Urban Montage by Charlene Weisler

Ron English Plans to Whitewash a $730,000 Banksy, and then Sell It

I like his style!

As reported in Hyperallergic: After buying it at auction, the American street artist says he will paint the Banksy mural white as a protest against the buying and selling of street art.

American street artist Ron English has announced his plans to stage a modern take on Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning Drawing“ by expunging a famous Banksy mural from existence. English says the controversial decision represents a protest against the art market’s continued monetization of street art.

“We’re tired of people stealing our stuff off the streets and reselling it so I’m just going to buy everything I can get my hands on and whitewash it,” English told the United Kingdom’s Press Association, adding,  “I’m going to paint over it and just include it in one of the walls in my house.”

Like Banksy, English is known for the strong political messages of his street art, which explores brand imagery and advertising. The artist has been arrested multiple times, preferring to use public spaces and billboards as his canvas.

The artist’s announcement comes roughly a month after Banksy attempted to destroy one of his own paintings, detonating a hidden shredding mechanism on “Girl with a Balloon” (2006) immediately after it sold for $1.3 million at a Sotheby’s auction.

English’s target is Banksy’s “Slave Labour (Bunting Boy)” (2012), which he recently acquired for $730,000 at Juliens Auctions in Los Angeles. The work depicts a young child crouched over a sewing machine as he produces Union Jack bunting. It was a protest against the controversial use of sweatshops to manufacture memorabilia for the Diamond Jubilee and London Olympics in 2012. And while “Slave Labour” was first painted on the outside wall of a bargain shop in north London, it was mysteriously removed months later before resurfacing at an auction in Miami in February 2013. It was subsequently removed from auction after considerable appeals by residents of its hometown London suburb, Wood Green. Regardless, the mural was eventually sold at auction in the UK, fetching a price of $1.2 million at Bankrobber London.

“The painting was created as a piece of social commentary. It was transformed into a commodity without regards to the original message,” English told Hyperallergic. “I knew that if I bought the painting it would shine new light on the art and the image hopefully putting the issue of child labor back into the public dialog. If I whitewash it, the piece becomes the new ‘Erased de Kooning’ by Rauschenberg. And it gains hype and status as a commodity in the art world, which would allow me to resell it at a profit and use the profits for children’s charities, furthering the original intent.”

Throughout his career, Banksy has tried to dissuade people from capitalizing on his art. In 2008, after revealing that a large body of work attributed to him was in fact fake, he pleaded with his fans: “Graffiti art has a hard enough life as it is — with council workers wanting to remove it and kids wanting to draw mustaches on it, before you add hedgefund managers wanting to chop it out and hang it over the fireplace.”

According to the Press Association, English mentioned that his purchase and eventual destruction of the mural was “for my good pal Banksy.” However, the artist does plan to eventually sell the piece for a million dollars. “I’m crazy but I’m not stupid,” he added in a comment to the publication.

The artist’s decision to cash-in on “damaged” art is well-informed. The buyer of Banksy’s self-destructed painting ultimately decided to keep it as her “own piece of art history.” After all, some critics estimate that the destroyed artwork is now worth double its original estimate.

Mosaics at Mexico City's UNAM Central Library

 

Atlas Obscura has found a great example of mosaics in Mexico City.

Originally opened in 1956, the library building is most evidently the work of artist Juan O’Gorman. Though the building’s architecture is blocky, windowless, and monolithic, the artist created colorful designs that cover the entire surface of all four sides. The designs were inspired by a quartet of historical epochs, with the north wall representing the pre-Hispanic period; the south wall, the colonial period; the east wall, the modern era; and the west wall, the university’s history.

The colorful decorations turn what could have been an imposing institutional block into a vibrant attraction that’s both a piece of history and a piece of art. And again, thanks to a little block jutting up from the roof like a handle, combined with the circular depictions of the Ptolemaic and Copernican visions of the universe, it really looks like a massive boombox built by an ancient civilization.

And the decorations get even more incredible up close, as they aren’t simply painted onto the walls, but composed of designs illustrated with a variety of types of local stone, each chosen for its natural color. Amazingly, all of the reds, greens, blues, yellows, and other colors are created with naturally colored stones from across Mexico. O’Gorman chose this method because as opposed to paint and other mediums, the stones wouldn’t fade.

The UNAM Central Library is an incredible building that manages to encapsulate the country’s rich history with a kind of symbolic visual poetry, writ large. It almost has to be seen to be believed. But seriously, you guys see how it looks like a boombox, right?

Giant Keith Haring Mural Revealed Nearly 30 Years After It Was Covered Up

Painted in 1986, the mural was covered up with aluminum siding three years later and has only just been brought back to light.

Benjamin Sutton

 

Last week, a mural Keith Haring painted in Amsterdam in 1986 was re-exposed to the public after being covered up by insulation panels for 29 years.

Haring traveled to Amsterdam in 1986 for a solo show at the Stedelijk Museum. In addition to creating a large-scale and riotously colorful canvas inside the museum (which it recently restored and reinstalled), he asked if he could make a public work. The museum offered the exterior wall of its art storage facility, and Haring set to work, completing the 40-foot-tall mural in a single, chilly day in March 1986.

Keith Haring working on his Amsterdam mural in 1986 (photo by Patricia Steur, courtesy the Stedelijk Museum)

The mural, rendered in white paint that pops against the red brick wall, depicts an enormous fish-dog hybrid figure with a more characteristic Haring figure riding on its back. The mural is signed “XXX KH86” in its lower-right-hand corner. Three years later, the Stedelijk moved out of the city-owned building, which became a cold storage facility, and aluminum insulation siding was added to its exterior, completely concealing Haring’s mural.

Following the restoration of the Stedelijk’s large canvas and a campaign by the Dutch street artist Aileen “Mick La Rock” Middel, the museum, the Keith Haring Foundation, and street art dealer Olivier Varossieau organized the removal of the panels. The virtually unscathed mural was uncovered on June 18.

Keith Haring’s recently uncovered Amsterdam mural (photo by Hanna Hachula, courtesy the Stedelijk Museum)

“The mural was under cladding for [29] years and it was a very large undertaking requiring a great deal of lobbying and red tape from many people to get the cladding to come off so that the very beginning phase of understanding what conservation work might be best appropriate considering its current conditions could get started,” a spokesperson for the Haring Foundation told Hyperallergic. “No timeline currently exists for its conservation and the development of the ‘Market Quarter’ will take many many more years to be completed.”

According to the New York Times, the team of Will Shank and Antonio Rava — who previously restored large-scale Haring murals in Paris and Pisa — will work on restoring the Amsterdam mural.

Keith Haring working on his Amsterdam mural in 1986 (photo by Patricia Steur, courtesy the Stedelijk Museum)

De Hallen Amsterdam

Keith Haring’s recently uncovered Amsterdam mural (photo by Hanna Hachula, courtesy the Stedelijk Museum)

5 Pointz Triumph!

This week in art news: a federal judge upheld his prior ruling in favor of the 5Pointz artists.

Judge Frederic Block rejected a post-trial motion by property developer Jerry Wolkoff to dismiss his prior court ruling compensating the artists of 5Pointz for the whitewashing of their artwork in October 2014. In his ruling last February, the federal judge ordered that the artists be paid $6.75 million in damages.

 

Congratulations #5Pointz artists and #meresone !!!!!

Street Creative Event in LA This Weekend

 

 

Some folks want to build walls – street artists long to paint them.And this weekend, June 9th and 10th, they’re going to do just that, as some of the world’s most brilliant street artists team up to paint one epic public mural in downtown Los Angeles.
 
Hand-picked by the maestro of words known as @wrdsmth – whose typewriter-styled words of wisdom have dotted many an urban surface all over the world – the roster of artists includes the likes of searing abstract expressionist @imalexinc, “Courage Has No Gender” founder @MegZany, and PADHiA, whose stark portraits under her @unfukyourself moniker probe the unexplored terrain of the human psyche. San Francisco-based street artist @Fnnch, whose “Honeybear” art can be found all over his city, has also been recruited, as well as the kinetic aerosol scribbler known as Jazz Guetta. 
 
With their creativity combined, this amazing assemblage of muralists are set to transform a 20-foot high, 168-foot wide wall in L.A.’s Arts District into the city’s newest art installation. 
 
We can’t WAIT to see what they come up with – and we want you to see it too, which is why we’re covering both days of this monumental event on our Facebook feed.
 
We’re doing this because, for one, it’s going to be incredibly cool! And, we believe in the power of street art to impact communities ALL OVER THE WORLD in profound ways.
 
Art, when untethered from the confines of a gallery or a private collection, has the ability to add spontaneity to our lives. When encountered on the streets near where we work or live, it shakes us from the humdrum routine of daily existence, its impact magnified by the element of surprise.
 
Building walls is an act of division – of keeping people out. Painting walls unites us. 
 
People from all walks of life will gather this weekend to see what these street artists are up to. They will watch them at work and we hope they will be stirred. Perhaps they will be moved to create their own works of art!
 
And when the artists are finished painting, their massive mural will live on and continue to inspire people.
 
A funny thing can happen when you paint a wall – it can turn into something else. It’s as though its inherent function as an object of separation disappears under layers of pigment and color. Instead of keeping people apart, it brings them together – creatives and fans alike.
 
We hope you will join us, too, for this #StreetCreative event in L.A.’s Arts District. The artists get going at 9:00 AM on Saturday morning, June 9. Catch updates on the CreativeFuture Facebook page!
 
See you there!

The Wit and Wisdom of Ancient Jewish Graffiti

Graffiti is forever! This is a funny article about ancient Jewish graff:

Researchers in the field have uncovered related messages ranging from “Lasius is a pervert” to “Good luck in your resurrection.”

by Eve Kahn

 

“You will come to an evil end if you rob this grave” and “My beloved was here” ranked among the most popular messages for graffiti writers in ancient Jewish communities.

Starting some 3,000 years ago, Jews scratched walls at homes and public spaces with prayers, warnings, blessings on deceased relatives, and store advertisements. They even used graffiti to mark rows of theater seats that were reserved for Jewish groups. In the margins of the texts, they sketched outlines of ships, people, menorahs, and synagogue columns.

Carving the letters and images “required time, diligence, steadfastness, and a degree of pain tolerance,” Karen B. Stern, an assistant professor at Brooklyn College, observes in her new book, Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity. As the graffiti artists hammered away at doorways, pillars or cliffs, she writes, “powders and fragments would cover one’s face and fill one’s lungs with dust; hardened dirt, rock, and plaster could push back and split fingernails; and carving implements, including metal nails, blades, and stones, surely drew blood when the lighting faded or surfaces grew unwieldy.”

A seat inscription for the place of the elder Jews from the Bouleterion/Odeon of Aphrodisias, Turkey. CC/King’s College London

She has documented graffiti written by Jews, dating back as early as the 8th century B.C., at archaeological sites from modern-day Croatia to the Persian Gulf. Clusters survive at the Dura-Europos synagogue in eastern Syria, El‐Kanaïs in Egypt along the Nile near Aswan, the Beit Shearim necropolis in northern Israel and the Aphrodisias ruins in western Turkey. They come in a babel of languages, including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Lihyanite, and Nabataean. Some people who carved the walls were clearly uneducated, while others used neat handwriting that indicates elite upbringings. Interspersed are markings from non-Jewish neighbors: pagan sayings, Byzantine crosses, and praise for Allah.

A skeleton hovering over a grave in Catacomb 1, Beit Shearim, Israel. Ezra Gabbay

Dr. Stern notes that for countries that have been torn apart by religious strife, and places where hardly any Jews live anymore, the graffiti now serves as evidence of past centuries of peaceable coexistence. Privileged and ordinary people of many faiths all had the same habit of emblazoning their names, interests and accomplishments on the walls. Decoding the inscriptions, Dr. Stern says, sheds light on those who left few other traces on the sands of time: “It’s about paying attention to voices that have otherwise been drowned out.”

The Artist Making Tapestries Out of Aquatic Trash

Jo Atherton’s colorful works turn our plastic crisis into a meditation on memory and time.

Article by Cara Giaimo  for Atlas Obscura.

 

Jo Atherton’s tapestries can’t be ignored. They’re filled with texture, movement, and color. When placed on the blank walls of galleries, they’re like fishing lures for the eye: visitors will spot them from across the room and hone on in.

“Often, people are drawn to them,” says Atherton. “They don’t quite know what they’re looking at … It’s only when they get up close that they have that shock moment of, ‘Oh my God, it’s rubbish!’”

This is not a judgement. Atherton, a freelance artist based in Bedfordshire, England, literally makes art from garbage. Some of it is old garbage—pieces of pottery and glass from ancient Rome, lent gravitas by the passage of time. Some of it is slightly more recent, like the nests of rope, fishing net, and colorful plastic doo-dads that make up those sneaky tapestries, which she calls “Flotsam Weaving.” She finds all of her materials herself, in the depths of the Thames and along the low-tide lines on Cornwall’s beaches.

One of Jo Atherton’s flotsam tapestries. Courtesy Jo Atherton

Atherton prefers to beachcomb in Cornwall, on the U.K.’s southwest coast. “A lot of material washes up in the winter because of the Gulf Stream,” she says, and she and other seekers pick up stuff from all corners of the Atlantic: the West Indies; the Eastern seaboard; Nova Scotia. Atherton describes the tideline as “a story,” and scavenging along it as “an act of reading.”

A detail from a flotsam weaving, featuring a bubble wand and a rooster-shaped bike reflector that once came free in boxes of Kellogg’s Cereal. Courtesy Jo Atherton

Often, she must imagine the characters that populate the resulting tales: What kid played with this plastic soldier? Who disobeyed their parents and released this now-popped balloon? But sometimes, the real ones make themselves known—as when she found a fisherman’s tag that had floated to Cornwall after detaching from a lobster buoy in Maine. “I thought, ‘I’ll type his name into Facebook and see if I can find him,’” she says. “And sure enough, I could.” Later, they talked on the phone, and realized they share a birth year, 1979.

Experiences like this inspired her Flotsam Weaving series, which she says is about “the threads of stories … [and] the similarity between text and textile.” More recently, she has been exploring other media, including printing and cyanotype. For these works, she arranges tiny bits of plastic in repeating, often circular patterns. Silhouetted and abstracted by ink or photochemicals, they look like plankton viewed through a microscope. “Prehistoric plankton settled onto the ocean floor and slowly turned into oil,” she says. “That’s now what we’re making our plastic from … the prints are a way of getting people thinking about these deep-time connections.”

 

Pow Wow Street Art in Hawaii

A friend just sent me some great photos of street art in Hawaii. This is part of an annual street art festival Pow Wow.

POW! – It’s the impact that art has on a person.

WOW! – It’s reaction that art has on a viewer.

Together they form POW WOW, which is a Native American term that describes a gathering that celebrates culture, music and art.

Centered around a week-long event in Hawaii, POW! WOW! has grown into a global network of artists and organizes gallery shows, lecture series, schools for art and music, mural projects, a large creative space named Lana Lane Studios, concerts, and live art installations across the globe. The central event takes place during Valentine’s Day week in February in the Kaka’ako district of Honolulu, and brings over a hundred international and local artist together to create murals and other forms of art. The festival is expanding to cities and countries such as Taiwan, Long Beach, Israel, Singapore, Jamaica, Washington D.C., Guam, New Zealand, Germany and more.

Who would have thought that such a mainstream tourist destination would have such wonderful murals and a full-on street art festival?

 

An Street Art Event in a Trump Hotel Suite

The shadowy artist collective Indecline converted a room at the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Manhattan into a solo jail cell for a man playing President Trump. Watch the video below and read the full account at HyperAllergic.

 

Wara Art

Recycling into art as reported by Atlas Obscura:

Giant animal sculptures are created with the rice straw leftover from the fall harvest each year. 

The rural, coastal Niigata prefecture in Northern Japan is known for its wealth of rice paddies, which produce a rich harvest each fall. After the rice is harvested and the grain extracted, a huge amount of rice straw is leftover, called wara.

Instead of going to waste, the excess wara is reused in many ways: for roofs, fertilizer, livestock feed, and, historically, to make various goods before it was replaced by more modern materials. In the region’s capital city, Niigata, it’s put to an even more creative use, transformed into giant, fantastic animal sculptures.

For the last decade, students from Musashino Art University in Tokyo have headed north to Niigata each fall to create wonderful sculptures with the leftover rice straw. These golden artworks, made by piecing patches of braided straw over a wooden frame, can be seen on display at the annual Wara Art Festival in Uwasekigata Park. In 2017, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the festival, the students were challenged to build the creatures twice as large as usual, and supersized gorillas, rhinos, and dinosaurs filled the open field.

Know Before You Go

The Wara Art Festival is held each year starting in late August and the sculptures remain up until the end of October.