The environmentalist blog TreeHugger recently posted a list of their top 5 “environmental artists.” Props to TreeHugger for putting Banksy at number 5 and then John Fekner at number 3. They put together a nice slideshow of some of their favorite work from Fekner, something I’ll eventually do here as well.
Photo by John Fekner
Beautiful Losers, the film about some of low-brow and street art’s 1990’s pioneers, is now streaming online on Babelgum. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, now you’ve really run out of excuses. If you enjoy reading Vandalog, this is a key film for you to see. Artists interviewed include Barry McGee, Steve Powers and Shepard Fairey. I think it even includes one of my all-time favorite quotes about art:
“From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that’s where the beauty is.” – Margaret Kilgallen
So yeah, get over to Babelgum.com/beautifullosers to watch the entire film. Now I kind of feel like an idiot for buying the dvd…
Last week, I went to the opening of Nick Walker’s latest solo show. In Gods We Trust is on now at Art Sensus (formally Orel Art UK) in London. Nick Walker’s 2008 solo show was (I think) the very first art gallery opening event that I went to in London. This blog’s name comes (in part) from Nick’s Vandal character. Still, I think most of Nick’s fans can agree that it was time to find something new after The Vandal. This was meant to be that new direction.
Some of the work in In Gods We Trust are the same images that Nick has been putting outside recently, and outside, most of them are okay. In a white walled gallery, they don’t stand up as well. Banksy once said “I can’t help feeling it was a bit easier when all I had to compete against was a dustbin down an alley rather than, you know, a Gainsborough or something.” Well, he makes a good point which applies to many street artists, and I think it applies to this recent body of work from Nick Walker and could have been the toast of Frieze, had the paintings been shown there.
That said, there are two very notable exception that more than offset the rest of the show. There are two pieces that work purely as indoor works, and I think they are screenprinted, not stenciled. Nick’s two Warhol Towers are pretty much what the title says: the paintings that Warhol would’ve made had he been alive for 9/11. I mean that in the best possible way. The image of the twin towers, repeated over and over in black and grey, is maybe the most serious and best work that I’ve ever seen from Nick.
In Gods We Trust is on view now at Art Sensus in London. The gallery is open on Saturdays from 11-5pm.
Benjamin Gaulon‘s Printball machine was in Vienna recently for BLK River. The machine is an interesting use of Graffiti Markup Language that uses paintballs to print a pre-programmed message onto a wall. For this piece, they wrote TEMPT, which is an entire story itself. Here’s a video of Printball in action:
Photos courtesy of Benjamin Gaulon
Somehow I’ve neglected until now to post about Faile’s upcoming solo show at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York. It opens on November 4th with an opening from 6-8pm. Bedtime Stories should be something special. I stopped by the Faile studio briefly a couple of months ago and the boys were slaving away on the 12 block paintings that will make up this show. If Jordan Seiler didn’t have an opening in Philadelphia on the 5th, I would be in NYC at this show for sure.
Photo courtesy of Perry Rubenstein Gallery
Amazing news this week about JR, the French photographer/street artist. He has just won the TED Prize, a $100,000 prize (to be used for some sort of positive purpose, not just to buy an amazing car) from the people who put on the TED conferences. TED have done a nice interview with the artist on their website. Ask any of my friends and they’ll tell you how I always say I am somehow mentally incapable of determining if a photograph is “good” or not, but I’m told that JR is a good photographer and he definitely is doing some important work trying to help people.
The prize was announced in an article in The New York Times. Here’s the start of the article:
It’s not common for important philanthropic prizes to go to people whose work involves criminal trespass and who make statements like the following: “You never know who’s part of the police and who’s not.”
But the TED conference, the California lecture series named for its roots in technology, entertainment and design, said on Tuesday that it planned to give its annual $100,000 prize for 2011 — awarded in the past to figures like Bill Clinton, Bono and the biologist E. O. Wilson — to the Parisian street artist known as J R, a shadowy figure who has made a name for himself by plastering colossal photographs in downtrodden neighborhoods around the world. The images usually extol local residents, to whom he has become a Robin Hood-like hero.
So congratulations to JR. This is some great news.
Photo by F4BZ3F4B
Yes there is other Street Art in Baltimore actually … And Frank actually looks attractive Via http://andrewlaumann.tumblr.com/
The opening night at Brooklynite Gallery for the “Portraits” show with Sten and Lex and I proved to be a great success, which came to no surprise considering the crowd’s the gallery has attracted in the past. Here are some photos from Brooklynite’s flickr page and some pieces from the show.
Continue reading ““Portraits” Opening Night Photos”
No Longer Empty organized this recent mural by Chris Stain which is a pretty substantial size at 82 feet long. Here’s a video of Chris painting the wall and speaking about his work:
Chris Stain from NYC No Longer Empty on Vimeo.
Video by Julie Congo
Photo by Superk8nyc
Last week in London was crazy-busy, but I’m glad I took a few minutes to get over to Pictures on Walls for the launch show of Tristan Manco’s new book Street Sketchbook: Journeys. To be honest, I haven’t read the book yet. I still have a few pages left in Street/Studio and then I’ve still got 2-3 other books in the queue before this one, but the show was good fun. There’s work from Roa, Ripo, Saner, Dran, Titifreak and a bunch of other talented artists, many of whose names I don’t remember. That’s the great thing about Tristan: he knows all these talented artists that most street art fans have never heard of, and this is a good showcase of those artists. But here are my favorite pieces from the show:
Sam3 actually has a new print at Paper Monster, but I think this wood block is 10x cooler.
Unfortunately, this show has closed already, but you can find some more pictures on my flickr.
