juxtapoz – Vandalog – A Street Art Blog

November 24, 2014November 23, 2014

Supplemental materials from Nuart

Maismenos at Nuart — ±maismenos± at Nuart

One of the great things about Nuart is the content that gets created around the festival. Participants in Nuart Plus conference write critical essays (something all too rare in the street art and graffiti worlds), the artists are interviewed for professionally-produced videos, and parts of Nuart Plus are posted on the web. It’s a bit late as these materials have now been online for a while, but I’d still like to share them.

Brooklyn Street Art‘s Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo have always been champions of the little guy, the artist getting up because they love it. In their Nuart essay, the duo reminds us not to get too caught up in celebrating the global abundance of street art festivals and mural programs, because such murals always come with strings attached, namely censorship and the risk that grassroots street art is silenced among the mega-murals.

I wrote a brief essay titled Art Ignites Change, which is our slogan/mission at the Mural Arts Program (I was attending Nuart as a representative of Mural Arts). In the essay, I try to take a new approach to looking at the perceived divide between muralism and street art. In contrast to Steven and Jaime, I tried to show how some legal murals can be even more powerful than street art when it comes to bringing about social change. As I say in the essay, I’ve never felt more like an agent for positive change than now that I am working for “The Man.”

In his essay, Peter Bengtsen writes about how unsanctioned street art can turn cities into sites for exploration, which is harder to do with mega-murals.

Juxtapoz editor-in-chief Evan Pricco’s essay is on some level the most honest of all. Evan declares that it’s inevitable that corporate interests would embrace street art, and suggests that maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

And there’s my favorite part of Nuart Plus: Fight Club, a no-holds-barred 2 on 2 debate on the local pub, surrounded half by Nuart fans and half by random patrons who are generally confused as to what all the fuss is about. This year, Evan Pricco and I teamed up against ±maismenos± and Mathieu Tremblin on the topic of illegal street art versus legal murals. It was a fun debate. Here’s what happened:

Nuart also conducted video interviews with a few of the artists.

I love the ±maismenos± interview in part because he echos my thoughts in Viral Art, that the internet is like a virtual street:

Mathieu Tremblin’s interview is interesting because I’ll watch anything where a street artist brings up Situationist philosophy, and because it shows a hint of the true final product of Temblin’s indoor installation at Nuart:

Similarly, Fra.Biancoshock’s interview includes video footage of a few of his Nuart street interventions that didn’t get much photographic coverage:

Photo by RJ Rushmore

March 16, 2012March 16, 2012

Weekend link-o-rama

While I spend my day at my other job explaining to people how a skee-ball tournament is art (seriously), I hope you’ll enjoy these newsbites from the past two weeks:

Almost everything I’ve seen of this show looks absolutely amazing: Saner’s solo in SF opening today.
You can listen to this conversation between Retna and his friend Med if you want a bit of insight into the Bowery/Houston mural, although it may just confuse things further in a good way.
Escif has been doing some really cool work lately and I’ve been neglecting to post it, but here’s one of my favorites.
Steve Powers and Faile designed potential covers for New York Magazine. Powers’ was used, but I’m a sucker for anything Faile so I definitely would have gone that route.
I meant to put this piece by Marco Sueño as the image for last week’s link-o-rama, but then my hostel didn’t have wifi so there was no link-o-rama.
Jaz took it up a notch with this mural in Lima.
S.Butterfly’s photos of the DMV crew show in Australia are finally online and the show looks great.
Eine painted the outside of Village Underground in London to raise awareness of the Homes for London campaign.
GrafRank is an attempt to graph the popularity of street artists and graffiti writers online using data from flickr. Interesting idea, but they need your feedback to make sure they are getting things right.
Juxtapoz is turning 18 and they are celebrating with a show later this month in Santa Monica. Artists include Retna, Shepard Fairey and Neckface.

Photo by Snyder

August 7, 2009

Interviews on Juxtapoz

Recently, Juxtapoz has had three interviews with some of the more interesting emerging street artists I can think of: Gaia, Imminent Disaster, and Dennis McNett. Gaia and Imminent Disaster are both friends of the blog (and of course, Gaia posts here from time to time) so it’s always exciting to see them getting press from the big guys like Juxtapoz. Here are my favorite parts from each interview:

Dennis McNett:

If you could punch one living contemporary artist, who would it be?

There are better people to hate on the planet than other people that make things.

Gaia (part one, part two)

Street artists often profess this war of conscience around the gallery/street issue, but you don’t seem to share those conflicts.

My perspective is I get up, I do work in the street, and I try to make it good and valuable, so that the experiences augment each other. Institutions provide certain opportunities but you have to go through these filters. There are no filters in street art—except for the obvious one, the law. Beyond that, there’s no curator deciding where you put up work, how you put up work…

Institutions provide other opportunities. If there’s this populous notion of ‘I want to show my work to as many people as possible’—you’re going to get that done a lot better institutionally. You may get a lot of passerby on the street, but think about how many people move through The Met each day.

Imminent Disaster (part one, part two)

Along the notion of “reclaiming public space,” why is street art is concentrated in “hipster” or gentrifying neighborhoods?

It’s a valid observation, and comes up often in the street art scene. It probably has to do with the fact that street art is a scene with a different audience. There are obscure graffiti spots in abandoned buildings or tunnels that are more about the difficulty of getting to the spot and therefore, will likely only be seen by other writers. Whereas street art tends to prefer to be seen by the scene—people who watch, collect, curate but do not necessarily do street art.

The duration of the mediums also might factor in on this. If wheatpaste was a more permanent mark on a wall, street artists might be more exploratory with their placement and find more obscure spots that would get much less traffic but last much longer. A look to stencil artists might prove this theory wrong, however. Even though it would last forever, I’ve never seen a celebrity head stencil in Queens.

I know I’ve personally been very lax on interviews on Vandalog for a long time, but I’ve got 2-3 coming up soon so keep an eye out for that.