From hard-edged, angular, and zig-zagging lines inspired by graffiti tagging styles to thick, swooping curved lines reminiscent of calligraphy, Opera Gallery’s Saber & Rostarr exhibition sets up a fascinating and fruitful comparison between two artists who combine street culture and aesthetics with more traditional abstraction.
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In an attempt to show the faces of the New Yorkers and tourists who swiftly move through Times Square at an unrelenting 24-hour pace, French street artist JR has set up a photo booth right in its center. Inside Out New York City, which started last night as part of the Times Square Arts public arts program, is a continuation of JR’s Inside Out Project, where the faces of the people who live in a place are made visible on its structure.
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PARIS — As I’ve been wandering the streets of Paris this week, one artist seems to be haunting my path with his dark and elegant street art. Fred le Chevalier, as he signs his work, has paste up drawings of red-lipped pale women posed with strange creatures like owls, large cats, and anthropomorphic suns.
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Global Voices is reporting on a new social media hashtag that is demonstrating that pro-LGBT proponents in Egypt are not afraid to speak out. The hashtag #ضد_رهاب_المثلية (Against homophobia) has been generating conversation between LGBT supporters and opponents, but its very existence points to a broadening of Egyptian debate on the topic of LGBT rights.
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It’s a drizzly Sunday in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and the cafés near the Simon Patiño Cultural Center are closed. We duck into Blueberry, a Bolivian knockoff of the Pinkberry franchise, where on a warmer day, affluent teenagers might be making out on the candy-colored couches, the boys occasionally turning to tease each other, while English speakers crowd the benches with gossip from home. But today, I sit in the stark-white space alone with the street artists El Dengue, Li Q, and Machy, as well as an interpreter, to discuss the local urban art movement over hot, too-sweet coffee. Immediately, we recognize the irony of our location. “Bolivia is a country for sale,” El Dengue says.
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When I entered the doors of Scope New York, taking place in the Skylight at Moynihan Station, part of the former James A. Farley Post Office, I almost walked right into a can of spray paint. Jutting with a horse head and a skateboard from the walls in French street artist Shaka’s large-scale, three-dimensional triptych at Gallery Nine 5’s booth, the spray can abruptly announced the abundance of graffiti and street-art-inspired work at this year’s Scope.
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Who cares about bad graffiti or street art? The spray paint scrawls of ill-chosen tag names (“Piggy Nasty,” “Pony Tail,” “Tricky Trout, Jr.”), reckless vulgarity (penises and boobs drawn on absolutely everything), and sad drawings that barely shape into the animal, face, or whatever they’re trying to be, who cares about all that? Usually these aerosol-on-concrete creations just fade into our visual background without a second glance, but artist Scott Hocking has recognized them for the masterpieces of mediocrity that they are in a photography book appropriately called Bad Graffiti, released in December 2012 by Black Dog Publishing.
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On a dark street in Bushwick on Beat Nite last week, one storefront stood out. From the plate-glass façade gazed out a classical, simplified portrait of a smiling girl’s face filling the entire doorway. Her hand stretched over the rest of the window, grasping a paper airplane, about to let it go.
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Between 1975 and 1983, tens of thousands of people went missing in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” The exact number of the tortured and murdered in state-sponsored detentions is impossible to determine due to the discreetness of the disappearances and disposal of the bodies. Free speech was nonexistent; the members of the media and press who spoke out frequently became part of the missing. It was in this environment of fear that street art became a public voice, and in the decades that followed it has continued to be part of an activist culture of art, especially in Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires. This week, filming started on a feature-length documentary called White Walls Say Nothing (Paredes blancas no dicen nada in Spanish) that aims to capture the history and contemporary vibrance of Argentine street art.
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A little corner of 21st C. heros has sprung up in the form of street art just north of McCarren Park, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Roller works by BAMN (aka By Any Means Necessary), the artist explained to Hyperallergic why he chose Swartz as the subject of his mural …
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