street art

Wall Street Panic Becomes Street Art Project

Filed under: Events, Art

It's been a rough few weeks on the stock market, the ghosts of September 2008 seem to be haunting the Street. Now there's some art to go along with that feeling. Artist Michelle Rogers has created an urban poster project placed on Broad Street beside the New York Stock Exchange entitled "My God, My God...The 3 Stock Traders." The artist will present large poster reproductions of her oil paintings of stock traders "in panic mode" directly at what she terms "the scene of the crime".

Rogers took her inspiration from no less than Venetian master Titian's portraits of figures looking up to the heavens in fear. Rogers' stock traders also appear to be gazing skyward in similar poses but they are looking at screens watching numbers tumble. The art makes a strong statement, "I want the Wall Street guys to know, that they are not the masters of the universe and to accept that they have caused great pain in the world and they need to make it right" - said Rogers on her website. The project was also exhibited during the 53rd edition of the Venice Biennale on the Grand Canal.

Rogers is an Irish artist who has created many powerful paintings including "9-11 Memorial," a tribute to those lost on September 11. Other paintings have explored issues of war and conflict.

Tags: art, art posters, michelle rogers, street art, wall street

Celebrating the Legacy of Keith Haring

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Decor, Art

It's been twenty years since artist Keith Haring died and although his career was very short his designs live on. In celebration of Keith Haring's birthday on May 4th (he would have been only 52), Blik, the maker of self-adhesive surface graphics, is releasing four new Keith Haring licensed wall graphics: "Untitled Face," "Robot DJ 84," "Untitled Heart" and "Spaceship Pyramid" as part of their line of Haring wall decals. The four designs chosen by Blik and The Haring Foundation represent some of Haring's most iconic images and those that have a strong emotional attachment for his fans. "Untitled Heart" shown above, sells for $55.
Want more Haring? If you take part in AIDS Walk NY as a member of the Keith Haring Foundation Team and donate $50 or more you will get a limited edition T-shirt featuring artwork by Shepard Fairey based on a portrait of Keith by Patrick McMullan.

Tags: art, blik, graffiti art, graffiti artist, keith haring, street art

Banksy's Latest Coup: Exit Through the Gift Shop

by Ariston Anderson (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Decor, Auctions, Celebrity Shopping, Art

What would cause the world's most elusive and most illustrious street artist to make a film with never before seen insights into his own life? To get back at a man who used his name and took advantage of his friendship of course. The art world is abuzz with the latest work from the genius that is Banksy, Exit Through the Gift Shop.While the film is not about Banksy, as the hype would have you believe, it's worth seeing for the rare footage into both Banksy's physical and mental studio.

To tell you straight off, you're not going to see Banksy in the film. You're going to see a hooded figure, face blurred and voice disguised, that may or may not be Banksy, embedding the narration with signature Banksy quips. The most revealing clue into who Banksy is, who some sources peg as Robin Gunningham, is a wedding ring on a male hand, shown when the artist is at work. And that Banksy has a team of assistants, any one of whom could have played Banksy in the film, to help produce the massive work. But trying to peg the identity of Banksy is of course not the point of the film.

What you are going to see is a giant art world hoax surrounding amateur filmmaker, Thierry Guetta, turned amateur artist, Mister Brainwash. There's no information given on how involved Bansky was in the actual filmmaking, although by putting his name on the resulting work, it's clear he directed the narrative into a con story, a con named Mister Brainwash.

Thierry Guetta was a successful L.A. storekeeper who lived with a camcorder glued to his hand. After years of recording his day-to-day life, he stumbled upon something worth filming after visiting his cousin, the Atari-cum-mosaic inclined street artist Space Invader. He followed him for years, leading to his entry into the underground scene, filming the movement's multitude of stars: Swoon, Neckface, Poster Boy, Zevs, and Shepard Fairey. After failing to get any ins toward the most coveted subject of them all, Banksy, Guetta's luck changed when Fairey rang him up one day. Banksy was in L.A. and needed someone to show him around. Following his guidance into where to paint in L.A., Guetta gained Banksy's trust and friendship. As Banksy's entourage didn't contain a more worthy photographer, he began bringing Guetta into his more outlandish stunts, for posterity's sake, including the installation of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner inside Disneyland.

Tags: Angelina Jolie, Banksy, Brad Pitt, damien hirst, film, LA, London, mister brainwash, Neckface, Shepard Fairey, street art, Swoon, Theirry Guetta, Zevs

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Jesus Stops Traffic on 5th Ave

by Tom Johansmeyer (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

A row of cars waiting for a green light was concealed by four large canvases proceeding across New York's busy Fifth Ave., creating the appearance of emptiness from W. 51st St to Central Park and beyond. Artist Nelson Diaz chose Palm Sunday to reveal his latest project, "The Isolated Christ," to the people of New York. The response to this unique mix of street art, performance art and oil on canvas was nothing short of astounding.

Five years in the making, The Isolated Christ is a four-part rendering of the most famous figure in one of Leonardo Da Vinci's most recognized works. Diaz "isolated" the image of Jesus Christ from the apostles in DaV inci's "The Last Supper" and plotted thousands of points on the image by hand. Then, using advanced calculus techniques, he fed the point into an equation that exposes "hidden" four dimensional space in the original image and used the results as the foundation for his signature perspective.

The result is four faces of DaVinci's Jesus, reflecting various situations. The final canvas – transcendence – offers an obscure, almost headless presentation, signifying the departure from the norm. The meaning is left to the viewer, with the religious assuming resurrection and the atheist likely to posit obsolescence. Diaz remains coy with his intention, believing that interpretation (like faith) is a personal affair.

With half a decade spent on the vision and production of The Isolated Christ (all four paintings were completed by hand – sans brushes, literally with his fingers), Diaz spent the last few months struggling with venue. He decided last summer to skip the traditional alternatives (such as art galleries) during his protest against the treatment of art as a commodity, during which he auctioned 10 paintings on eBay for the princely starting bid of $1 each.

"The old way of doing things is dead," he explained during several of our meetings. Deep-pocketed buyers writing checks for pieces they don't understand, he believed, would not be able to sustain itself ... a lesson to which the art market was treated last September. Diaz wanted a public setting. As with his eBay experiment, he wanted to return the aesthetic to everybody, not a self-proclaimed elite.

That left only one "gallery" from which to choose: the streets of Manhattan.

Gallery: Nelson Diaz and The Isolated Christ

Tags: art, art galleries, art gallery, ArtGalleries, ArtGallery, artist, artwork, cathedral, davinci, fifth avenue, FifthAvenue, gallery, leonardo da vinci, leonardo davinci, LeonardoDaVinci, manhattan, moma, museum, museum of modern art, MuseumOfModernArt, museums, new york, new york city, NewYork, NewYorkCity, painting, paintings, st. patricks day cat, street art, street artist, street artists, StreetArt, StreetArtist, StreetArtists

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First Shepard Fairey Survey to Open at Boston's ICA

by Tracy Chait (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art has announced it will host the first museum survey of Shepard Fairey's provocative street art. The exhibition is aptly named Supply and Demand (recall how tricky it was to get your hands on Fairey's Obama gear) and will chronicle Fairey's 20-year reign as the guerrilla multi-media operative he is. It will also include a new mural commissioned specifically for the museum. Fairey is heavily involved in the plans -- he'll be plastering lucky Boston with public works of art and will even DJ on opening night.

Known for his shape-shifting tendencies -- the artist regularly jumps the boundaries between commercial and fine art -- Fairey's point of view is unwavering. "The real message behind most of my work is 'question everything,'" he told ICA curators.

The exhibit opens February 6 and will run through August 16.

Source

Tags: boston, ica, institute of contemporary art, InstituteOfContemporaryArt, shepard fairey, ShepardFairey, street art, StreetArt, supply and demand, SupplyAndDemand

Banksy Works Fail to Sell at Auction

by Tracy Chait (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Auctions, Art

Banksy, the British graffiti artist who remains semi-anonymous, had five of his works at a Lyon and Turnbull auction in London over the weekend. None of them sold.

Part of the problem stemmed from Banksy's refusal to claim the work as his own. Banksy has a history of stating that street art should remain in its places of origin, and this group of pieces had been moved. In the past the controversial artist's work has earned double the expected auction price.

[via The New York Times]

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Tags: auction, banksy, graffiti, street art, StreetArt