Brooklyn Street Art Newsletter - July 26, 2013

Images Of The Week: 07.21.13 Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Adam Young, Adelaide, Am3ba, Bask, Buff Monster, David Flores, Hero, Nils Westegard, Olek, Pop Mortem, Rep 1, Skount, Street Hart and Wakuda. Top image Olek and crew cover an entire locomotive train in Łódź, Poland over the course of two days. (photo © Olek) Olek. Lodz, Poland. ... Read More

Wall Therapy 2013 Starts With FREEDOM in a Tunnel BSA is totally psyched to be your source for hot exclusive images and a few scintillating stories that unfold during Wall Therapy, the Street Art festival anchored in Rochester, New York that is kicking off right about…. Wait! It already started! Here is your first dispatch. FREEDOM, that’s what Street Art and graffiti means to a ... Read More

Miron Milic Mural Haiku at Boombarstick Croatian born illustrator Miron Milic is known by dear friends for his erotic illustrations but he created what you would typically regard as a nature loving mural for the Boombarstick Festival this month. Based on a Haiku from Japanese poet and painter Yosa Buson, Milic invites you to take off your shoes and get your ... Read More

BSA Film Friday: 07.19.13   Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities. Now screening: MOMO in Jamaica and Cuba with Angelino, POSE and REVOK in NYC, Ian Strange AKA Kid Zoom and “Suburban” project, and “The Story of The Fisherman”. BSA Special Feature: MOMO in Jamaica and Cuba with traveling companion Angelo Milano FAME ... Read More

Culture Jamming Street Artist COMBO Stages Topless Spectacle in Paris A Femen Revolution with French Street Artist COMBO In the face of 21st Century misogyny and a general discomfort with public nipples of the female variety, a male street artist named COMBO just staged a high profile half naked protest with wheat-paste, brushes, and breasts in Paris on July 14.  Reinterpreting the painter Delacroix’s Liberty Leading ... Read More

Street Art of the Subtler Sort in Denmark New Danish Street Art / Public Art Festival Retains the Simplicity of “Play” In the past few years major cities have begun to sport Street Art festivals that boast and blare themselves with branding, t-shirts, press releases and 90 second video trailers touting the event like an Olympics with spray cans; hosted in the city center ... Read More

Various & Gould and Flower Power in Berlin When was the last time you sent your grandma a greeting card? Huh? You know she likes those ones with all the fancy swirly fonts and flowers growing up the trellis and probably a couple of cats wrestling. Get going son. You won’t have Grandma forever and you know how she loves her grand babies. And ... Read More

Phlegm at Boombarstick Brings a Theatre/Church Alive in Croatia Sheffield, England-based Street Artist, fine artist, and illustrator Phlegm took part in the zero edition of Boombarstick in Croatia last month, and today we have some images of his new work there. Now abandoned, the building previously held a cinema and was originally a church. Many Street Artists pine for this sort of architectural opportunity, ... Read More

Images Of The Week: 07.14.13 We’re in the thick of summer now ya’ll, get out the lime popsicles and 40 SPF sunscreen and let’s ride our bikes out t0 Coney Island. New Yorkers don’t need those waves like Cali to be happy, we just like the sand and the crash of the waves and waft of french fries from up ... Read More

ROA Fox and Friends in Vienna Here are a handful of new shots of Street Artist ROA as he prepares his new urban wildlife wall in Vienna – featuring a fox, rabbit, beaver, and a doe on the wall of a local school in the Austrian capital. You can see how his work is beginning to take more dimension and mass ... Read More

BSA Film Friday: 07.12.13   Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities. Now screening: Neighborhood Love in Brooklyn by Serringe, Isaac Cordal: The Family, and The Lurkers go to Bulgaria for Summer Fun. BSA Special Feature: Neighborhood Love in Brooklyn A new film by Serringe that celebrates the magical mix of sun and aerosol ... Read More

Hitnes at Boombarstick: Street Art in Croatia 50 points awarded for the name: Boombarstick ! Also, baby goats in your promo video melts even the meanest graff writers heart, so another 25 points for that. (see adorable video below) In fact, if you look through all the walls and materials and listen to the voices of the organizers, you find a serious consideration of ... Read More

Specter Brings the Beauty of Decay to a Pristine Brooklyn Pool Specter’s Inversion of the “Broken Window” Theory Makes a Splash The news that the average apartment price is over $3,000 dollars a month in New York was blasted across many channels yesterday and we told you two weeks ago that our own informal survey of 1-bedrooms in Williamsburg showed the median price is now $3,150. That’s ... Read More

LNY, Gaia, Nanook and RAE in Cleveland for Zoetic Walls New stuff from Cleveland today gives us a look at a project in the Waterloo District called Zoetic Walls that includes Street Artists LNY, Nanook, RAE and Gaia. RAE. Detail. Zoetic Walls. Cleveland, Ohio. June 2013. (photo © Pawn Works Gallery) “You are doing awesome stuff for our neighborhood – keep it up!” says Cleveland resident, Linda ... Read More

UNO: “Don’t Care, Obscure This”

“When I received the invitation to take part in a street art festival in Athens I thought I would try to paint a wall speaking about the problems of Greece and in particular to speak about the consequences of the crisis they are experiencing,” says UNO of his invitation to participate in the first Athens ...

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Afghanistan's First Female Street Artist

Shamsia Hassani, a female street artist in Kabul, is both courageous and inspiring. Read an interview with her via this link and check out her process in the video:

 

Queens Borough President Helen Marshall Puts Nail in 5Pointz Coffin

Should we chalk this up to yet another politican who is beholden to the special interests of developers?

In a all-too-common display of short sightedness, the Honorable Queens Borough President Helen Marshall has voted to tear down international graffiti mecca 5Pointz in Long Island City Queens to ... wait for it... make way for luxury condos. Luxury condos that will be built, by the way, alongside elevated subway tracks and railyards. But hold on --- there are some affordable apartments promised too! In fact 7.5% of all of the apartments will be "Affordable" (meaning that 92.5% is luxury) So that makes it all okay.

According to the Daily News:

An iconic Long Island City building that has served as a legal canvas for graffiti artists for more than a decade is now one step closer to the wrecking ball. Queens Borough President Helen Marshall announced Wednesday that she supports the plan to tear down the former water meter factory, which houses the 5Pointz Aerosol Art Center, to create room for a pair of luxury residential towers.

Her recommendation came after the owners of the site, Jerry and David Wolkoff, agreed to create 75 units of affordable housing for seniors, veterans and residents of northwestern Queens. There will be about 1,000 apartments total. The Wolkoffs also promised to create 20 artist studios, up from five.

“I had some concerns about this application,” Marshall said in a statement. “But I believe those concerns have been adequately addressed.”

The Wolkoffs, who own the site and have allowed aerosol artists to paint the building, are seeking approval to build a pair of towers larger than current zoning allows.

 
Community Board 2 unanimously voted against the project, citing a lack of below-market-rate housing and substantial artist studios, said CB 2 Chairman Joseph Conley.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/queens/queens-borough-president-backs-luxury-towers-5pointz-article-1.1401185#ixzz2ZnSYeH6h

But it is not okay. We are losing a unique one-of-a-kind art center that attracts visitors from around the world. Doesn't Queens and NYC in general want that??

It is bad enough when mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn casts her vote to destroy St Vincents Hospital so a super-luxury development and private park can be created for the 1%'ers. (And she also voted AGAINST the community and FOR NYU in their millions of square feet expansion into the core of Greenwich Village that will change the neighborhood forever or until a nuclear attack.)  To have this political venality spread to other boroughs is simply disgraceful.

Awake Citizens! Awake show your muscle at the voting booth!

Sign the petition to save 5 Pointz now.

 

 

Yarnbombing Humans

Now this is something that you don't see everyday. Artisk Olek had yarnbombed people!

Yarn Bombing Picnic in Union Square, photo by John Black Photography

This is taking the yarn-bombing trend to the next level. Right here in New York City is one of the inspirations for this trend. Olek, a Polish-born costume designer turned set designer turned guerilla artist, is perhaps most recognizable for completely crochet-ing the Wall Street Bull and Astor Place Cube in 2011, but she’s taken the movement to the next level (with an accomplice it seems).

Moving from objects to people, Olek’s latest work covering people (friends and strangers) in yarn, like in the picnic captured by photographer John Black in Union Square, have been popping up on Instagram since April. Those in the know have been tagging oleknyc and olek in the photos. Instagrammer 4rilla, meanwhile, took the chance and “picked up some wild hitchhikers and brought them to Central Park.”

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Extreme Yarn Bombing

Street Art That Blends into Its Environment

A French street artist by the name of Levalet has been creating a series of funny scenes that seem to interact with their environment using nothing more than paper cut-outs and wheatpaste.

The artwork appears lifelike in many scenes such as a woman emerging from a door and a man closing the shutter of his shops for the day. They were created in black and white, but if given an element of color, it wouldn’t be surprising if many people were fooled into thinking they were real.

Levalet’s final touch is often a 3D object such as an umbrella, this completes the illusions and potentially acts as a way to draw in passersby who may not have noticed the 2D art in the first place.

Click through the gallery below to see more of the eye-catching pieces.