I spotted this on my lunch break today:
A contemporary, street-level sequel to Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased De Kooning Drawing“… or is tape just that much cheaper than paint?
Either way, I love it.
(And yes, I have already submitted this to There, I Fixed It.)
Popularity: 6% [?]
I was walking South on Seventh Avenue from Penn Station yesterday when I came across this great, rushed piece of Michael Jackson memorial graffiti:
It’s everything I like about folk art — public, not too fussy, and definitely puts passion over precision.
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Spotted in SoHo:
Consider this an open call for people to illustrate that showdown. I’m talking anything from drawings on napkins to multi-million dollar blockbuster films. Make this happen, internet.
For additional inspiration, allow me to direct you to some awesome character illustrations by friend-of-a-friend Chris Bishop:
(more on Mr. Bishop’s Flickr page.)
Popularity: 4% [?]
Flipping through my Flickr contacts, I was chuffed to discover that our lad Poster Boy has been collaborating with another practitioner of imprompru aesthetic interventions, tape-slinger Aakash Nihalani:
There are more on Nihalani’s website, under STREET ART > COLLAB.
Chances are, if you have working eyeballs and have been around northwestern Brooklyn or lower-mid-Manhattan lately, you’ve seen Aakash Nihalani’s tape-cubes. The things that I enjoy about his work are things that I myself gravitate toward in my own art-activity: bright colors against dull city surfaces, and simple gestures which serve to highlight and elevate small details that would otherwise seem insignificant. (And I also, obviously, have an affinity for colored tape as an artist material.)
Here are a couple of videos that I found of Aakash in action:
Popularity: 3% [?]
I saw this in the subway stop by my apartment on Friday night — Poster Boy’s latest, if I’m not mistaken:
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You may have noticed D.Billy’s name on a number of posts over the past few months. He’s not only a friend of mine, but a pretty awesome artist.
From the artist’s statement on his website:
Using colorful media such as twisting balloons, party streamers, and artist tape, I have begun to add visual representations of sound effects to public spaces as a sort of dimensional graffiti. After embellishing the found scenes and photographing the results, I leave my additions in place to engage passers-by for as long as the materials hold up. For me, this process encourages a reexamination of surroundings and objects that are usually taken for granted, and injects a hint of the fantastical surreality that I have established in my other work.
Or, at the very least, I hope someone thinks these things are kind of funny.
Here’s some of his work:
More after the jump …
Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 3% [?]
In the Northernmost part of Greenpoint, just about as far up as you can go in Brooklyn without falling in Newtown Creek and drifting across the sludge-channel to Queens, there is an ever-changing graffiti mural on the corner of Clay and McGuinness, on the walls of the Power Brake Service shop. We’ve seen employees on site while artists are laying it down, and even saw an NYPD cruiser stop by for a short chat with a tagger before rolling along without so much as a finger-wagging, so we reckon the building owner either approves of the paint job, or at least isn’t bothered by it.
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A friend sent this to me a few years back:
I just rediscovered it in the ol’ archives, and man, it never gets old for me.
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My friend David William is helping me beef up the NY/Web-based arts coverage here, just to get more content moving through the pipes and be another set of eyes, ears, and opinions on the street. We’ve been friends for a while now, and I’ve loved his art and aesthetic for a long time. Make sure and make him feel welcome, folks, while we monkey with the technicalities of setting him up with his owner user account here.
He writes in here with his first guest post:
Walking past the Taco Bell on 14th street, just West of Union Square, I spotted these two new cut-and-shuffle jobs:
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Shepard Fairey’s cool and all, and Wooster Collective rounds up some of the best graffiti on the streets. But me, I love the dashed-off graffiti in New York the best — the hastily scrawled line or two that completely cracks me up. Simply scribbling a dirty word doesn’t cut ice. There’s got to be wit, vision, or some kind of instant art. I saw a poster for Cats once where people had sculpted little genitalia out of chewing gum and stuck it on all the leaping cat-dancer crotches in a sort of wordless 3-D sculpture.
I don’t know why this adulterated poster in the 8th Avenue A/C/E/L station cracks me up so much, but it sure enough does:
Here’s a closeup:
Popularity: 2% [?]
