Art
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From Bushwick Block Party To Street Art Park?

Avatar photo by Hrag Vartanian

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.

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5 Intriguing Projects From Dalton and Powhida’s #Rank in Miami

by Kyle Chayka

If you, like so many art-worlders, are heading to the Miami art fairs next week, chances are you may be feeling a little grimy. Why? Not because of the humidity, but maybe because of the exploitative economic interactions and hierarchies on display at US’s biggest art shopping mall. The antidote to all this is #Rank, an event organized by artists William Powhida and Jen Dalton in collaboration with the Edward Winkleman Gallery, which will be park at the Seven art fair. #Rank will critique the blatant displays of wealth and status and the stratification of the art world through panels, artist projects and lectures. The details of #Rank were until recently unclear aside from a call for proposals, but now Powhida and Dalton have started announcing their artist projects, and they sound great. Here’s a preview of 5 projects that I find particularly interesting.

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YouTube Archive + Anarchy, Part 3

by Brent Burket

For the third and final installment in his series of YouTube Essays, called YouTube Archive + Anarchy, blogger and curator Brent Burket pretty much goes for broke. If this doesn’t get you pumped about YouTube, or at least disturbed enough to stop using it for a few days, there’s no hope for you. From black metal to necrophilia, surrealism and Alice Cooper, these are the YouTube videos you only find at 2 in the morning after a night of heavy drinking. Also, Jeffrey Deitch gets punched and bitches out his attackers like Woody Allen in a pink suit.

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Seychelle Allah Talks Space Slave Trade & His Aggregate Style

Avatar photo by Hrag Vartanian

One of the figures behind Space Slave Trade, Seychelle Allah discusses his brand of afrofuturism that layers the visual culture around him into a world in which the aggregate plays an important role.

Allah’s relationship with social media has been complex. Space Slave Trade, named after a friend’s band, started after he was kicked off Facebook for sharing images deemed inappropriate by the service. The resulting blog is NSFW and careens from porn-like images with young Asian girls to absurd representations of starving Africans. The aesthetic is young, fresh, and aggressive without being violent.

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Sound of Art is Loud, Sound of Partying Louder

by Kyle Chayka

Last Thursday, Paddy Johnson (AKA ArtFagCity) held a debut party for her ambient sound-collecting DJ battle record Sound of Art at Santos Party House, and I think our small sector of the art world collectively took the morning off on Friday. This short vacation ended with your humble writer as well as the Hyperallergic editor stumbling into work around 11am accompanied by groans and sensitivity to light. Thanks to the musicians that spun the album in their sets that night, the conclusion after the party, and post-copious LP and vodka sales, was that art sounds pretty loud, but art-partying sounds louder.

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YouTube Archive + Anarchy, Part 2

by Brent Burket

For the second in his series of YouTube Essays, YouTube Archive + Anarchy, blogger and curator Brent Burket selects a mix of art and music, collecting YouTube music videos, amateur documentation of video art pieces and performance art. Check out a Katy Perry introduction and feminist firecracker Karen Finley invading a Sinead O’Connor song, to disastrous and hilarious effect. Click through for the complete VJ set.

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YouTube Archive + Anarchy, Part 1

by Brent Burket

For a fan of art like me, YouTube is a gold mine. I remember when I was in college about the only access I had to the art and music scene in New York City was pouring over the New York Times in the library. The rest was imagination. YouTube brings art and music closer, no matter where you are or when you are. It’s a crazy archive that holds art, new and old. Sometimes its been sanctioned by the artist. Sometimes, not so much. The best thing about art on YouTube is the access that it allows for the viewer and also because of the exposure for artists. Some artists and gallerists might have an issue with that last point. But quite frankly, that’s their problem. Click through for a journey into YouTube’s anarchic archive of art and artistic materials.

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Art + Sparks at BETA

by Jorge Martin

Last Sunday’s BETA Spaces 2010 didn’t disappoint as we all got what we were looking for. Organized by the all-volunteer organization Arts In Bushwick, BETA Spaces (Bushwick Exhibition Triangle of Alternative Spaces) offered the public a big block party full of art. A truly overwhelming affair with more than 50 exhibitions spread out across galleries, studios, apartments, temporary locations, and any place else that could possibly contain art, it displayed the works of 400 artists in a fantastic collaboration between curators, artists, and art fans of all kind.

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Punch Me Panda by Nate Hill Starts Today

Avatar photo by Hrag Vartanian

Starting today, artist Nate Hill will be performing his newest piece, “Punch Me Panda” (2010) at #TheSocialGraph. If you are in Brooklyn, you can text (347-742-2293) or tweet Hill (@natexhill) to come to your home, where you can punch him for one penny. This is the first-time the artist has performed in the context of a gallery show and a rare opportunity to see “Punch Me Panda” in his natural habitat.

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Blue Chip Chelsea: Keifer, Rauschenberg, Sugimoto + Surprises

by Kyle Chayka

Yesterday afternoon, I ventured out into the bordering on bad weather and braved the gray skies to bring you the latest on Chelsea this November. The gallery district is probably much as you remember it, with high-end galleries showing off their blue chip stables and smaller spaces skipping to keep up. Yet there are still pleasant surprises to be found in the warehouse-strewn streets, from lesser known painters that include (gasp!) a ceramicist to commercial shows that may as well be museum retrospectives. Continue below for the blow-by-blow of my blue-chip Chelsea trip.

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A Trip Through BETA Spaces

by James Daniel

I spent my Sunday wandering into the living spaces of Bushwick, searching for art, and there was a lot to find. Though, much of what I found seemed to have woken up at 11:30am to start setting up for the event that technically started at noon. Truly, I didn’t mind. Who am I to complain, when I’m spending my day invading the homes of artists?

The experience for me was as much about walking through the grey, unwelcoming streets of Bushwick as it was seeing the plethora of work being created there. It was stumbling around, looking for the garage entrance; It was walking down a dark, graffiti’d hallway, wondering if I was even on the right floor; and it was opening the many different doors to find vibrant colors, projections, snacks, wine, or any other sort of welcoming warmth.