Shantell Martin Public Art in Queens

Untapped Cities website announces a great piece of public art in Queens, New York:

Awarding-winning artist Shantell Martin has debuted her 16,000-square-foot mural in the “Big Yard” Seaside playground at Waterside Children’s Studio School. Located near the new Rockaway Hotel and used by 700 students and numerous community members, the outdoor recreational space provides the ground for Martin to make her mural visible to passersby on foot, guests atop the neighboring and new Rockaway Hotel rooftop, and New York City travelers arriving by air.

The mural consists of iconic, monochromatic black and white interconnected lines, Martin’s signature style of drawing, that form texts and images to revitalize and beautify the neighborhood and highlight the vibrancy of the Rockaway Community and its urban beach landscape. “Because of the scale, there are multiple ways to experience the piece. What you have on the ground is very different from the experience you have of it from a higher perspective where you get to see how the lines, words, and faces are actually interacting with each other,” Martin said. “It’s all about discovery and letting people interact with it the way they naturally feel inclined to.”

The project is a response to an open call letter from Friends of Seaside Playground, a grassroots organization dedicated to promoting wellness through art, sports, and outdoor activities for children in the community, and its partners 7|G Foundation and The Rockaway Hotel. The committee sought proposals for a temporary mural at the “Big Yard.” Martin, who has previously presented her works on large scale screens at World Trade Center and on a former military chapel on Governors Island, was unanimously chosen by the committee. “When curating a public artwork, it is imperative that the work connects to the community that is living with it,” said Michi Jigarjian, Rockaway Hotel’s Social Impact Officer. “For Shantell’s piece in Rockaway, she centers on the empowerment of understanding ‘who you are’ and ‘yes you are you,’ which is a powerful message for a community as diverse and vibrant as Rockaway.”

Street Art of Shrine? Maybe Both

Nicole Saraniero writes for UnTapped New York that there is a makeshift shrine to Mercury spotted at a Brooklyn NY subway station.

When you are running late and waiting for the subway, you may find yourself praying for it to arrive quickly. Well, it looks like one subway rider has taken their plea for timely service to the next level by creating a cardboard subway shrine. This makeshift ode to the god Mercury was spotted by straphanger Russel Jacobs in the Utica Avenue A/C stop in Brooklyn.

The subway is a the perfect place to find guerrilla art and fun pop-ups like this. The shrine features a sketch of the Roman god Mercury with winged feet, a winged hat and winged staff. Mercury is known as the god of luck, commerce, communication, among other things. The most appropriate for this application, Mercury is the patron of travelers. The altar of the shrine is strewn with an offering of yellow roses, red electric candles, a trio of dice, a miniature bridge and a Metrocard. Perhaps if you leave an offering, Mercury will smile upon you and your train will arrive on-time.

 

Tel Aviv's Florentin District is Losing Its Wonderful Street Art

The Times of Israel sheds light on an international travesty. Artist neighborhoods filled with street art are being over run by developers and destroyed. One such neighborhood is the Florentin in Tel Aviv. Read more here --

The hub of Tel Aviv’s street art scene remains Florentin. Operators regularly offer guided street art tours for foreigners and Israelis alike to view the art spread throughout the neighborhood. Abarbanel Street and its surrounding industrial zone of wood and metal workshops — as well as art galleries — are the street art epicenter.

But with Florentin’s ongoing, fast-paced gentrification, the art on its streets is dwindling. In several parts of the neighborhood, in fact, street art was recently painted over by the municipality. Due to soaring real estate prices, rival developers are battling over the land in their haste to build residential housing. And as they do this, they are stripping away the neighborhood’s soul, driving real estate prices even higher, while offering little to the public — apart from more living quarters in an overcrowded section of a city that is in dire need of cultural spaces.

“Street Art Tel Aviv” — the first in our series of books documenting Tel Aviv’s urban art scene — captures the streets of the city when they still largely belonged to us.

 

Washington DC's New Graffiti Museum

Kelsey Ables writes for the Washington Post of the new Graffiti Museum in Washington DC:

At the new 14th Street Graffiti Museum, opening Oct. 3 near 14th and Crittenden streets NW, the only way to look at the graffiti, in some spots, is to look, gallery-style: letter by letter, line by line, stroke by stroke. Tucked behind Stein’s Cafe Raw Bar and a boarded-up pizzeria — and barricaded, on the outside, by a tall iron fence — the museum occupies an open-air courtyard previously used to store trash bins. Graffiti lines two exterior walls, and the fence, which runs along Crittenden and a nearby alley, hugs the museum’s facade so tightly that as you walk along the outside, the letters take up your full field of vision. Up close, you can see how seamlessly the artist Jah blends one shade into another to make heavy, 3-D forms; how Denso traces letters with a painterly, dripping white; how Grave’s letters deconstruct into tumbling abstract forms, falling in and out of legibility. With the letters towering over your head, you can sense what it must be like to write them: the thrill of shouting from the walls of a gray city in bubbly purples and pinks.

In a town teeming with museums that tend to be grand and formal, the Graffiti Museum is neither. From the sidewalk, it looks a little too modest to own the title “museum.” But step inside its unassuming walls — covered with work by foundational D.C. writers, as graffiti artists are called — and you’ll find a history that couldn’t be told more honestly anywhere else.

In recent years, graffiti has moved into the mainstream: Graffiti-inspired paintings auction for millions; popular brands sell apparel emblazoned with signature tags; institutions as polished as the Museum of Modern Art display street art. Along the way, graffiti has moved further from the communities — often poor or otherwise marginalized — that pioneered it.

Grave at work. (Nick Moreland)

SMK. (Nick Moreland)

For an art form that was nurtured in the streets and is apathetic about (if not antagonistic to) institutional prestige, the 14th Street Graffiti Museum, with its humble digs, feels true to graffiti’s under-the-radar, after-midnight origins. Under the guidance of curator and artist Cory Stowers and his encyclopedic knowledge of local writers, the space gives graffiti the respect and attention of a museum, without uprooting it from its context.

Stowers hopes the museum will bring foot traffic to local businesses in an area that has been hit hard by the pandemic and the temporary closure of Metro’s nearby bus garage for renovation. The term “museum” is meant as part of the appeal. “It gives it a certain cachet,” says Stowers. “We could have painted this anywhere and just not put a title on it, and most people would not care, but because I called it a museum, people care.In designing the space, Stowers leaned into the weighty title. The outer wall highlights active graffiti artists from his Double Down Kings crew. The inner wall — over a backdrop painted with images of such graffiti paraphernalia as black books and markers — chronicles a history of D.C. graffiti in which legendary writer Cool “Disco” Dan, depicted in a vibrant mural, is the cornerstone.

‘A folk hero’: D.C. street art legend Cool ‘Disco’ Dan dies at 47

Erick B. Ricks’s mural of Cool “Disco” Dan. (Nick Moreland)

Danny Hogg, who died in 2017, was notoriously elusive, his simple tag, scrawled in plain letters, nearly ubiquitous. On the walls of go-go venues, and surfaces high and low along the Red line, he shouted for attention. In person, he was said to be quiet, even awkward. In the mural by Erick B. Ricks, the myth and the man merge. Ricks casts Hogg in deep purple and sublime orange, arms outspread, and with two halos — one gold and the other patterned with the D.C. flag — circling his head. He looks Christlike.

The man in the mural seems to gaze toward a tag by R.E. Randy, D.C.’s first graffiti “king,” according to Hogg, and one of Hogg’s biggest influences. Stowers refers to the tag, which features the logo of go-go band Rare Essence, as the “most D.C. thing in the space.”

For Stowers, the museum is as much an opportunity to honor Hogg as a chance to widen public discourse about graffiti. Hogg straddled the two major graffiti movements in D.C.: the go-go style — defined by simple lettering that would appear outside music venues — and the more stylized New York graffiti that began to appear in D.C. along with the rise of the District’s straight edge and hardcore punk movements.

“There are not really broader conversations, outside of ‘Disco’ Dan, about old-school graffiti and why it’s important, but we are trying to change that,” says Stowers. “Artists in the culture in the late ’80s early ’90s — like SMK and SEK — really paved the way for what we are doing today. They should not be relegated to footnotes.”

Murals that are part of the 14th Street Graffiti Museum. (Nick Moreland)

The artists known as SMK and SEK, and other members of the Fierce Fighter Crew (or FFC), which Dan would ultimately join, fill the wall with his mural. Throughout the space you can see how graffiti has evolved, from the austere letters of R.E. Randy and graffiti “queen” known as Lisa of the World to SMK’s colorful, New York-inspired work. One of the first artists to incorporate mural elements, Mesk, whose “Power to Love” piece is featured on the courtyard’s back wall, laid the foundation for the younger artists featured on the exterior walls of the museum.

Connecting the dots between the plain scrawl of Cool “Disco” Dan and today’s loud, three-dimensional graffiti writing might seem overly generous. But even if the style is different, the endeavor is the same: to reclaim a piece of urban space and declare defiantly, simply, purely — maybe even profoundly — “I am here.”

 

If you go

14th Street Graffiti Museum

14th and Crittenden streets NW.

Hours: Open daily, beginning Oct. 3, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Admission: Free.

Street Art Reurns to NYC and I Am Thrilled!

... But I know some people are not happy with the rebirth of NYC graf. Oh well. The re-emergence of street art and graffiti is a sign that New York still has its artists. I see this trend as a big positive, revealing a core creative that is basic and authentic to our experiences living here. For  those of us who remember the street art of the 1970s and 1980s, today is reminiscent of the work of those days and a refresher from the sanctioned commoditized version we were living in since 5Pointz was destroyed.

Hot off the press from the New York Times ---

Graffiti Is Back in Virus-Worn New York

The Seventies called. They want their walls back.

While most New Yorkers grudgingly accepted New York City’s lockdown in March, one community eagerly embraced it: graffiti writers. Deserted commercial streets with gated storefronts offered thousands of blank canvases for quick tags or two-tone throwies, while decorative murals in gentrifying neighborhoods were sprayed over as the streets rendered a definitive critique.

From the South Bronx to East New York, a new generation of graffiti writers has emerged, many of whom have never hit a trainyard or the inside of a subway car. But like early taggers who grew up in a city beset by crime, grime and empty coffers, today’s generation is dealing with its own intense fears over the devastating effects of the coronavirus on communities and the economy.

“Does art dictate the times or do the times dictate art?” said John Matos, 58, a graffiti writer known as Crash who started out in the 1970s. “Before now, the streets were sanitized, with pieces that were cool and nice, and done with permission. Now, we’re back to the roots.”

In his day, tagging was a dangerous — and illegal — art done under cover of night as writers sprayed whole subway cars from top to bottom. To many New Yorkers, it was a hallmark of a city in decline, a view later reinforced by the “broken-windows” approach to policing. Many artists from that era made the shift to gallery exhibits or commercial murals in the mid-1980s, when the city began aggressively targeting what was largely considered vandalism. By 1989, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had declared victory over graffiti (though in recent years some whole cars have been painted clandestinely, leading city officials to step up security).

In the following decades, street art — murals commissioned by landlords and businesses or done by collectives in gentrifying neighborhoods — became trendy as the city experienced an economic and population boom. And while graffiti never disappeared completely, in recent weeks it has become ever more visible citywide. The increase in graffiti is for many residents an unwelcome sign of the recent economic upheaval, especially for property owners who take on the Sisyphean task of trying to erase it all.

“It all begins and ends with angst,” said Mr. Matos, 58, the son of an evangelical preacher who grew up in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx. “Teenage angst is always going to be provoked. I always equate graffiti with music, like the way Stevie Wonder wrote political songs. What’s going on in the streets is a response to things.”

Today’s pieces are just as bold — and illegal — as those from four decades ago. Henry Chalfant, a co-producer of the 1983 graffiti documentary “Style Wars,” said it’s just part of the landscape for him. He noted that as subway graffiti declined, more artists took to the streets, where they painted without permission.

“It’s more just getting your name out there now,” said Mr. Chalfant, who published “Subway Art” with the photographer Martha Cooper. The book is a definitive archive of the ephemeral art. “Is that really different after the trains were over and the old kings stopped painting? People just went out and bombed. And they still are.”

The lockdown — especially when the M.T.A. announced reduced hours — echoed subway graffiti’s heyday some 40 years ago, when artists took advantage of snowstorms that left dozens of unattended trains parked overnight in tunnels. And while wearing a mask may have looked odd six months ago, no one has a second thought about it now, making it easier to paint despite the near-universal presence of surveillance cameras.

Concerns over the virus, as well as the death of George Floyd and others at the hands of the police, have been reflected in the pieces showing up around the city. But a lot of the new tags around town are, on their face, apolitical, though the mere act of writing on a wall is a political statement in itself.

“The whole thing with quarantine is that people feel powerless because daily life and activity is very different,” said Eric Felisbret, the author of “Graffiti New York,” who took up aerosol art as a teenager on the Lower East Side. “They can’t control anything. But they can get out there and bomb — that’s something they can control.”

 

Watch Graffiti Artist ESPO Do His Art on Deseerted NYC Streets

A stark look at life in New York City during the pandemic. Fascinating yet heart breaking:

Banksy’s ‘Game Changer’ Painting Was Almost Stolen From a UK Hospital

Some people have no shame - as noted by The Observer:

As one of the most famous artists in the world, Banksy is used to people making attempts to pilfer his creations: last September, a stencil drawing made by Banksy of a rat disappeared from its perch outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and it still hasn’t been determined whether Banksy himself was involved in this caper. More recently, however, a painting made by Banksy honoring the hospital workers battling at the front lines of the coronavirus was reportedly almost stolen from Southampton General Hospital in the UK. According to The Sun, a mysterious man was spotted loitering around the painting, which is called Game Changer, by guards watching via CCTV. He was subsequently removed from the premises before he could do any damage.

“The man just walked in brandishing a cordless drill,” an unnamed source told The Sun. The attempted robbery apparently took place on May 8, only two days after the painting was originally installed in the hospital. “Security spotted him and asked a supervisor if they should stop him. They were told to watch him and he was seen walking past the picture at least five times, clearly having a good look. Security stepped in and he was removed.” It was originally planned that the painting should remain in the hospital, at which point it’ll be auctioned off in order to raise money for the U.K.’s National Health Service.

Game Changer, which depicts a small child playing with a doll in a nurse’s uniform while neglecting superhero figurines in an adjacent basket, could eventually draw as much as $6 million at auction, which would be a hugely helpful influx of cash for the NHS, especially given the volatility that the pandemic has unleashed. Given the fact that the Banksy painting holds so much potential value for the U.K. hospital system, it seems as though it should be guarded carefully in the future.

Virtual Walking Tour of Welling Court in Astoria

The fabulous street art of Welling Court in Astoria Queens is captured by this beautiful video. Enjoy:

 

The best NYC street art inspired by our surreal times

Howard Haile writes for Time Out

One of the big questions surrounding the "New Normal" is how will it affect life as we know it in the long term. In what ways will it transform how we work, how we vote and how we entertain ourselves? Will going to the movies, seeing a musical or dining at your favorite boîte ever be the same?

And then there's the issue of art, which has already migrated to the web in the form of virtual tours and online viewings. But more important is how the content of art is going to change. Will the art world go back to business as usual, or will the current situation become a principal subject for artists and the curators and collectors who follow their lead?

In the gallery world, this has yet to happen in any concerted fashion, though there have been some efforts to address the crisis. Street art, on the other hand, seems to be making a more noticeable pivot towards responding to Covid-19 and its fallout. This may be due to the fact that street art is historically rooted in the idea of being a guerrilla activity, nimble in execution and subversive in content.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that here in New York, the city that gave birth to the graffiti movement, several examples of pandemic-related street art have been popping up around town. We picked out some especially eye-grabbing pieces, which you can check out here.

Banksy Just Made a Surprisingly Earnest Painting of a Superhero Nurse and Donated It to a British Hospital as a Morale Booster

Three cheers for Banksy. As ArtNet reports:

The work will remain on view at the Southampton General Hospital until this fall, when it will go to auction.

Caroline Goldstein, May 6, 2020

Banksy has donated a painting to England’s Southampton General Hospital in an effort to raise the spirits of medical professionals working on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic.

The painting, an uncharacteristic medium for the elusive street artist, shows a young boy playing with a superhero doll dressed as a nurse, complete with a mask and apron bearing the Red Cross symbol, and a cape fluttering behind her. Next to the child, a wastebasket holds castoffs, including Spider–Man and Batman figurines—outdated versions of superheroes in our new pandemic-stricken world.

The artist left a note with the special delivery, titled game changer, that read: “Thanks for all you’re doing. I hope this brightens the place up a bit, even if its only black and white.”

 

The hospital, which is the largest in the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust system, hosts coronavirus researchers, including those who are starting vaccine trials.

Speaking to the BBC, which first reported the news, hospital trust CEO Paula Head said: “It will be really valued by everyone in the hospital, as people get a moment in their busy lives to pause, reflect and appreciate this piece of art. It will no doubt also be a massive boost to morale for everyone who works and is cared for at our hospital.”

The work will remain on view in a foyer near the emergency department until this fall, at which point it will go up for auction to raise money for the National Health Service. And judging by recent history, it could be quite profitable. In late March, Sotheby’s held an online auction of Banksy’s works that netted $1.4 million, showing that buyers were undeterred by the economic downturn.

This isn’t the first time the anonymous artist has made work commenting on our isolated new realities. In April he showed off his new work-from-home life with a mural painted in his bathroom.