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 !!!!!
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!
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?
In Hyderabad, India, a new street arts district has been created, delighting the eye and enlivening the neighborhood. As reported in Atlas Obscura, a magical expanse of colorful street murals lies hidden within the quiet neighborhood.
Crossing the train tracks into the small, residential neighborhood of MS Maqtha does not prepare you for what lies beyond. Hidden within the network of narrow alleyways, roadside stalls, and curtained-off homes lies a world of vibrance and energy, a collection of brilliantly colorful street art murals that stretch across entire buildings four and five stories high.
In December of 2017, the largest street art foundation in India, St+Art India, took to the streets of MS Maqtha with a troupe of artists from around the world. The coming weeks saw the residential area transformed, with more than 30 murals breathing new life into the faded walls.
In an interview with Arch Daily, St+Art India’s Akshat Nauriyal said of the project” “We feel that art, at least the way it exists as an industry, has become marginalized only to a very small section of society, almost a novelty of the rich and the elite.” This Maqtha project, the third fully fledged art district to be created in India, is an attempt to democratize art, to bring it (quite literally) to the streets.
Walking through the streets is a magical experience, full of color. The area is divided into four districts: Green Gully, Yellow Gully, Pink Gully, and Blue Chowk. A series of painted arrows direct visitors to each of the areas of the district, allowing one to spend hours exploring the painted streets.
Hyderabad is a rapidly developing city in the Indian South, divided between the “Old City” and the fast-growing areas of Hitec City of Jubilee Hills. There is perhaps no better place in the city to see this intertwining of old and new than in the neighborhood of MS Maqtha.
To find the murals, cross the train tracks and follow the main road all the way to the end. The beginning of the first section is at the end of this road on your left. From there, follow the art and follow the arrows.
Hyperallergic reports that the guerrilla intervention was in place for two hours during the museum’s pay-what-you-wish period on a Saturday.
On Saturday, the otherwise unremarkable fourth-floor bathroom in the Guggenheim Museum saw an artistic intervention whereby the currently installed, stock white toilet was completely enveloped in coarse, glimmering gold yarn. The bathroom in question was previously and rather infamously activated by Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet (“America,” 2016). While that work stayed in place for a full year, Saturday’s unsanctioned intervention remained in place for roughly two hours.
“We can confirm an intervention of a crocheted piece that covered a toilet on the museum’s Ramp 4,” a spokesperson for the Guggenheim told Hyperallergic. “The intervention came to the attention of security personnel near the end of our Pay-What-You-Wish hours on Saturday evening and was carefully removed and sent to the registrar’s office. There was no damage and nothing was vandalized. The Guggenheim does not encourage unauthorized interventions; however, we are heartened that a visitor was so inspired by the Cattelan installation that they were moved to create one of their own.”
To anyone even remotely familiar with the inner workings of New York’s contemporary art scene, this particular guerrilla art intervention, in every respect, screams of the Polish fiber and knitwear artist, Olek. When asked over the phone about the Guggenheim intervention, Olek — an irreverent cross between a Guerrilla Girl and a Pussy Riot member — would neither confirm nor deny authorship.
Olek has made a name for herself by covering famous statues and monuments with her distinctive, multi-colored “yarn-bombing.” In 2010, long before the arrival of “Fearless Girl,” Wall Street’s “Charging Bull” statue — perhaps one of the more overt symbols of wealth, capitalism, industry, and generally masculine, patriarchal notions of American strength and success — was wrapped snuggly and surprisingly in Olek’s pink and purple camouflage pattern. A year later, she wrapped the Astor Place cube in a similar dressing. In 2012 she traveled to Barcelona to give Fernando Botero’s giant sculpture of a cat a similar treatment. Later that summer, in Washington, DC, Olek covered the National Academy of Science’s Albert Einstein Memorial in pink and purple crocheted fabric. Her use of these colors — those often attributed to a particular sex and catering to established female gender norms — one would assume, is no accident.
Though the always playfully ferocious Olek doesn’t lead with feminist talking points, it’s difficult not to contextualize her works as playful but nevertheless punk rock acts of feminist protest. Each project is a brazen, uninvited takeover of otherwise masculine-charged and over-sized art objects.
In the case of the Guggenheim intervention, the artist (whomever he or she may be) is adding another dimension to Cattelan’s “America,” which resurfaced in the news recently when the Guggenheim’s deputy director Nancy Spector offered to lend the gold toilet to the Trumps. Here, the unnamed yarn-bomber is doubling down on Cattelan’s joke and Spector’s subsequent, suave, punk rock act of political rebellion via polite curatorial sassiness. The artist, if she is in fact female, may also be making a guerrilla statement about the lack of representation of women in institutional spaces.
As the sculptor Antony Gormley said of Olek’s work in 2012, when she covered his seaside sculptures in the UK with her yarn costumes: “I feel that barnacles provide the best cover-up, but this is a very impressive substitute!” Though the US political machine currently seems to be riddled with barnacle types, perhaps it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate potentially vibrant alternatives — however fleeting they may be.
Artslant weighs in on Berlin's Street Art Museum:
Since the Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art opened in Berlin this fall, it has already seen thousands of visitors. Placed inside of a pre-war apartment building in the sleepy neighborhood of Schöneberg, the museum is easy to spot—it’s painted from top to bottom in colorful murals with the words “UNique, UNited, UNstoppable” wrapping around the front of the building.
The museum currently hosts new artworks on canvas by some 100 artists, as well as digital prints and sculptures, and a rainbow-hued staircase by British artist Ben Eine. We’ve come a long way from the time when authorities would spend thousands to remove spray paint from buildings—these days street artists sell their works for those amounts. Over the last 40 years graffiti and street art have transformed from being considered vandalism into a celebrated, commercial art form, and the Urban Nation Museum is a prime example.
Inside, you will find the blockbuster superstars of street art, like Banksy, the stencil artist known for his award-winning feature film Exit Through the Gift Shop. There is also a two-story-high painting by Shepard Fairey, who created the iconic “Hope” portrait of Barack Obama in 2008, and works by 3D (the lead singer of Massive Attack) and Parisian stencil artist Blek le Rat.
The museum is also home to works by graffiti pioneer Futura, who made his name painting New York City subway cars in the 1970s. But just as Futura went on to show in New York art galleries in the 1980s, Urban Nation’s museum space drives home the point that street art and galleries have long been connected, and that it has notoriously been a challenge for institutions to “get it right.”
This isn’t the first street art museum and it won’t be the last. There’s the Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art in Munich and the outdoor Street Art Museum in Amsterdam, which started as a grassroots project in 2010. There is the Street Art Museum in St. Petersburg, which was founded in 2014, and London’s own Street Museum of Art.
Apart from being the largest of its kind, what sets this Berlin museum apart from the rest? Well, it’s a cool mix of up-and-coming European artists that also pays homage to the forefathers of American street art. For example, the museum presents a colorful canvas by New York artist Kenny Scharf, who rose to fame alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 1980s. There is also a piece by Ron English, known for altering advertising billboards to have anti-corporate messages in the 1980s.
The museum also shows what’s hot at the moment, like Swedish artist Andreas Englund, who paints portraits of aging superheroes, and Iranian artists Icy and Sot, whose metal fence piece shows a refugee family running across a border. Despite this mixture of historical and contemporary strains, the layout isn’t chronological, so it can be hard to follow a narrative, and the curation frequently comes across as cluttered.
Despite the rebellious origins of urban art, it comes as a surprise no artist worked directly on the walls of the museum. All except one: the Portuguese artist VHILS, who carved out a portrait of a man’s face into the drywall.
Interior installation view of Urban Nation Museum, 2017. Photo: Sabine Dobre
While this museum is a wonderful gesture to a marginalized art form, there isn’t enough real world politics, grit, or transgression crossing the institutional threshold, and this first exhibition hardly comments on the state of the western world. Artists like Hanksy, who did a dung portrait of Donald Trump in New York City, or the collective Indecline, which painted political murals on the Mexican-US border wall, or local political street artist Thierry Noir, who was one of the first to paint the Berlin Wall while it was being torn down, would have been great additions. As a result, Urban Nation’s inaugural exhibition takes no weighted risks in presenting an art form once synonymous with risk-taking.
The museum is a living testament to show how far street art has come, and where it is today, grappling with the role of commercial brand crossovers and teetering on the cusp of institutionalization, but there is scant visibility of the local scene. Considering the long history of street art and its political past in Berlin, there are few voices represented, and they aren’t the strongest ones.
For a real slice of the Berlin street art scene, however, gallery-goers are better off going to Urban Spree, a street art gallery and studio in Friedrichshain, which has shown works by Berlin-based artists like Rylsee, Klub7, and Johannes Mundinger.
To Mundinger, the museum does have some perks, but it still leaves room for improvement. “What I like about the museum is its initial concept to invite different people to bring their favorite street artists for the first pre-exhibition they hosted, and bringing different artists from different backgrounds to Berlin,” he said. “Still, there could have been more diversity, content and style-wise.”
Walls from the “Art Mile” along Bülowstrasse, timed with the opening of Urban Nation Museum. Courtesy: Urban Nation
Urban Nation is not just a museum—the organization also commissions walls around the city with their ongoing One Wall project, and timed with the museum opening, they organized an “Art Mile” of works on walls and trains along Bülowstrasse. Nevertheless, there isn’t much devoted to Berlin’s own important history here, considering countless artists made their mark on the Berlin Wall between the years 1961–1989. After the fall of the Wall, hundreds of artists painted the east side of the Berlin Wall, now called the East Side Gallery, with peace imagery and murals. There is little trace of that heritage, unfortunately.
According to Jochen Küpper, director of Urban Affairs, an urban art festival in Berlin, the local scene was ignored by the museum in the months leading up to their grand opening. “Many international artists were invited, but the local scene was mostly ignored,” says Küpper. “For locals, it didn’t make sense why their requests were ignored, as everyone wanted to help create. Urban art is a public art form and communication is at the core of the movement.”
He adds: “Why did they call this a museum of urban art? There isn’t much about the history, especially the history of urban art in Berlin; there’s no information about the artists or any technical framing, which should be normal for a museum. For most people, it looks like a private collection, more like a gallery. This is not good for the art and this so-called museum, right now, is more of a negative threat for urban art, than any opportunity or community building.”
Interior installation view of Urban Nation Museum, 2017. Courtesy: Urban Nation. Photo: Sabine Dobre
Nadja Sayej is an arts reporter and the founder of ArtStars*, check out her website at nadjasayej.com.
As reported in CNET:
Teufelsberg played host to British and American spies during the Cold War. Now the Berlin site is open to the public as a "natural cultural space." Using only the lights from our phones to guide us, we climbed up and up -- eleven steps, turn a corner, repeat.
Panting unashamedly, we emerged into the big, dark space, which was lit only by a shaft of light from one window. I could hear the echo of my own astonished voice as I looked up to see a figure representing heaven and one representing hell reaching around the inside of the dome at the top of the tower, fingers touching, as though holding the space between and all of us in it in a reluctant embrace.
I'm at Berlin's Teufelsberg Field Station, a former listening post for the US National Security Agency, known for its giant white bubbles on top of the facility that look like a collection of moons. Abandoned for many years, Teufelsberg is taking on a new lease on life as an art exhibition space.
The amazing acoustics of the top dome mean that these days it is used for jam sessions and even small gigs, but it was a different case during the Cold War. British and American agents used the four white globes at the facility to spy on the Soviet Union.
The spheres were put together via many teflon triangles, each one unique and arranged according to a complex mathematical problem in order to best create the ball shape, and would only allow information to pass in and not out. They also served to shield whatever technology -- something that even today is a mystery -- was hidden underneath.
When the NSA left in the early '90s, it took all its equipment with it. Reports about the activities that took place at Teufelsberg are classified until 2022. But even then, we may not find out much. Marvin Schutte, the current landlord of the site, believes that when the information is finally made public, the bulk of it will be redacted.
That would be a shame, I said to him, as we squinted into the late afternoon sun at the makeshift bar he has set up in front of the station, but he shook his head. "I don't care actually about the past," he said. "Looking forward is better."
And his forward-looking vision for the place is already taking shape. In 2016, he officially opened Teufelsberg to the public (although people have been stumbling upon it in one way or another for years) charging them 8 euros for access, and another 7 euros for a photo pass. In May, he announced a more ambitious renovation of the site to make it fit as "a natural cultural space."
Eventually there will be more indoor gallery space, as well as a little museum with some history. Schutte's main focus right now though is infrastructure -- putting in lighting, water, windows, heating.
Then there are the jam sessions, the street art that occupies the inside and outside of most of the buildings, the little bar with up-cycled furniture dotted around -- these are all already feeding into the renovation.
There are enough places in Berlin for partying, said Schutte. He wants locals and tourists alike to come to Teufelsberg to chill out.
"If you have a stressed week in Berlin, you come up here Saturday, sit around, listen to music, see art, talk to artists and just enjoy silence and free time," he said.
Teufelsberg, meaning "devil's mountain," is actually the name of the man-made hill on which the Field Station sits. The site was chosen for its height rather than its obscure location, but the fact that it's situated slap-bang in the middle of the Grunewald forest, requiring at least 30 minutes of uphill hiking to reach it from an S-Bahn train, does enhance the sense that it's shrouded in mystery.
Nyika Mukada is one of several artists who works at Teufelsberg doing tours, running the payment desk and arranging space for visiting street artists to come and do their thing. Artists can call up several weeks before arriving and book a wall upon which to spray or paint. "We support sport and art and culture," he told me, as we wandered between the murals.
Keen to show me one of his favorites, Mukada directed me to a photorealistic portrait of woman created by artist Nick Flatt, who spent 17 hours per day for ten days painting the woman and the words that surround her. "Fuck Facebook," "Fuck NSA," "Fuck Brad Pitt," they read.
The photorealistic painting by Nick Flatt.
Andrew Hoyle/CNETThis anti-espionage, anti-politics tone is echoed in other works around the complex. Schutte seems more keen to encourage a certain vibe rather than furthering a specific political agenda, but many of the artworks at Teufelsberg hint at underlying anarchist and anti-statist sentiments that are self-consciously at odds with the setting.
Teufelsberg really is a place of great natural beauty and while it could be interpreted as decaying, it is actually being reclaimed, not just by artists, but by nature too. From a 360-degree platform half way up the tallest tower, Mukada pointed out the lake of Wannsee, shimmering in the distance on the far fringes of the forest. In the other direction is Berlin's skyline. "And look, we are still being spied on today," he joked, gesturing to a red and white radio tower in the direction of the Olympic Stadium.
As part of the regeneration project, there will be no new buildings because the area is protected. "What you see is what you get," said Schutte.
His vision for Teufelsberg runs counter to what one developer wanted to do with the place, which was, in Mukada's words: "to turn it into the Beverly Hills of Berlin." On one floor the mock-up of a model apartment still stands, but it's now just another canvas for artists.
"Berlin is so much more than money," said Schutte. "The place is really precious. You can do much more here than just take some rich people inside."
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.
Has Street Art gone mainstream? I am finding more and more art fairs including street art and more street art themed fairs popping up. I am both elated and concerned. How about you?
Moniker International Art—the eight-year-old UK fair devoted to urban and street art—is coming to New York this spring. It is the latest addition to the bustling Frieze-anchored fair lineup in early May.
Moniker’s inaugural New York edition will take place at the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse in Brooklyn from May 3-6. Roughly two dozen exhibitors will set up shop in 10,000 square feet of waterfront space. The complete list has not yet been announced, but so far, exhibitors include StolenSpace Gallery and Curious Duke Gallery of London and Station 16 Gallery of Montreal.
Moniker’s director Tina Ziegler says the expansion to New York follows marked growth of the London fair. Since it was founded in 2010, she says, the fair has doubled the number of exhibitors and tripled the size of its exhibition space.
“It started as an art fair championing urban art but since then, we’ve embraced a lot more of what’s happening across the board with street art and graffiti art. The movement is expanding and is much more widely accepted as a serious art form,” Ziegler told artnet News.
Image courtesy Erwin Bernal via Flickr.
Ziegler says global expansion was a priority when she took the reins as director last year. “The obvious choice was New York. Street art and and graffiti as we know it today can be linked back to Brooklyn and New York’s subway graffiti so it just seems like a natural home to come to,” she notes.
Finding a location, however, was far from simple. After a trip to New York and heavy research, the team settled on the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, which is most often used as a music venue. “We need space to experiment,” Ziegler says. She was also encouraged by the growing popularity of the Greenpoint to Manhattan ferry, which makes the warehouse more easily accessible. (Plus, Frieze Week visitors are already accustomed to taking a boat to an art fair.)
Each year Moniker focuses on a different theme, and the New York edition will present interactive installations inspired by a fun fair or what the US calls a carnival. “We’re presenting carnival themes that touch on many subcultures within the urban art movement, so it also includes the political realm, and looking at the influence of comic book culture and Surrealism [on the fun fair],” Ziegler says.
Of the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, Ziegler says: “When I walked into that terminal, it had all the characteristics of the first venue in London where we launched…. It was a little bit rough around the edges but it’s got a lot of historical character. We really felt at home.”
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