According to Untapped City, spray paint cans are the latest unconventional objects in New York City to be arranged in the form of a Christmas tree. Standing in Freeman Alley at the UNTITLED Hotel on the Lower East Side, this graffiti-themed tree is made entirely of spray paint cans sourced from artists within the LES community and supplies from the iconic All City Legends art shop in Harlem. The festive display honors the creators who have made the alley a new street art hotspot.
Walking down Freeman Alley is like walking through a hidden art gallery. The building walls on either side are covered in colorful street art and wheat pastings. Jimmy Wright, an artist who lives in a 19th-century stable on Freeman Alley, told WNYC that there has been street art there since the 1980s, but the proliferation of art really took off during the Black Lives Matter protests.
The alley runs about halfway through the block between Rivington and Stanton Streets, parallel to Bowery and Chrystie Street. It opens at Rivington and dead-ends at Freeman's Restaurant which opened in 2004. The alley is just a few blocks away from another popular street art spot, the Bowery Wall Mural at the corner of Houston Street, where artists like Keith Haring, JR, and Banksy have left their marks.
In the early 1900s, Freeman Alley was where the bread lines would form for the nearby Bowery Mission. The short stretch of street was officially de-mapped at that time. Over the course of the 20th century, the alley remained a largely forgotten backstreet. Now, Freeman Alley is a vibrant corridor flanked by shops, restaurants, galleries, and the UNTITLED Hotel.
The tree will be on display through the holiday season on the ground floor outdoor terrace of UNTITLED hotel located at 3 Freeman Alley. Guests are invited to tag the tree with their own sticker “ornaments.”
According to Altas Obscura, every December 23, crowds gather in Oaxaca's main square to celebrate the Night of the Radishes, or La Noche de Rábanos. It’s a competition between artists who use the purple produce to make sculptures and, hopefully, win the big prize of the night.
All kinds of sculptures can be seen—saints, musicians, buildings, even a tiny cemetery where little radish people are celebrating the Day of the Dead. As Mexico is a heavily Catholic country, religious themes are common. Radish replicas of Michelangelo's La Pietà and da Vinci's The Last Supper have made appearances. To ensure fair competition, everyone uses vegetables grown by the government for the festival. And these radishes are big: Some grow 1.5 feet long and can weigh almost seven pounds.
The festival starts in the morning, when everyone can see the artists working on their sculptures, but wait until night if you want to see the finished masterpieces. The festival also features concerts around the city, fireworks, and light shows.
Don't get me wrong. I love Osgemeos, having seen their work in many international cities. But I get a bit worried when major museums begin to showcase street art. I think that the allure of street art is its unabashed freedom that is not restricted by established museum walls. So now as per the Washington Post.....
Museum shows can be death for street art. Osgemeos look alive and well.
In a Hirshhorn show squirming with energy, the famous Brazilian twins toss out discernment for populist exuberance.
You could write a lengthy history of efforts by artists to bust out of the studios, galleries and wealthy homes that traditionally confine them. A lot of those efforts create friction. Graffiti art is part of this story. The identical twins Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, known to the world as Osgemeos (Portuguese for “the twins”), have been the face of Brazilian graffiti art for several decades now. Their gradual crossover into mainstream international art-world acceptance is sealed by a year-long exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum. Organized by Marina Isgro with the support of CJ Greenhill Caldera, “Osgemeos: Endless Story” is billed as the artists’ first U.S. museum survey and the largest U.S. exhibition of their work.
I would not fight to the death with anyone who described Osgemeos’s work as twee and repetitive. And yet, honestly, I love it. “Endless Story” is an unusually exuberant museum show. Imaginatively installed across a full floor at the Hirshhorn, it feels joyous, funny and unstuffy.
The Pandolfo twins grew up in São Paulo and became world-famous multimedia artists known as Osgemeos. (Filipe Berndt/Osgemeos)
Born in 1974, the Pandolfo twins grew up in São Paulo. They weren’t yet 10 when they first encountered hip-hop culture. Under the influence of their older brother Arnaldo, they took to drawing and their parents soon enrolled them in a free art course. “Wild Style,” an influential film about hip-hop, was a big early influence, and by 1986 they had transformed themselves into young B-boys — a local DJ nicknamed them Os Gemeos — hanging out at the São Bento subway station in São Paulo, breakdancing, rapping and making graffiti.
By the 2000s, the Pandolfo twins were making major murals on city walls and subway cars, even as they were showing in commercial galleries. In 2004, in the lead-up to the Summer Olympic Games, they were invited to make two murals in the host city, Athens. The following year they made their first New York mural outside a Coney Island subway station, and they later made a mural in downtown Manhattan, on the same site (the intersection of Houston Street and the Bowery) as a famous mural by Keith Haring. They were establishing pedigree.
When Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art gave them a solo show in 2012, the exhibit was complemented by a large-scale mural commission — a boy in patterned pajamas crouching in a space that was perfectly congruent with the building’s silhouette. An eruption of color and pattern in gray downtown Boston, it totally transformed the cityscape.
The Hirshhorn presentation includes a montage of blown-up photographs of Osgemeos’s best-known murals, which have appeared all over the world.
Of course, institutional acceptance in the form of commissioned murals is one thing. But my sense is that, within the graffiti community, art world success, in the shape of museum surveys and commercial gallery representation, can be fatal to street credibility. So be it. If success is a deathbed, Osgemeos look surprisingly alive and comfortable in it.
Their show squirms with energy. Every gallery is different. Early on, a phalanx of display cabinets teems with sketches, comic strips and graffiti paraphernalia, all of it revealing the twins’ working methods and impressive drawing skills. As you go further in, you sense a creative partnership that thrives on expansion — into film, sculpture and installation art, and the creation of futuristic fantasy worlds.
Remember when I complained about Street Art clothing designs being co-opted by high society at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Well here is a clothing line that I can get behind - one by the Graffiti Museum in Miami. Please check it out.
Always Keeping It Fresh!
Shop Our Exclusive Apparal Line Below
Explore our exclusive collection of apparel and accessories, designed to make a statement! From bold streetwear to unique, hats, totes and more!
We opened our latest exhibition in Shanghai, and here's what you need to know.
During the last week of September, graffiti artists from around the world met in Shanghai to prepare an empty exhibition space to become the Museum of Graffiti's first exhibition in China. With a striking combination of site-specfic murals, interactive build-outs, and large scale original works dating back to 1974, the "Street Echos" exhibit has proven to be our most ambitious performance to date. Our team remains in great gratitude to our Chinese partners at AFA who (literally) rolled out the red carpet for the graffiti art movement. Highlights from the Grand Opening event included a live performance by Jon One, the unveiling of a giant, interactive robot sculpture by Delta (Boris Tellegen) that guests could slide though, and of course a dance party on the train.
Check out a few flicks below, but please head to this link on our website to see all the photos and get more information about all the participating artists and how to visit in case you are headed overseas!
What do you get when you cross old cigarette vending machines with the art world? Art-o-Mat! Art-o-Mat uses these old vending machines to display and sell small affordable art works.
The inspiration for Art-o-mat® came to artist Clark Whittington while observing a friend who had a Pavlovian reaction to the crinkle of cellophane. When the friend heard someone opening a snack from a vending machine, he had the uncontrollable urge to buy a snack as well.
In June 1997, Clark was set to have a solo art show at a local cafe, Penny Universitie in Winston-Salem, N.C. He used a recently-banned cigarette machine to create the first Art-o-mat® and it was exhibited along with 12 of his paintings. The machine sold Polaroid black & white photographs mounted on blocks for $1.00 each.
The show was scheduled to be dismantled in July 1997. However, owner Cynthia Giles loved the machine and asked that it stay permanently. At that point, it was clear that involvement from other artists would be needed if the project was going to continue. Cynthia introduced Clark to a handful of other local artists and the group Artists in Cellophane (AIC) was formed.
The machine remains unaltered and now resides in Delurk Gallery in Winston-Salem, NC.
AIC is the sponsoring organization of Art-o-mat®. The mission of AIC is to encourage art consumption by combining the worlds of art and commerce in an innovative form. AIC believes that art should be progressive, yet personal and approachable. What better way to do this, than with a heavy, cold, steel machine?
Bravo to Hyperallergic which celebrates a great street art initiative in Los Angeles resulting in a fascinating and glorious exhibition. Makes me want to travel there to see it!
The Craziest Art in Los Angeles May Be Underground
An exhibition at Superchief Gallery explores the work of Operation Under, a collective of artists using subterranean tunnels as their canvas.
LOS ANGELES — Just after dawn on a recent weekday morning, at the edge of a nondescript parking lot somewhere in LA County, I met three members of Operation Under (OU), a clandestine collective of graffiti artists, painters, photographers, nature devotees, and urban anthropologists. We donned rubber boots and hi-vis safety vests, walked past a “No Trespassing” sign, hopped a low fence, and entered a drainage tunnel.
We set off in the pitch blackness, a path illuminated only by flashlights. Examples of old stoner graffiti were visible near the entrance but quickly faded further in, replaced by scuttling roaches, swooping bats, nesting birds, and other subterranean flora and fauna.
“One of the things is we don’t leave breadcrumbs all the way to the entrance,” OU member Evan Skrederstu told me, sloshing through a shallow stream of slimy water that flowed down the center of the path.
Half an hour later, the tunnel opened up into a small chamber containing two works by OU: Skrederstu’s trompe l’oeil painting of a wild-eyed woman appearing to break through the concrete wall and a portrait of a Mexican hairless Xoloitzcuintli dog by Tank One. We ventured further, crouching down as the tunnel got smaller, until Skrederstu stopped abruptly. In the distance, gleaming eyes stared back: a family of raccoons. “I’m not trying to mess with that,” he said, retreating and returning to the outside world just as most people were getting ready to start their day.
Underground tunnel artwork by Evan Skrederstu (photo Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)
The tunnel was one of over 100 that Operation Under has explored and created art in over the past seven years. Now, the exhibition Life Underground at Superchief Gallery just south of Downtown LA brings the group’s mysterious workings to the surface, featuring original artwork by dozens of OU participants alongside photo and video documentation of their exploits. The walls are covered salon-style in painted banners, a recurring motif in their work that conjures a sense of old-world exploration, akin to planting a flag, and the back of the gallery has been turned into a kind of stage-set of a tunnel, complete with a family of curious raccoons, one of whom wields a paint roller. A makeshift tattoo studio behind a faux concrete wall occupies one corner, as illusionistically painted green water trickles from a fabricated pipe. This Saturday, August 24, Superchief will host a panel discussion with Skrederstu; author Susan Phillips; LA graffiti legend Chaz Bojorquez; and other scholars from the worlds of street art, ecology, biology, and beyond.
Installation view of Life Underground at Superchief Gallery LA (photo courtesy Superchief Gallery LA)
OU members wear many hats, and count tattoo artists and scenic painters among their ranks, contributing a sense of technical polish to their work below and above ground. The subject matter in the show reflects the eclecticism of the collective, including elaborate text-based graffiti tags, Aztec imagery, fantastical creatures, references to the natural world, and cartoons. Unsurprisingly, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, pop culture’s most beloved underground dwellers, make a couple of appearances.
Operation Under officially began on January 1, 2017. According to ESK31, the group’s “de facto leader,” he and fellow artist Ser@la were painting in a tunnel they had previously wandered into as kids growing up in LA. “He was gonna write ‘Operation Underground’ but he ran out of room, so he wrote ‘Operation Under’ and put a ‘#1’ next to it,” ESK31 explained. This was the first of many “missions” in tunnels all over LA County (with a few ventures out in Texas, Hawaii, and even Ecuador), each sequentially numbered, that the loose collective has since completed. “It didn’t start with grand initiative,” ESK31 said. “It turned into what it became organically.”
Detail of raccoon murals by Christopher Brand in Life Underground (photo Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)
Angelenos have been leaving their marks on overlooked sites of urban infrastructure for decades — on tunnels, bridges, and train yards and along the concretized channel of the LA River.
“These forms of historical graffiti — by children, partying teens, workers, gang writing — slowly got covered by modern graffiti, tagging. Then when they got into rollers, they decimated historical writing,” explained Susan Phillips, who explored this history in her 2019 book The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti. OU is certainly not the first group of LA artists to use underground spaces as their canvas; however, their novel approach unites their disparate tunnel paintings into one sprawling collective conceptual artwork.
Donning rubber boots and hi-vis safety vests, members of Operation Under use underground tunnels as their canvas. (image courtesy Superchief Gallery LA)
Murals by Operation Under (photo by Bill Dunleavy, courtesy Superchief Gallery LA)
In response to the ephemeral nature of street art, OU was driven to create work that would stand the test of time. Working in the tunnels is a way to avoid erasure by both civic authorities and fellow artists eager to claim a coveted spot, as well as protect artwork from the harmful rays of the sun.
“They got frustrated with how much work you do just to end up getting buffed,” said Superchief co-founder Bill Dunleavy, who spent two years working with OU on the show.
“There’s never a need to go over someone in a tunnel (beef excluded),” longtime OU member ADZE added. “If you keep walking, you’ll eventually find plenty of nice blank walls to paint on.”
Although some members use spray paint, most OU artists work with brushes and acrylic paint, a more stable medium that holds up better in the dank environment. It also serves as a cover if confronted by authorities. “When you’ve got spray cans, you’re a vandal” in the eyes of police, said an OU member who goes by Sick.
Operation Under was driven to create work that would stand the test of time. (photo by Bill Dunleavy, courtesy Superchief Gallery LA)
Although the secret, secluded locations might seem to preclude the wide visibility that graffiti artists above ground strive for, OU members view documentation as a way to disseminate their work. “Photography is our form of visibility. It is a way to control how our work is represented,” said Sick, noting that it is also a way to control how their work is monetized. They have published four books chronicling the project.
Despite the technically illicit nature of their prohibited excursions, there is a certain element of youthful whimsy and infectious curiosity inherent in OU’s project. “It’s a little like time travel meets juvenile exploration, secret club activity meets urban history,” Phillips said.
“We live in a pretty regulated society,” Skrederstu added. “OU makes these little openings into a part of it that people don’t talk about, that you didn’t even know existed.”
Installation view of Life Underground at Superchief Gallery LA (photo Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)
Installation view of Life Underground at Superchief Gallery LA (photo Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic)
I have been an advocate for street art for many, many years partly because I saw it as an anti-establishment form of expression, forgoing galleries and museums and bringing some pretty amazing talent directly to the people without any effete curation.
So what am I to think when I see the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC offering Sprayground - a Pop Up store at the museum that offers what appears to be fashion and accessories with spray paint street art graffiti designs "while supplies last"?
Well, what I think is that street art has now been co-opted by the very institutions that tried to suppress it and has effectively "jumped the shark" meaning that it is over as a revolutionary form of expression.
I don't mind museums showcasing street art - the Miami based Museum of Graffiti is a great example of how we can celebrate that art form without diminishing it. But the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Really??
Once seen as a real estate blight, graffiti has become part of the urban fabric in many US cities. In Atlanta, street art is omnipresent in some of the trendiest neighborhoods. And places like the heavily-sprayed Krog Street Tunnel, near the BeltLine, are not only embraced by residents; they’re safe spaces for anyone with a spray can — even as graffiti remains illegal in most of the city.
It’s the result of years of behind-the-scenes work by Atlanta’s style writers to push for their culture’s preservation and decriminalization. Today they are driving forces in the conversation about public art. Read more by Brentin Mock today on CityLab: Graffiti Can Be a Neighborhood Asset, If Cities Embrace It
This great article in the Washington Post covers what I just read about in an art-related website. I am all for this type of thing and would encourage it on all dormant gentrification projects. I wish I could go to LA and see this masterpiece! Bravo!
Here is the article since it may be behind a paywall. I have a subscription.
It’s been about five years since Actual was a regular on the Los Angeles graffiti scene. He said he got on the “straight and narrow” when his daughter was born. But when graffitists started converging on an abandoned development in the city, he thought: “Am I going to be that guy that just said, ‘Oh yeah, I saw it happen. That was cool’ — or am I going to be that dude that was a part of it?”
The sky-high graffiti covering dozens of floors of the Oceanwide Plaza development in downtown L.A., a $1 billion project that was abandoned in 2019, has captured the world’s attention. It’s created eye candy for Instagram. It’s become fodder for conversations about urban blight and foreign investment. And despite graffiti’s undeniable rise to the mainstream, it’s reignited an old debate over whether it is art or vandalism.
To the graffitists participating and the experts watching, the “bombing” — as it’s called in the graffiti world — is more than a stunt or a crime. In a culture where visibility rules, the painted skyscrapers have become a landmark, literally taking the art form to a higher level. For them, it’s a historic moment.
Actual couldn’t pass it up. On his first attempt to enter the complex, he got caught and ran out. On his second, he saw security chasing a group of graffitists and tried to enter from the other direction. Another guard was waiting. Then, on his third try, he squeezed in through a hole in a fence that was covered by a construction sign. When he got into one of the towers, heart pounding, the real challenge began: “It was a big climb,” said Actual, who, like other graffitists mentioned in this story, spoke on the condition that he be identified by his tag name to discuss the illegal artwork. He wanted to paint higher than others, but by the time he reached the 36th floor, “I couldn’t walk; all my leg muscles were just shot.” So he scoped out a spot and got to work. “It was like a trance,” he said. “You’re so high up that it’s not until you come back down that you deal with the world again.”
The effort wasn’t wasted. Susan Phillips, author of “The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti” and a professor at Pitzer College in California, said in an email that it was “perhaps the most legendary roll call in the history of Los Angeles.” Roger Gastman, a longtime graffiti curator and historian, said there’s been “a boom in street work the last few years unlike anything I have seen since the 1990s,” and the buildings show “that graffiti is bigger than ever.”
The reaction was, of course, not entirely positive. The Central City Association of Los Angeles released a statement saying it was “disturbed by the images of the vandalism” and calling for the city to “address this blighted property before it becomes a further nuisance.” The LAPD said Wednesday that it had arrested four suspects and was investigating “numerous crimes.”
In a social media statement last week, it said that additional security measures would be “implemented immediately” and that the graffiti will be removed. The department did not reply to a request for further information. In California, vandalism is punishable with jail time as well as fines. On Tuesday, Michael Delahaut, who lives across the street, said he was watching police raid the buildings. To the 54-year-old, who has been in the L.A. graffiti scene since the 1980s, the creation outside his window was no nuisance — it was more like waking up and finding a masterpiece had been installed in his living room. “It would’ve taken hundreds of writers, tens of thousands of cans. It’s amazing,” he said. “I’ve been able to witness a lot of graffiti movement moments, but this might be the biggest.”
The opportunity was created by a “perfect storm” of factors, Delahaut said. Buildings in the luxury complex, put up by Chinese firm Oceanwide Holdings, reached as high as 55 stories before the company put the project on hold in 2019 because of financial troubles, the Los Angeles Times reported. In December, the security company responsible for the property sued the developer, saying it had stopped paying. Oceanwide Holdings did not respond to a request for comment. After the first night that pieces started going up, Delahaut said, he expected security to ramp up. It didn’t. By the next night, “it was clearly a scene,” he said.
Delahaut watched with the fascination of a curator. He admired the typography, kept a record of the artists’ progress — noting that he might need it for a later exhibition — and likened the work to the classic style captured on the cover of Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s canonical 1988 book, “Subway Art.” (He also compared it to a smaller project on a building in Miami last year.) As a former graffitist himself, he couldn’t help but think through the logistics: “The process of getting into the building, climbing up the stairs and figuring out how much you got to carry,” Delahaut said. “Graffiti is so much more than the act itself.” Some have looked at the graffiti as a symbol for the state of Los Angeles.
Phillips, the author and professor, said that in a place increasingly molded by private money, the work is a “powerful commentary about who gets to shape what.” Stefano Bloch, a cultural geographer at the University of Arizona who studies graffiti, called it “an exposé on the failure of oversized development,” made “in vibrant colors that force us to look up.”
But the artists are split on their motivations. Aqua, a graffitist and fine artist who worked on the high-rise project, said in an email that for those involved, it was all about location. “It is in the heart of the city with high visibility. What a gem!” For Actual, the work gave new voice to the streets. “The money invested in [the buildings] could have done so much for this city,” he said. Now, he said, the graffiti is a reminder: “That’s every single kid in this city just putting their name down, showing they exist and taking the city back.”
