Almost completely left out of the Jeffrey Deitch-organized Art in The Streets at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art and minimally referenced in its exhibition catalogue and other recently published surveys of graffiti and street art, the historical importance of Fashion 时装 Moda МОДА has been lost to a generation of artists and graffiti-lovers. It’s time for that to change.
Art in the Streets
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Deitch Listens as Carlo McCormick Brings Up Blu Whitewash
According to the art world’s favorite vlogger, James Kalm, Art in the Streets essayist Carlo McCormick spoke on June 19 at MOCA and Jeffrey Deitch was in the crowd.
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Brooklyn Museum Nixes Street Art Show
The Brooklyn Museum has issued a press release stating that it will no longer be hosting LA MOCA’s Art in the Streets exhibition, which was scheduled to appear in Brooklyn next spring.
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Required Reading
Jeff Koons’s art collection, thoughts on LA MOCA’s questionable art history, Invader in Paris, a tour of the Calatrava building in Milwaukee, something fishy about Warhol, iPhone photography and corporate culture and the US government … all on this week’s Required Reading.
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Street Artist Gets Jilted by LA MoCA, Bombs Bathroom
Becca Midwood, a downtown LA street artist working since the mid-1990s, got pulled from LA Museum of Contemporary Art’s Art in the Streets exhibition due to a “last minute curatorial choice.” Becca gets her work in the museum anyway, though, with a wheatpaste in the museum’s bathroom. Check out this video of the guerrilla operation.
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Pantheon Puts Street Artists Behind Glass
Across the street from the Museum of Modern Art at West 53rd Street is an exhibition that might be unexpected for those expecting only Van Goghs and Picassos. Pantheon: a history of art from the streets of NYC is an attempt to create solidified narrative of street art history, to pin down this ephemeral art form into something more lasting, and more didactic. The team behind Pantheon, including co-curators Joyce Manalo and Daniel Feral, have put street art behind glass, creating a visually striking display that actually manages to insulate the art from the viewers, divorcing street art from its natural context. Though this art is visible from the street through the space’s huge plate glass windows, this is not street art in its most literal (and historical) form.
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Street Artist Space Invader Arrested in LA?
The Los Angeles Police Department caught and arrested two French nationals vandalizing buildings with “buckets of grout and pieces of tile” near the LA Museum of Contemporary Art’s Little Tokyo gallery this past Friday. One of the vandals seems to be the famed French street artist Space Invader, reports the LA Times.
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Everyone Wants to be First
There is apparently something about institutional street art shows that move museum folk towards declarations of their firstness. Street Art at the Tate Modern in 2008 was billed as “the first major public museum display of Street Art in London” while just last winter Hugh Davies, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, glowed that he was “really proud” to be “the first (American) museum to do an international street art show of this scale and scope.”
Art In The Streets, the latest and of course much buzzed exhibition opening at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art is billed by MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch as — surprise surprise — “the first exhibition to position the work … from street culture in the context of contemporary art history.”
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Unurth: “Art in the Streets” Is a Missed Opportunity
Sebastian Buck of Unurth, which is arguably the premiere street art photo blog, has a lot of visual goodies from LA MOCA’s Art in the Streets show. He also has some very interesting thoughts on the show, which officially opens tomorrow:
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Graffiti Writers Start a Game of Tag with LA’s MOCA
Raise your hand if you’re not surprised that LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art is getting tagged by a whole bunch of graffiti writers because of the upcoming Art in the Streets show? Well, Katsu is doing his part on the heels of an attention-grabbing faux MoMA/Nike ad series he pulled off in New York a few weeks ago. According to 12ozProphet, the massive Katsu fire extinguisher tag has some supporters in the upcoming museum show.
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Graffiti’s US History & Art in the Streets: Interview with Roger Gastman
On April 17, MOCA LA’s Art in the Streets exhibition opens. The show, which was organized in roughly a year or since Deitch became director of the institution, promises to be a major exploration of street art, graffiti and skateboard culture at one of the country’s most important contemporary art institutions. Today, I spoke to one of the exhibition’s curators, Roger Gastman about his important new book, The History of American Graffiti, which he co-authored with Caleb Neelon, and the MOCA show.
Posted inOpinion
Deitch Breaks Silence On Blu Whitewash
MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch has finally broken his silence and spoken to the Los Angeles Times over the recent whitewashing of the Blu wall commissioned for the upcoming Art in the Streets exhibition, which will be the first major US museum show featuring street art.