LA2

Born and raised in the Lower East Side, Angel Ortiz (also known as LA2), like so many other kids would write on his desks and chairs in school. When his mother put him in the NYC Boys Club, which he loved because of the access to a swimming pool. His friends at the Boys Club were already tagging up in the streets, buses and sanitation trucks when asked him to join them in using the streets as their canvas. After that, Ortiz was tagging non-stop. He became the King of the buses and sanitation trucks. His tags were everywhere, At the age of 14, Ortiz met Keith Haring, an artist from Reading ,PA. Haring was attending The School of Visual Arts and had a studio in the Lower East Side (The Rat Studio). Of all the tags he saw around the city, the "The LA2 tag" stood out to him. He asked around to see if anyone knew whose tag it was and looked for Angel for months before they were finally introduced at Junior High School 22. Here, Haring and other graffiti artists were creating a mural. He asked if anyone knew LA2, to which SOE, Angel's friend responded and said, "I can get him for you." He went to Angel 's house, told him there is a guy with funny shorts and glasses asking for him. When he skeptically went over to the school, Haring could not believe Angel was a kid! They got along right away and loved learning from each other. Ortiz showed Haring some markers tricks- Keith did not know too much about markers, but he was the King with the brushes. It was as if they had always known each other.

Their first collaboration was that first day on a taxi hood in The Rat Studio. LA2 added his tags and crew names and asked Keith if he could add squiggly lines to add energy.  Two weeks later, Haring called Ortiz and told him he had sold the piece and he wanted to collaborate with him.  Tony Shafrazi gave him his first show with their collaborations in the Fluorescent Room.  Keith Haring then asked his mother's permission to take Angel traveling. He wrote a letter to his teacher and at the age of 15 he was exhibiting in Europe. Through Haring, Ortiz met art icons like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Richard Hambleton. They exhibited for almost seven years, but continued collaborating till Keith's passing in 1991. 

 

Angel Ortiz lives in NYC and is still creating and exhibiting world wide.  LA2 HAS done work for various museums and programs, such as the Children's Museum of Arts, the Children's Museum of East End, Apple Village Arts and the Renaissance Charter School.  

 

He believes meeting Keith Haring was a blessing for both.  Humbled to this day that it was his tag that caught Keith's eye.

Adam Neate

Adam Neate's art career started in the early 2000s painting as a graffiti artist. He went on to a term he calls free art, where he would paint on found pieces of cardboard and leave them around the streets of London for people to find and take home. Over the years he left thousands of individually painted works and was one of the early pioneers of the movement that is now called Street Art. In 2006 he was given the opportunity to show his paintings in a more traditional gallery setting at Elms Lesters, showing alongside established names like Futura and Phil Frost. Since then he has been featured in prominent solo and group exhibitions worldwide to great critical acclaim.

Adam Neate (born 1977) is a British painter, conceptual artist and described by The Telegraph in 2008 as "one of the world's best-known street artists". He specialised in painting urban art on recycled cardboard, and has left thousands of works in the street for anyone to collect. He is a contributor from the movement in transferring street art into galleries. Neate's street art has garnered global interest, having been documented on CNN reports and European television. Major collectors and celebrities are fighting for his original works and international critics have lauded the artist's work. Since 2011 Neate has been mastering his own language of 'Dimensional Painting'. Elms Lesters publish a range of Adam Neate's Dimensional Editions and Multiples

Mickael Broth

Street artist, muralist, night owl, ex-vandal, skateboarder, writer- those are just a few words to describe well-known Richmond artist Mickael Broth. The 32-year-old literally made his mark in Richmond painting large scale art forms all over this town, from inside and outside of Mellow Mushroom, to 15 bike ramps for this year’s Dominion Riverrock, to a Richmond Kickers mural, even gracing RVA Magazine’s 10th anniversary cover with his colorful, trippy artwork.

Mickael Broth, also known as The Night Owl, is a Richmond, Virginia-based artist, muralist, sculptor, and writer. Mickael moved to Richmond in 2001 with the intention of painting as much graffiti as possible. His involvement in vandalism was halted abruptly with his arrest in 2004 and subsequent ten-month jail term for his crimes. Since that time, he has gone on to pursue an active (and legal) career in the arts. He was awarded a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship in 2008 for his studio work and has shown widely around the United States; from museums and galleries to alternative spaces and abandoned buildings. His work is held in numerous private and corporate collections. He has painted over two hundred public murals throughout Richmond, the United States and Europe since 2012, in addition to helping curate multiple public art festivals. Through his public art work, Mickael has been commissioned by all manner of clients, from small local businesses and nonprofits to municipal governments, museums, and Fortune 500 corporations. He has been an active member of the community, working with youth groups, as well as leading volunteer groups in the creation of collaborative public art projects. Mickael serves on the board of directors for the RVA Street Art Festival and has been instrumental in the curatorial direction of the organization since its formation in 2012. In 2013, he published Gated Community: Graffiti and Incarceration, a memoir detailing his experiences with vandalism and jail. In 2017, he was awarded a commission by the City of Richmond for the creation of an 15’ tall welded aluminum sculpture installed in front of the Hull Street Library in Richmond’s Manchester neighborhood. Mickael’s second published book, Murals of Richmond, which documents Richmond’s public art explosion, was published in November 2018 by Chop Suey Books and quickly sold out of the first printing. Mickael continues to live and work in Richmond, along with his wife and educational activist Brionna Nomi, their son Maverick Rosedale, and their shelter-dog Lil’ Nilla Bean.

http://mickaelbroth.tumblr.com/
Whurk.org/38/mickael-broth

Claudio Parentela

Claudio Parentela is an illustrator, painter, photographer, mail artist, cartoonist, collagist, journalist free lancer. He has been active for many years in the international underground scene and has collaborated with many zines,magazines of contemporary art,literary and of comics in Italy and in the world. His work can be categorized as street art but with a variety of mediums. He describes his illustration style as,"anarchic, cool, conceptual, twisted, schizophrenic, obsessive, and chaotic."

"I feel completely absolutely free only when I’m amongst my 'artistic things' and in my studio, with my photos, my papers, my colours, my glue, my scissors, my ropes, tapes, plastics, all my 1000 things I found around in the city. It’s been difficult to arrive here where I’m now but it’s a wonderful continuous magical journey, every moment and every day," he says.

What advice would you give to other artists?
To be and to continue to be, and try to be themselves. It’s so important, and then to have fun to have fun to have fun.

 

Margaret Kilgallen

Margaret Kilgallen's paintings and murals reflected a variety of influences, including the dying art of hand-painted signs, elements of American folk art, mural painting, and a variety of formal painting strategies.

At an early age, she was impressed by examples of works by Southwest and Mexican artists, and she employed these artists' use of warm colors in her own painting. Her many works in gouache and acrylic on found paper (often discarded book endpapers) reflect an interest in typographic styles and symbology that can be traced to her work as a book conservator with Dan Flanagan at the San Francisco Public Library in the early to mid-1990s.

In addition to her commissioned mural work, Kilgallen was also a graffiti artist under the tag names "Meta" and "Matokie Slaughter." The latter name, a homage to folk musician Matokie Slaughter, was specifically used for freight train graffiti, a hobo tradition that strongly influenced her work. Kilgallen was an accomplished banjo player and became an avid surfer after moving to California.

Kilgallen was an avid reader and thinker, looking to Appalachian music, signage, letterpress printing, hobo train writing, and religious and decorative arts to inform her work. Her work demonstrates her respect for and engagement with craftsmanship and the stories of everyday peoples' lives. She was especially interested in "the evidence of the maker's hand."

As she explained: I like things that are handmade and I like to see people's hand in the world, anywhere in the world; it doesn't matter to me where it is. And in my own work, I do everything by hand. I don't project or use anything mechanical, because even though I do spend a lot of time trying to perfect my line work and my hand, my hand will always be imperfect because it's human. And I think it's the part that's off that's interesting, that even if I'm doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I'll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that's where the beauty is.

Watch Place on PBS. See more from ART:21.

Edgar "Saner" Flores

Edgar "Saner" Flores is an urban artist, muralist, professor, illustrator & graphic designer.  Raised by his parents in Mexico City and surrounded by rich color and tradition, Saner developed an interest in drawing and Mexican Muralism early on.  "I visited Oaxaca a lot when I was growing up because my mother is from there, and certain traditions which they carried out there really caught my attention."  He began expressing himself on paper and through graffiti art, later going on to earn a degree in graphic design from the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico.

 

His lively & humorous images of masked characters on public walls, found objects and other canvases are influenced by Mexican custom and folklore, color, mysticism, masks, and skulls.  A mix of these lifelong interests and passions has led him to become the artist he is today.  "The masks that I use are traditional masks from Mexico."  The jaguars, coyotes, skulls, and other recurrent characters appear in my work because that parallel world is the real self, the real face. "

 

Saner's work has been featured in galleries in Mexico, the United States, London, Berlin and Barcelona.  Recent projects & exhibitions include "Kidnap Express," Mid-City Arts Los Angeles, "Nose Job," Eric Firestone Gallery East Hamptons NY, "The Bone yard Project," Tucson Arizona, "The Bone yard: Return Trip," Pima Space & Air Museum, "The Wynwood Walls," Miami/Art Basel.  He has collaborated with Kidrobot, Vans, G-Shock, HQTR Canada, Pineda Covalin, Persigna Store, Bacardi, Adidas Mexico, Televisa, and many others.

 

MEXICO CITY'S SANER - CATHARSIS - ART EXHIBIT TRAILER - OPENING SATURDAY OCTOBER 27, 2012 - NEW IMAGE ART from THE CINEMA on Vimeo.

Tobias Batz

Tobias Batz' work, a fusion of fashion photography and street art, is a respectful celebration of the female sprit. It reflects the urban landscape of New York City and its inhabitants. His cutting edge use of photography, body painting, spray paint and experimental methods of digital processing pays homage to Andy Warhol, Frederico Fellini, Man Ray and edgy fashion photographers such as Helmut Newton and Richard Avedon.

These works of art can only be called “pictures,” not “paintings,” or “drawings,” for he creates them with paint, and drawing, and photography, and digitized electronic synthesis and editing, a “palate” of all the means that the 21st Century offers to the visual artist.

Why not use them all freely interchangeably and synergistically in single works of art? Why not? You really think that given the chance Leonardo DaVinci wouldn’t have computer enhanced some of his paintings? Or that the late Renaissance Dutch hyper-realists wouldn’t have creamed in their velvet jeans to have been able to play with real photography instead of mere camera obscura?

Tobias Batz knows this very well, using paints, dyes, photos, Photoshop, computer synthesis, whatever, to create images of his urban dreamers, by a 21st. Century artist who has been one of them, and for the evolution of this multi-mode palette as the dominant creative mode of 21st. Century art. An art in which the multiplex means of its creation is entirely unbound and beside the true point of all visual art. Sorry Marshall McLuhan, but in the 21st Century, the medium is not the message, but only a delivery system for the message. The message is not the means with which it was created or the material matrix in which it exists. The message is the image itself.

Ian "Kid Zoom" Strange

Ian Strange also known as Kid Zoom is a street artist with large vision. Born in Australia, he now resides in New York CIty and creates a range of large paintings for both internal and external display. His latest works are entirely freehand aerosol spray paintings that show a remarkable facility with the medium. Kid-Zoom is relatively new to the street art scene but has already gathered a devoted following and an appreciation from other established street artists like Ron English. 

Dan Witz

Dan Witz, born 1957, Chicago, IL, is a street artist in the finest sense. He attended Cooper Union in New York City’s East Village. In 1982 he received a NEA grant and in 1992 and 2000 fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His first book, “The Birds of Manhattan” was published in 1983 by Skinny Books. Solo exhibitions include Semaphore Gallery NY (1985,1986), Clementine Gallery (1996), StolenSpace, London (2007); DFN Gallery NY (2003-5, 6, 7, 8, 10) and Carmichael Gallery, LA (2009). Group exhibitions include: Buying Time: Nourishing Excellence, Sotheby’s NY(2001); and Fifteen, NYFA Fellows at Deutsche Bank, NY (1999). Submission (curated by Juxtapoz) Fuse Gallery NY (2005); From The Streets of Brooklyn, Think­space Art Gallery, LA (2009) and Beach Blanket Bingo, Jonathan Levine Gallery NY(2009). Dan lives and works in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Prolific author, video star and artist.

 

Ron English

One of the most prolific and recognizable artists alive today, Ron English has bombed the global landscape with unforgettable images, on the street, in museums, in movies, books and television. English coined the term POPaganda to describe his signature mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones, from superhero mythology to totems of art history, populated with his vast and constantly growing arsenal of original characters, including MC Supersized, the obese fast-food mascot featured in the hit movie “Supersize Me,” and Abraham Obama, the fusion of America’s 16th and 44th Presidents, an image widely discussed in the media as directly impacting the 2008 election. Other characters carousing through English’s art, in paintings, billboards, and sculpture include three-eyed rabbits, udderly delicious cowgirls and grinning skulls, blending stunning visuals with the bitingly humorous undertones of America’s Premier Pop Iconoclast.