Weekend link-o-rama

Smells, Cash4, Don Pablo Pedro and Keely
Smells, Cash4, Don Pablo Pedro and Keely

Last class of the school year yesterday. Now for finals. Can’t wait… Here are some distractions in case you’re in a similar boat:

  • NoseGo has some new prints available today with Unit44. These are not giclee prints, but rather archival pigment prints, a significant step up in quality as I understand it.
  • The fantastic ceramic street artist Carrie Reichardt is organizing this show in London.
  • Great sculptural installation and indoor mural by Pixel Pancho in Mexico City.
  • Loving this collaboration between Kofie and El Mac.
  • S.butterfly has photos of the Bom.K show in Paris. Wish I could see this one in person.
  • And Kaws has a solo show in Tokyo at the moment. It’s Kaws, so feel free to check out the photos, but you pretty much knows what’s coming.
  • JR and José Parlá collaborated on a mural on the outside of Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, where they have a two-man show opening next week. Glad to see Parlá working outdoors, but it always strikes me as a bit odd since he tries to distance his work from graffiti. I guess when there’s a show to promote… Although to be fair, the show is about a series of collaborative murals that JR and Parlá made together in Cuba.
  • JR’s Inside Out project booth in Times Square is a huge hit. He’s been covering the street with photos of people who stop by his little photobooth, and it looks awesome. The billboards in Times Square were even (briefly) given over to JR for the project. The whole thing is a fight against outdoor ads and for public spaces for the public, but JR manages to make his point without beating people over the head with politics. Instead, JR just shows people a better world and makes them smile. I’m not a JR fanatic, but I absolutely love this project.

Photo by Hrag Vartanian

KRT and Keely Plaster NYC

With what has been a relatively slow summer in regards to wheatpasting, Cost, Set, and Smells of KRT and Keely came as a breath of fresh air. Flipping between monochromatic color schemes to eye popping fluorescents, the designs in these posters grab the attention of viewers from a stylistically minimalist stance as well as those drawn in by painfully bright colors.

Of particular interest is the use of “emergency orange” in some of Cost and Smells collaborative pieces. While this color has been co-opted in the area by EKG for quite some time, I was glad to see someone else incorporating it into their work, especially when paired with an orange door.

For those who may not be drawn to text-based work, they are sure to notice the razor-sharp edges of Keely’s lizard. Having a presence on the streets for a while with stickers, these wheatpastes are the largest images I have seen from the artist outside of Pandemic’s walls. The imagery, scale, and voracity with which this team hit the streets recently makes for an exciting end to what has been a relatively slow summer.

All photos by Rhiannon Platt

New in Bushwick, Brooklyn

From playful paste-ups to stylish graffiti murals, new pieces are surfacing daily in Brooklyn’s Bushwick. Here’s a sampling:

Keely
Radical and ND'A
Owns & Ewok
Shank aka Demote
Sen2

 Photos by Tara Murray

Weekend link-o-rama

Keely

This week the Occupy Wall Street live streams have been very effective at distracting me from Vandalog, which I’m not too upset about. The violent and suppressive eviction of Occupy Wall Street is certainly more important that the latest swindle that some art gallery is trying to pull. Nonetheless, I have been paying attention even if I haven’t been writing, so here’s what’s been going on in the street art world this week:

Photo by Damonabnormal