Olive47 at Breeze Block Gallery

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Olive47‘s latest solo show, bonita bonita, opened a few weeks ago and runs through June 1st at Breeze Block Gallery in Portland. Olive47 describes the work as “a visual dissertation on Joseph Campbell,” but I haven’t read anything by Campbell since high school, so if anyone wants to explain the connections that they catch, please do so in the comments.

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Photos courtesy of Olive47

Olive47 at Breeze Block Gallery next month

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Olive47, a longtime friend who also happens to paint some of my favorite cute characters, has a show next month at Breeze Block Gallery in Portland, Oregon. bonita bonita has been curated by Sven Davis, another friend from the UK and the UK editor over at Arrested Motion. If you want to go to a gallery and know that you’ll leave happier than when you came in, this show could be for you.

bonita bonita opens May 2nd from 6-10pm and runs through June 1st.

Photo courtesy of Olive47

KR in Miami

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I’m not always a fan of KR (I don’t care how good the ink is, a marker should not cost $10, and it should be designed to be refillable) or his murals (I’d much rather see pieces by Just or Katsu using similar techniques), but Olive47 got some great photos of a piece by KR in Miami.

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Photos by Olive47

Miami Madness, part one

Chanoir and El Xupet Negre
Chanoir and El Xupet Negre

Well, the street artists went to Miami, did their thing, and now most everyone is on their way back home. I’m guessing we’ll have a few more posts on Vandalog devoted to the murals left behind in Miami this year, but my friend Olive47 has sent over a few photos to get us started. There’s work by Chanoir, El Xupet Negre, Celso Gonzalez, Olive47, Free Humanity, La Pandilla, Logan Hicks, and one unknown artist (if you know, please leave a comment) 2Square.

Olive47
Olive47
La Pandilla
La Pandilla

Continue reading “Miami Madness, part one”

A long overdue post: Living Walls 2012

Mon Iker

Last month, I was at the Living Walls Conference in Atlanta, but it’s only now that I’ve really had a chance to sit down and write about it. I thought that I was going to write this really long post, but the environment at Living Walls is difficult to capture in words, so this post isn’t nearly as long as I would have hoped.

Miso. Click to view large.

Living Walls is, as far as I can tell, the best mural conference/festival/program going on right now in North America. Living Walls doesn’t tend to just invite all the artists who are painting at other mural events around the world. They invite good artists. Sometimes those artists are guys like Roa who are everywhere, and sometimes it’s women like Miso who have only ever painted one or two murals. As a result, Living Walls sets trends among mural festivals.

Lex and Sten

For their main conference this year, Living Walls really bucked popular trends and tried to put street art on a new track by having a festival made up almost entirely of female muralists. While guys like Gaia, LNY and I were still invited to speak at the lecture and panel portion of the conference, the murals by Lex&Sten and Indigo&Andrzej Urbanski were the only two where male artists were contributing.

Martina Merlini

While the murals weren’t as amazing on the whole as they were last year and the crowd of artists wasn’t nearly as rowdy (although that might have been a plus), this year’s Living Walls did bring some great work to Atlanta and really showed that there are some underrated female street artists and muralists out there who could be on the mural circuit as much as guys like Jaz or Roa. My hope and expecting is that the top-tier of artists from the conference will get more attention brought to their work thanks to Living Walls and some will start getting invited to a lot more mural festivals. As I’ve said in the past, I do not generally get excited to give artists preferential treatment based on them belonging to some underrepresented group, but I can see why an all-female Living Walls may have been the right move for this year even if the quality of the work did drop slightly.

Jessie and Katey

This Living Walls conference had more artists than ever before who were either more on the community mural side of the spectrum or had never painted a mural before. The results of that move were mixed, but there were some artists like Jessie&Katey and Mon Iker who took the opportunity and absolutely crushed it.

Hyuro. This wall has since been painted over.

One thing I have to add isn’t so much about the art though. Whether Living Walls were inviting only artists that none of us have ever heard of before or stealing their line-up from Nuart, it would still be at least one of the best mural conferences in the world. That’s because Living Walls’ secret is in their amazing staff. Living Walls has best team of volunteers of any mural festival I’ve ever seen or could imagine. They are unbelievably dedicated to the festival and to getting more world-class street art and murals in Atlanta. Every day, the media team led by Alex Parrish was up until something like 4am putting together a video of what had gone on that day, and then they’d be back up at 7am to start filming all over again. Just last week, I was emailing with Keif Schleifer, their Logistics Director, who was spending her free time advising me on cherry-pickers. The day of the Vandalog Movie Night, volunteers showed up out of the blue to help us set up and run the show. Laura Calle and pretty much everyone else on staff who spent their own money to pay for the gas to drive myself and the artists around Atlanta. The drag queen who was a volunteer last year and this year helped arrange a drag show for the Living Walls Block Party. The artist assistants who stand in the hot sun alongside their artists all day long, offering any help they can. And of course, Monica Campana, the Executive Director of Living Walls, who is the amazing glue holding everything together without ever sleeping or slowing down. Everyone on staff or volunteering at Living Walls works at least as hard as the artists, and they were certainly working harder than me. After visiting two years in a row for just a few days each time, it honestly feels like I have family in Atlanta.

Olive47

Much more after the jump… Continue reading “A long overdue post: Living Walls 2012”

Living Walls is underway

This year’s Living Walls Conference has begun and the team are posting daily updates to Vimeo. Here are the first three days. I’ll be arriving in Atlanta for the conference in less than 24 hours. Please join me on Wednesday night for an evening of short films and Friday evening for a panel about gender and identity in street art. And also, I’m sure the rest of the conference events will be interesting too. Here’s the full line up of Living Walls activities.

Pasting Miami

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While Vandalog and a lot of other art blogs have been focusing and will continue to focus on the murals that recently went up during Art Basel Miami, it’s worth noting that the streets also got plastered in posters. Unless otherwise noted, these images are by Mike Pearce, who has the best set of images of this year’s Miami street art extravaganza that I’ve seen so far. Here are some posters by Olive47, Vort, Don’t Fret, Clown Soldier, Clandestine Culture and others.

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Vort. Photo by Vort
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Unknown

Photos by Mike Pearce and Vort