Last Saturday’s All City Block Party at Factory Fresh in Bushwick attracted street art fans and artists to cover the walls of the block-long Vandervoort Place with murals and art work by Brooklyn talents, including Chris Stain, Gaia, Skewville, Imminent Disaster and Tek33 and Dscreet of London’s Burning Candy crew.
Of course, photographer Luna Park has the goods at The Street Spot, and there are some more pics on Juxtapoz via Gaia, but I wanted to talk to Ali Ha, co-founder of Factory Fresh, about the project. I was dying to ask her what exactly is going on with Vandervoort Place and their dream of turning it into a street art park or more specifically an artist-run green space for the community.
A large piece by Gaia greets pedestrians on Vandervoort (image via The Street Spot)
Hrag Vartanian: Can you tell me what the block party was all about and Factory Fresh’s role?
Ali Ha: Much like the actual day itself it all just kinda came together. Originally we had tried to do the block party back in June during Bushwick Open Studios soley for the park with Jason [Andrew] from Norte Maar as our sponsor however our permit didn’t get approved till the day before so we cancelled the event back then. Then Vandolog contacted me about showing the “Burning Candy Film” just before Miami Basel. Finally, All City contacted me in August wanting to do a block party with Vendors and Adam and I mentioned our wall. We had permission to start painting on Vandervoort permanently and we decided to put all of it together and have a big event for street art. We met with Marcus and we made a list of artists cordinated logistics. All City contacted artists and worked on the main details for the event, we just helped make it all happen and hosted a bunch of our friends in the process.
HV: So, how realistic is this idea of making a street art park on Vandervoort Place?
AH: We have already been working on it for two years. The Parks Department had us documenting the broken into cars and the piles of matresses and tires people dump daily. And since the street doesn’t have any cut curbs other than ours it is a reality we do believe we can make happen one day. But we have always thought it would take 5-10 years.
We have a fund & we work with trustart.org to help get us thru some of the red tape. The idea was presented at TED Confrence last year on our behalf thru Trustart. You can read more about it here.
Saturday we got a bunch of signatures for our petition so it was a great day for getting another step closer to our goal.
Top image of Deeker at work is via Luna Park at The Street Spot (with permission)
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