled, begging the question: Who decides what’s included, and what isn’t? MTO’s piece also hints at a future where augmented reality is the norm. The re:art has a great article with photos and analysis of MTO’s mural. For now, I’ll just add: I can’t wait for this mural to show up on Google Street View.

Photo by VladyArt

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#RexisteMX and the radical distribution of protest art

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#RexisteMX, an anonymous collective of Zapatista-trained activists with a focus on using street art may at first appear to be your standard street artists with a political message, but that’s not quite right. For one thing, the internet is essential to their project, even though they’re trying to spread messages on Mexico’s streets. The group’s main artistic output consists of poster and stencil designs, which they post on the internet for free, explicitly encouraging others to cut their own #RexisteMX stencils, use #RexisteMX posters at protests, or remix and reuse the designs.

A #RexisteMX design posted for download on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.
A #RexisteMX design posted for download on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.

You may think you’ve heard about street artists doing this sort of thing before. Off the top of my head… Shepard Fairey has been giving away or selling his stickers for decades, and the “Urban Renewal Kit” on his website includes three classic OBEY designs that anyone can download for free; group like Artists Against Police Violence have repositories of high-resolution downloadable protest art from a wide array of artists; the Guerrilla Girls have a handful of free downloads on their website but the group definitely has strong feelings about strict copyright controls; and Just Seeds released a series of downloadable artist-designed posters advertising the People’s Climate March.

But #RexisteMX goes a step further than most similar projects from artists, even artists taking an activist stance. Fairey, Artists Against Police Violence, Guerrilla Girls, and Just Seeds all encourage people to use their work, but only within strict limits. Shepard does allow some remixing of his work, but that’s more about fair use, parody, and promoting Fairey’s own OBEY GIANT campaign than letting people take ownership of his content and encouraging new artistic creations (although that is a nice side-effect). There are plenty of artists participating in activism and lending their skills to various causes, but generally speaking the artist still more or less maintains control of their work.

However, #RexisteMX’s strategy isn’t unique among activists. There’s Occupy* Posters, for example, and CrimethInc uses a custom license similar to a Creative Commons license for their work. Which leads to the conclusion that the members of #RexisteMX are activists using street art as a method, rather than street artists participating in activism.

A #RexisteMX design posted for download on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.
A #RexisteMX design posted for download on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.

The collective actually does actively resist the label of art, saying “Rexiste is an idea, not an artist. We prefer personal anonymity and creative commons; our designs and ideas are open spaces to be shared, reappropriated and reinterpreted. We don’t make art, we create collectively, we feel collectively. We exist because we resist.” And they provide anyone who is interested with the opportunity to resist too.

Ironically, by avoiding the label of artist and the trappings associated with that, as well as relying on the internet to distribute their work, these activists are taking street art back to its roots as a tool for self-expression by anyone with an internet connection and the simplest tools.

Stickers by #RexisteMX
Stickers by #RexisteMX

Photo and designs by #RexisteMX

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Le Jardin Rouge

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Krito. Photo by UrbanPresents

The Jardin Rouge is an artists’ residency center located in Morocco, near Marrakesh, at the foot of the Atlas Mountains. Created by the Montresso Art Foundation, the idea was to have a place of exchange and creation open only to artists, with no other purpose than seeing them evolve and grow in their creative process. The residency boasts an amazing environment and very comfortable working conditions, and it is open to both well-known and emerging artists. The only requirement is to have talent. And those who have passed through “Le Jardin Rouge” have that in spades! Lucky for us, the owner has a particularly strong passion for urban art, and the residency offers urban artists complete freedom of artistic expression.

It sounds like paradise, and that’s not far from the truth. The photographic work of Bart, from UrbanPresents, makes me fall in love with this place. The landscape, the light, everything is there to sublimate the work of the artists, whether in the park (which covers is 13 hectares!) or inside a building that also serves as an exhibition space.

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Reso and GoddoG. Photo by Damien Mauro,

French artist GoddoG was recently an artist-in-resident at Le Jardin Rouge. In his own words…

It was super welcoming. Le Jardin Rouge is one-of-a-kind. The main purpose of my visit was to deepen my technique on canvas by linking my work on walls with my work on canvas. The 10-week residency helped me develop my technical skills, and allowed me to concentrate on my work while expanding it. In addition, Le Jardin Rouge is a place to meet other artists and exchange opinions, which helped me develop further as an artist and as a critical thinker.

Continue reading “Le Jardin Rouge”

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Aïda Gómez wins at street Tetris

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Aïda Gómez saw a deteriorating wall in the Berlin subway and thought what we all think when we see a city’s infrastructure falling apart: “This is terrible. I can’t believe I just paid money to wait for a train in this place if they can’t even fix the walls…” Well actually, no. Gómez wasn’t quite so sour. She saw an opportunity to inject some fun onto the subway and use art to repair the wall. She did this:

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Okay, I’m not sure “street Tetris” is really a thing. I suppose I just made it up, but if it were a thing, Gómez just won. She calls this project Mind the Gap. It reminds me of the Astoria Scum River Bridge by Jason Eppink and Posterchild, which I also really love.

Also, here’s a GIF version:

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Photos by Aïda Gómez, GIF by RJ Rushmore

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Street art for a rainy city

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How have I not seen this before? Am I the only one?

Rainworks is a series of street art pieces by Seattle-based artist Peregrine Church that will only appear when the ground is wet. Using a commercially available “superhydrophobic coating” (basically a spray-on sealant that repels water), Church stencils Roadsworth-esque artworks onto concrete surfaces. On a sunny day, the artworks are invisible, but when it rains, as is known to happen from time to time in Seattle, the stencils appear. The rain soaks into the surrounding concrete, making it appear darker, and rolls right off the sections that Church has coated so that those areas stay bone dry and remain lighter.

Very cool idea. I hope this takes off. It shouldn’t be too hard for works like these to start appearing in other cities. The material Church uses is pretty pricey, but Rust-Oleum makes a similar product.

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Photo and GIF courtesy of Peregrine Church / Rainworks

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BR1 and Elfo’s tribute to Houdini

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Okay, I know I should be publishing more than just ad disruptions, which seems to be all I’m writing about lately in one way or another, but this piece that BR1 and Elfo did in Istanbul just made me smile and I couldn’t not post it. It’s called Houdini.

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Photos courtesy of Elfo

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Winter break in Lisbon

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Cane Morto (Italian crew)

How can one not fall in love with Lisbon! When you walk the streets of this city, in tourist areas or less known places, you see art everywhere. Graffiti, tags, and a diverse array of street art explodes on the walls. Add to all the illegal activity Vhils’ UnderDogs project, and you end up going from surprise to surprise at every street corner.

Lisbon was hit hard by the 2008 economic crisis. As a result, a lot of buildings of the city were abandoned by their owners, quickly enlarging the playground of graffiti and street artists making the city attractive to many international artists.

It’s now a kind of “street art place to be”, which is okay, but you soon find yourself torn between the pleasure of discovering new stunning art pieces and frustration caused by having already seen photos of so many of the murals on the internet. Still, better to share the artwork than not, so here’s some Lisbon street art from Cane Morto, Vhils, Créons, Sumo, Exit-enter, C215, Tinta Crua, Os Gemeos, Kraken, Sam3, Ericailcane, and Mr.chat.

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Vhils
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Cane Morto
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Créons (Belgian artist)

Continue reading “Winter break in Lisbon”

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Je suis Charlie.

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“we are all Charlie”, by Jef aerosol. Weapon, by Francois Labaune.

“JE SUIS CHARLIE.” I am sad, I am angry. I am Charlie. These words have became a universal claim against obscurantism and violence, for the freedom of expression, whether written, spoken, or drawn. Cabu, Charb, Wolinski, and Tignous, 4 famous cartoonists, died in the terrorist attack against the office of Charlie Hebdo on January 7th, in Paris. 12 men and woman died in the attack. Since these terrible events occurred, artists and anonymous people spontaneously reacted by pasting, painting, tagging all kind of tributes to cartoonists but also more broadly to diffuse values of brotherhood and respect.

In my turn, I wanted to pay tribute to all of them with some collected pieces displayed by artists and anonymous who expressed their sadness and anger in the walls in Lille, where I am. Especially in moments such as this, anonymous street art is as important as the pieces by more famous artists. The streets are the most honest expression of how our nation is feeling today, a visible emotion which, I hope, will never be forgotten. It’s time to start our duty to remember.

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“I use my bombs (spray cans) to defend my values. you use yours to try to scare us. You’ll never get there.” by Koper. And various tags by anonymous.
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“We are Charlie.” Artist unknown.
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The 4 cartoonists, Cabu, Charb, Wolinski, Tignous, by Jef Aerosol.
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Cabu and Charb by Jef Aerosol.
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Wolinski and Tignous by Jef Aerosol.

Update from Jef Aerosol piece, finished on January 14th, 2015.

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Jef Aerosol Tribute for Charlie Hebdo.
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Honoré, Cabu, Charb, victims’ name, by Jef Aerosol
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Victims’ name, Wolinski, Tignous, by Jef Aerosol.

Photos by Aline Mairet.