How Street Art Clashes with Gentrification in Bushwick Brooklyn
Check out this great doc on the clash between Street Art and gentrification in Bushwick Brooklyn:
Gentrification
Breaking News-- Appeal Upheld in 5Pointz Artist Lawsuit
Great news--
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Gripes - The Sequin Wall at Hudson Yards
Touted as a street art instagrammable wall in the Dubai-on-the-Hudson Hudson Yards Mall, this pathetic effort at cred leaves me cold. First they gentrify a neighborhood and chase all of the street artists out and then they construct a do-it-yourself "graf-wall" nicely situated among luxury retailers. Oh really?
In my opinion, a better, more authentic wall would be similar to the gum wall in Seattle. Now that is art!
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.
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 !!!!!
5Pointz Artists Win Their Lawsuit Against Developer Who Destroyed Their Art
In what was to me one of the biggest news events of the year, it was announced that the lawsuit against 5Pointz developer and art destroyer Wolkoff has been decided in favor of the artists in the amount of $6.7 million. It is, in my opinion, justice served, but a bit of a pyric victory since the building and the art have been destroyed. And destroyed at a time when other cities around the globe creating street art and urban art museums.
In a conversation I had with meresone, the CEO of 5Pointz, a few years ago, he spoke of making 5Pointz a street art museum. That dream is now shattered. 5Pointz was a special and magical place that would be very difficult to recreate. So the granting of $6.7 million is okay, but the true cost is much greater.
And let's not forget that Wolkoff is naming his new glass towers that are build on the grave of the graffiti mecca 5Pointz. How is that for nerve?
5 Pointz Artists Vindicated!
Finally some good news from all of the bad concerning graffiti mecca 5 Pointz. After a trial that, using the VARA law that art cannot be destroyed without 90 days notice, a jury in Brooklyn came back with a guilty verdict that the destruction of the aerosol art was illegal.
Here is the coverage from Untapped Cities:
The question of whether graffiti should be considered art was the central issue in the 3-week trial concerning the 5Pointz complex in Queens, which ended on Tuesday when a jury found that a New York City real estate developer broke the law when he tore down the complex, The New York Times reported. With the demolition of the building, 49 vivid graffiti murals spray-painted on the complex’s walls were gone.
Though the judge must provide his final verdict, the finding by the jury of Brooklyn’s Federal District Court will serve as a recommendation for the presiding Judge Frederic Block.
The complex in Long Island City became an aesthetic wonder and an unconventional tourist destination in its nearly 20 years. It was a unique collaboration between developer Jerry Wolkoff and a crew of graffiti artists, and was defended by the crew’s lawyers as “the world’s largest open-air aerosol museum.” However, the graffiti’s creation was always based on the fact that Wolkoff planned to tear down the complex in favor of luxury apartment buildings, a move he made in 2014 which began the conflict.
When the graffiti artists caught word of 5Pointz’s demolition, they filed suit against Wolkoff, citing a violation of the Visual Arts Rights Act, a 1990 law concerning an artist’s moral rights, which allows artists of works of “recognized stature” to prohibit the destruction of their art.
The graffiti crew’s lawyer, Eric Baum, stated that Wolkoff failed to give them a 90-day warning before he hired workers one night to whitewash the building.
Though Wolkoff’s lawyer, David Ebert, argued that the 21 artists involved had erased more graffiti themselves by constantly changing their art, with nearly 11,000 murals coming and going over the years, the jury ultimately sided with the artists.
Both Ebert and Baum agreed that Block would only take the jury’s ruling as a recommendation. The judge has requested the two submit court papers within the next few weeks regarding the verdict’s validity. Following this, he will reach a verdict which may force Wolkoff to pay damages to the graffiti artists.
For more on the whitewashing and demolition of 5Pointz, check out 5Pointz Graffiti Haven in Long Island City Whitewashed Overnight by Building Owners and 35 Photos from Inside the Demolition at 5 Pointz Street Art Haven.
Hong Kong Street Art Risks Selling Out
According to Malcolm McLeod writing for Artsy, Hong Kong sanctioned street art risks "jumping the shark" because the artists are encouraged and supported. I am not so sure that I agree.
Here is the full article. I look forward to your comments.
In Hong Kong, buildings rise and fall daily in a jungle of bamboo scaffolding. Many are torn down and replaced within only 30 years of their construction. With the exception of the colorful high rises that light up the sky along Victoria Harbour, the architecture of Asia’s commercial center is defined by utilitarian shades of gray and beige. In reaction to their drab surroundings, a core group of local and international street artists have been making their marks on Hong Kong.
“Cities right now are really ugly, because at some point in the first half of the 20th century, people started to have a very strong belief that a single ideology could create a new world,” says the Italian-born, Hong Kong-based street artist Barlo. Around that time, he says, the idea of decoration fell by the wayside. “That was the beginning of modernism, born from the idea that when you create a building, everything is designed to follow a function from beginning to end.”
Over the last five years or so, explosions of artwork have begun to breathe life into areas around Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories. Depending on whom you ask, you’ll hear this artwork called street art, muralism, graffiti, calligraffiti, or even vandalism. Each of these monikers represents a different style and attitude found among the international culture on Hong Kong’s busy streets. For contemporary artists, these forms of art present both an opportunity to beautify the city and a chance to experiment.
“I actually stopped painting for a while when I was living in London,” Barlo laments. “I would walk outside and get discouraged because there were so many legends working around me. In all that busyness I think I lost my own voice.” He recalls feeling inspired upon arriving in Hong Kong, where he initially didn’t know anyone and wasn’t confronted by an onslaught of art on the streets. With this newfound creative freedom, Barlo moved on from graffiti and portraiture to develop a more naturalistic style of painting, using brushes to portray mythological creatures and fantastical scenes in Hong Kong.
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Barlo, World Upside Down, Hong Kong. Courtesy of Barlo.
Compared to the long histories of street art and graffiti in cities like New York or London, Hong Kong’s scene is still embryonic. Yet it’s evolving at a startling rate in recent years thanks to an influx of international talent and a growing cadre of locals looking to make names for themselves. While street art has existed in Hong Kong in niche groups for nearly two decades, beginning with the illegal works of graff writers like Tsang Tsou Choi (a.k.a. the King of Kowloon) and then Xeme, it is only recently that the general public has taken a genuine interest, often driven by commercial support. In this city built on “making the sale,” street art has become a hot commodity, and many groups are jumping on the bandwagon. Thus, we are seeing an uptick in opportunities for artists to create work legally.
First, there are galleries and museums—including Above Second Gallery, Over the Influence, and nonprofit Hong Kong Contemporary Art (HOCA) Foundation—that have exhibited the works of international stars such as Cyrcle, Shepard Fairey, and Vhils. Above Second’s director, May Wong, takes a lot of the credit.
“I don’t want to sound boastful, but we kind of brought the street art trend to Hong Kong,” she says, pointing to “Work in Progress,” the gallery’s 2013 group show. “With Cyrcle, Rone, and all these artists, we already had one of the biggest street art exhibitions years ago. And that’s why the education level has come so far in Hong Kong.”
Educating Hong Kongers on the artistic merits of street art is a motivating factor for Wong and her peers. “I think it’s just taken longer for people to understand,” Wong says. She recalls seeing the King of Kowloon’s work as a child. “I walked by it going to school every day or would see him in action. I’d ask my mom, ‘What is he doing?’ and she’d say, ‘Oh, he’s just a crazy guy.’ Back then, I didn’t see it as an art form or even as graffiti.” That changed after she spent time living in New York. “It hit me that a public space can have something that influences the society and gives energy to the community,” Wong says. One such community in Hong Kong is Lam Tei village near the Siu Hong MTR station, where local artist 4Get and Frenchman Sautel Cago collaborated with eager residents of this lower-income area to create abstract, improvisational works on their walls, which can still be seen today.
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4Get and his mural in Hong Kong. Photo by Superen. Courtesy of 4Get.
4Get, who splits his time painting in Hong Kong and mainland China, sees the presence of big, international names at museums and galleries as a boon for the local scene, not an intrusion. “There are many artists who come and go in Hong Kong, but basically, we all know each other. It’s not a big community—there are only 20 or 30 people doing [street art] who are [Hong Kong] locals,” 4Get says. He acknowledges that, as an artist, the infusion of these international artists fuels inspiration and offers an opportunity to learn about the broader landscape of contemporary street art. “We have the chance to get to know the outside world and see big artists like Shepard Fairey, to see how they execute their work and their crazy styles.”
In contrast, Barlo believes major street art exhibitions are limiting opportunities for local or unknown artists. “It always depends on what is your goal in life,” he says. If you want to become a famous contemporary artist and show in galleries—no simple feat anywhere in the world—Barlo says Hong Kong is an especially difficult place to start. On top of that, he doesn’t see it as a place where artists are encouraged to take risks.
“A lot of the people that want to do street art here want to play it safe,” Barlo explains. “The main problem is no one will give you a space and say, ‘OK, you are a street artist for a living. Please change this space and create an experience for the viewer, so that they enter your world and want to leave with a piece of it.’ ” Instead, if an artist receives a commision, that transaction is more like an investment. “But if you’re someone who’s never had a solo show, then who will invest in you?” He adds that confining street art to white cube galleries is creatively stifling. “It’s taking that change you are trying to create in the city and confining it to a gallery—boring.” How, then, are local street artists supposed to make a living in Hong Kong?
“It’s easy to be a punk when you’re 16,” says Cath Love, an artist whose character Jeliboo is gaining popularity on T-shirts and apparel. “But then you grow up and the bills start rolling in.” Many Hong Kong street artists, Barlo included, work day jobs as graphic designers, and they make a point to distinguish that work from what they’re doing in the streets. With the exception of a few exhibitions from Above Second and Pearl Lam—who, last year, put on a show of nine local street artists called “Hidden Street”—local street artists aren’t well represented in Hong Kong galleries. Yet somewhere between the worlds of high art and advertising, the collaborative and commercial opportunities for artists in Hong Kong are growing, usually through private and corporate commissions as well as citywide street art festivals.
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Okuda San Miguel and his mural Rainbow Thief at 180 Tai Nan Street for HKwalls 2016. Photo by Cheung Chi Wai. Courtesy of HKwalls.
These commercial opportunities figured prominently in “High Art, Low Art, Street Art,” a recent panel discussion at Bonhams Hong Kong held in conjunction with the auction house’s display of work by New York-based artist KAWS. During the discussion, the speakers tried to piece together the phenomenon of street art in Hong Kong, particularly the difficulties of securing public walls for artists and undertaking a traditionally rebellious art form in a city where issues of control and censorship have been front and center since the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement in 2014. Among the speakers was Maria Wong, managing director of the annual street art festival HKWalls, which was started by Jason Dembski and Stan Wu in 2014 and has since served as a major platform for Hong Kong street artists.
Wong discussed how neighborhoods have slowly become more amenable to the HKWalls festival. “The first year, we had local shop owners saying, ‘What, you’re just going to scribble on my wall? Why should I let you paint my wall?’ They thought of it as vandalism,” she recalls. “Now, we have this great portfolio of work, and it helps a lot. It’s getting easier to convince people.” That snowball effect is evident in some of the massive walls Wong and her team were able to procure for the 2015 festival in Sham Shui Po.
“Hong Kong is catching up a bit late, but even globally I think it’s become kind of a trendy thing, so people see it as a way to market themselves and their business,” Wong says. “They also see the value of having it in their offices. That’s probably why you’re seeing a lot of it being paid for,” she adds, referring to the commercial side of street art in Hong Kong.
HKWalls is heading into its fourth year of giving local, regional, and international artists equal opportunities to get their work onto city walls. The initiative has exposed street art to the communities of Sheung Wan, Stanley, and Sham Shui Po, while educating shop owners about the work’s value and emphasizing the positive energy these artists bring into the spaces they inhabit.
Secret Walls is another group supporting street art in Hong Kong and abroad, with events coupling live art exhibitions with music, dancing, and drinking. In a tournament format not unlike a rap battle, artists take the stage and paint throughout the party. When all’s said and done, the cheers of the audience determine which artist moves on to the next round of competition.
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Gan working on his mural at 110 Nam Cheong Street for HKwalls 2016. Photo by Eric Hong. Courtesy of HKwalls.
Secret Walls Hong Kong recruits artists from various backgrounds to compete in their shows. Among them are local artists Boms and the collective Parents Parents, who come from backgrounds in illustration and graphic design. Boms paints Chinese characters, rather than English letters, alongside cartoon characters in works that resemble a twisted Studio Ghibli film. Since taking part in HKWalls and Secret Walls, local artists have received invitations to international festivals, as well as commissions to create works in restaurants and office spaces around the city. Most recently, Parents Parents painted a mural at Facebook’s Hong Kong office.
Barlo is critical of these commercial jobs, which nevertheless offer a large source of income for Hong Kong-based street artists. “I think what we see right now is a resurgence in Confucian ideals, really. A respect for authority. I think that’s why you don’t have very many young kids just going and painting in the streets,” Barlo says. “If your goal is just to do Nike’s office from the beginning, what are you doing?”
While Barlo may criticize these commercial gigs, others, like veteran Hong Kong painter Stern Rockwell, a transplant from New York, believes that any support for the scene is positive. “I don’t believe in selling out,” Rockwell says. “Obviously, it’s more fun if someone just gives me a wall and lets me do my thing, to improvise. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to make a living and hold on to that visa. So you’ve got to work inside the lines a bit.” Rockwell has sold small pieces through a number of galleries, and he’s willing to compromise with his patrons, but only to a certain extent. “Some people want a specific idea that is suitable to their company and represents their image, and it’s more of a back-and-forth process dealing with the corporate side of things. So, for me, that’s not the fun stuff, but it’s still cool in the end. It’s still my work, and I’m still happy with the outcome.”
Given this commercial focus and the lack of overt political motivations found in the provocative works of artists like Banksy or Blu, Hong Kong’s street art scene is an easy target for criticism. However, the medium’s storied, rebellious spirit does thrive, albeit somewhat secretly. In the far corners of the city, abandoned buildings double as training grounds for those brave enough to make the journey. Barlo and Boms reminisce about the days they painted abandoned warehouses or school buildings in the New Territories or out past Kennedy Town on the Island Line, before they were confident about putting their stuff out there. These more established artists and the veteran Rockwell agree that doing this work off the beaten path is the best way for aspiring artists to start. “A lot of people want to do what I do, and to them I just say: ‘Do it.’ The walls are out there,” Rockwell says.
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Stern Rockwell and Senk, HKwalls 2016. Photo by Kyra Campbell. Courtesy of HKwalls.
As someone who has made Hong Kong his home after visiting for many years, Rockwell has had a comprehensive look at the city’s changing climate for street art. “The majority of people here in Hong Kong embrace it. I think people here like the idea of expressing themselves and seeing people expressing themselves,” he says. “I started coming here in the early ’90s and there was absolutely no creativity at all. It was just how much shit could you jam into a store. So it’s changed a lot.”
Several organizations have sprung up recently to encourage and develop a homegrown brand of street art. Secret Walls, for example, has a side project in the works called School Walls, with the idea that, one day, kids around Hong Kong will compete and collaborate with one another in the name of street art. And Write the Future, a spray paint store and meeting place in Kwun Tong, encourages all artists, whether visiting or local, to use its space for sharing and educating people on the merits of street art—a concerted effort to eradicate the stigma surrounding this misunderstood art form. Barlo, for his part, looks to the example of 4Get’s collaboration with Lam Tei village, and he hopes to one day involve the growing refugee population of Hong Kong’s New Territories in a documentary art project.
“When it’s done right, street art is not just decoration to make a city more cute or more colorful. We must make a city more interesting,” Barlo says, “and touch someone on a deeper level, to make them think. It’s about changing the environment you exist in.”
—Malcolm MacLeod
140 Essex Street in NYC this Weekend
Artists Fill a Lower East Side Building with Murals Before It’s Demolished
According to Hyperallergic - Before it’s razed, 140 Essex Street is hosting a one-weekend exhibition featuring 10 murals by 10 artists.
The low warehouse building at 140 Essex Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side is not long for this world. The former site of the Essex Street Market and, more recently, host to a mockup of the subterranean park the Lowline, will soon be leveled to make way for an apartment building that is part of the Essex Crossing mega-development. But before its walls meet the wrecking ball, they are being filled with murals.
This weekend, 140 Essex Street will reopen to the public one last time for Market Surplus, an exhibition featuring murals by 10 artists who’ve filled the building’s 20-foot-tall walls. Organized by Hanksy, the show features an international slate dominated by renowned street artists, including Pixel Pancho, Elle, Faust, Sonni, and more. When I visited the raw, cavernous space last night, many of them were still hard at work on their murals — the building only became available at the end of last week — but several were already finished and ready for tonight’s opening celebration.
“A lot of the artists are making murals inspired by the neighborhood,” Hanksy explained. Some of the references are fairly overt, like Sonni’s popping, stylized rendering of the local cityscape replete with rooftop revelers and water towers. Others are much subtler in their Lower East Side homages; for instance, the artist NDA used to work at the Essex Street Market and, during a recent visit, struck up a conversation with the butchers near his former stall. His mural is a giant portrait of them.
Most poignant, perhaps, is Faust’s mural of golden, elegant script, which reads: “This will never last.” It speaks not only to this building’s imminent disappearance, but to the cycles of demolition and construction reshaping this neighborhood yet again.
The Beautiful Psychedelic Pollution Floating in the Gowanus Canal
Steven Hirsch’s photographs, now in a new book called Gowanus Waters
Who would have thought that such dangerous pollution could produce such vibrant colors in compositions that remind us of high art?
According to Allison Meyer of Hyperallergic,
New Yorker Steven Hirsch brings his lens so close to the toxic surface of the heavily polluted Brooklyn waterway, you may worry about his health. Yet the results are strangely mesmerizing, transforming the burbling brew from more than 150 years of industrial runoff into psychedelic abstractions. Streaks of purple mingle with neon greens and blues, while rainbow wisps swirl amid a murky darkness, like galaxies floating in space.
Hirsch’s vibrant images encourage a new perspective on the 1.8-mile waterway. And while they’re not necessarily a form of environmental advocacy, it’s hard to separate them from the site’s polluted past. The Gowanus neighborhood continues to be gentrified and developed (the gleaming Whole Foods got a $12.9 million tax credit for its cleanup of contaminated land) even as the adjacent waters remain poisonous. In a 2013 article for Popular Science, Dan Nosowitz asked, “What would happen if you drank water from the Gowanus Canal?” The answer was complex due to the sheer number and variety of pollutants — in one of the stagnant micro-zones, you might be guzzling raw sewage or E. coli, while another would be rich in radioactive material or arsenic. No matter what, you’d probably get dysentery.
The Gowanus Canal is now an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund Site, although it’s possible the cleanup plan could be delayed under the Trump administration, with longtime EPA opponent Scott Pruitt leading the agency. Some of its “black mayonnaise,” a grotesque mix of coal tar, heavy metals, and PCBs lining the canal’s bottom, along with old boats, tires, ragged metal, and even boulders, was dredged late last year. Will Hirsch’s photographs eventually be a time capsule of industrial folly?
“One spring day, we visited the canal and Hirsch saw, for the first time, the water teeming with tiny fish, but caught virtually none of the slime he’d been hoping to discover to make new photographs,” journalist Jordan G. Teicher writes in an introduction to Gowanus Waters. “Indeed, thanks to its Superfund status, the canal — long referred to by locals as ‘Lavender Lake’ for its distinctive, unnatural hues — is slowly on the mend. Soon enough, Hirsch’s polluted palette will be a memory, much like the industrial heyday of the borough’s interior.”