Raised by Woods

A perfect little documentary about Seattle artist No Touching Ground, aka. NTG, who recently returned to Seattle after an extended stay in Argentina. NTG has long explored the spaces within our urban environments that play host to wildlife, and this film is as direct a statement as you will ever see about his vision of the coyotes, wolves, bears and birds who once owned this land and will again.

For the Birds

While looking through the magical dumpsters of Barcelona, we happened upon a small pile of stuffed birds that had been discarded. The birds were all exotic species, from Africa, Australia, South America, and someone had carefully taxidermied them, mounted them to wooden posts, and eventually threw them away. A death in the family perhaps? Or a wife tired of her husband's morbid hobby? We rescued the ones that weren't completely destroyed, got hammers and nails, and carried them up to the Parc Guinardo. We strayed from the paths and climbed back into the trees, nailing the birds in high places to be discovered someday by passers-by.

Animated Murals

He may be a big businessman these days, but I still really love the animated murals that INSA creates. The magic of these pieces is that they only exist online - he paints and re-paints the walls multiple times to achieve these animated effects.

Incredible stuff. More here.

Hands

The project Hands, by a 4-man team from Barcelona, is some darn clever street art. The installations spreading through Barcelona's streets are well suited for an online presentation, complete with a video for political context. People's reactions to the art, not to mention the creation and installation processes, are also very well captured. Nicely done.

NTG in SA

Seattle street artist No Touching Ground is busily moving through South America, posting gorgeous images and getting attention.

A few weeks ago, he put up a mural in Buenos Aires of Susana Trimarco, an activist who has been fighting for ten years to free sex slaves in Argentina.

From Wikipedia:

After [her daughter was kidnapped], Susana began to visit brothels dressed as a prostitute trying to find her daughter Marita. She received threats and was given false clues in order to mislead her search. Her investigations lead to the release of other women deprived of their liberty.

Read more about NTG's travels on his website, or check out other people checking him out on the Buenos Aires street art blog, here and here.

Mapping Barcelona

A woman named "Katrine" has been living in Barcelona, seeking out street art and carrying a camera. It's not an uncommon way to see that photogenic city, but she has taken the unprecedented step of organizing the best of her photos into a highly organized and accessible map of Barcelona, directing us to specific art pieces on specific streets. It's a work in progress, but it's worth taking a tour today.

Billboards

Philadelphia photographer Zoe Strauss has teamed up with the Philadelphia Museum of Art to present her photography in a uniquely powerful way. The Museum has rented more than fifty commercial billboards throughout Philadelphia to serve as exhibitions of Strauss’ photographs, primarily photos of poor and working class people throughout the United States.

Commuters exiting the West Entrance at 30^th Street Station in Philadelphia see a billboard with no corporate logos, no slogans, nothing to sell, just a photo of a homemade plywood sign that reads “Don’t Forget Us” in red spray paint, made by a Louisiana resident living through the after effects of the BP oil spill.

Another billboard shows a shabby alleyway between the row homes of the 6200 block of Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia where more than 60 homes were destroyed during a famously violent confrontation between the MOVE organization and the Philadelphia City Police. Hard to imagine, but the city is currently full of these stirring images.

It's a fascinating and timely project. You must read more.

We Own the Night

From early 2009 to mid-2010, the Underbelly Project was the art world’s best-kept secret. After years of kept promises and hushed mouths, the book "We Own the Night" has finally been released offering some three hundred photographs of the project plus the death-defying stories from some of the participating artists.

The story has it that in 2005 New York street artist PAC first discovered a South Manhattan subway station that had been abandoned for 80 years. Compelled to revisit the place, he invited a collaborator, Workhorse, and the two of them conceived of turning the station into a gallery for the world’s leading urban artists. They arranged late-night trips to the "gallery" for more than 2 years, painting night after night to transform the space into the largest underground art gallery in the world.

When the curators declared the project finished in 2010, they invited a handful of friends and street-art friendly journalists who were sworn to secrecy, but there was no opening to show the work and the public were never invited. In late October of the same year, the secret was out when the New York Times ran a feature about an art installation that very few people would ever see. Soon afterward the space was boarded up by the MTA, and its location remains a secret to this day. The new book is the first full document of the work, and though I haven't seen it yet, I daresay it's set to become a seminal book on street art, and may even form the end of a history opened by Henry Chalfant.

More on this great project right here.

Manage Workflow

Remarkable new work from New York artist Specter. This is part of his "Manage Workflow" series that celebrates New York's marginalized workforce. These highly detailed hand-painted portraits started appearing around NYC in 2009. More here.

Makin' it Last

Part of what makes graffiti so compelling is it's incredibly contradictory nature. Whatever manic and aggressive aspects an individual piece of graffiti can posses, its impermanence gives it an inherently fragile quality. Graffiti is all about the moment that you happen to see it - one day it's a blank wall, the next day it's a masterpiece, and the day after that it's gone again. Bam.

Despite that here-today gone-tomorrow quality, graffiti- and hip hop in general - has attained a cultural longevity that no one would have predicted 35 years ago. Some of the artists who appeared like bursts of flame, and may have been expected to disappear just as quickly, are now revered as elder statesmen. Photos of their pieces have become cultural icons, and in the rare situation where an original piece has survived, they have become pilgrimage sites.

So it's only natural that a number of thoughtful projects have surfaced that mean to preserve some international graffiti landmarks.

Photographer and film director Henry Chalfant is spearheading the restoration of the 30 hours of unseen outtakes from the classic graffiti and hip-hop culture documentary Style Wars. The film is an indispensable document of New York Street culture from the early '80s, and there are about 30 hours of film shot between 1981 and 1982 that have almost never been seen. Chalfant, who co-produced the original film, is trying to preserve that footage and re-edit it into a second full length DVD. Here’s a great little video from Chalfant about the project.

While Style Wars was screening for the first time in NYC, Keith Haring was being flown over to Australia to paint a mural on an outdoor wall of the Collingwood Technical College in Melbourne. The mural is one of the few remaining outdoor murals by this influential and brilliant artist who died in 1990, and it's been sitting exposed to the sun and rain for the last 27 years. Finally there's effort underway to save it, going on right here.

Giving a little cash to a project like these is a personal choice - what's more interesting is the growing awareness that these ephemeral works form a part of our culture that is worth keeping.

State Route 99%

Closer to home, Seattle artist No Touching Ground has pasted a series of lifesize portraits of Occupy Wall Street protesters on the columns supporting the monorail on Fifth Avenue. Good strong medicine that can't be ignored. The art police are very quick to remove ornamentation from these particular columns, if you want to see them in living color before they disappear try to make the trip to Belltown before too long. You can see them eternally on the web of course, here and here.

By the way, NTG has been doing some really powerful work all over the place. For example, check out this piece that appeared in Brooklyn, NY over the summer. Nice.

Rochester Gets Faith

Artist Faith47 out of South Africa was in Rochester, NY recently to work with local artists in transforming a large concrete wall in Troup Street Park into a message of hope, with a second location on North Union Street by the Rochester Public Market. The Synthesis Collaborative, a Rochester nonprofit organization, sponsored the multi-site mural project. Faith47 joined other South African artists including Mak1one, Freddy Sam and Dal along with the FUA Krew out of Rochester, and while there she found time to hit up this underpass deep with the network of Rochester roads. Pretty.

Artoleptic

This Sunday brings the 5th Artoleptic Festival to Pioneer Square. This small but steadily growing fair highlights urban arts and music, with appearances from plenty of top tier and lesser known artists and musicians. For the first time this year, the festival invites the public to bring large box trucks, work vehicles or buses to get painted for free. If you've got such a beast, just roll your vehicle into the center of the festival at Western and Yesler and have it set upon by a team of artists that includes 179, EGO, Joey Nix, Weirdo and others. A simple clear coat over the top and it should last for years!

This Sunday only, August 21 2011, from noon to 8pm.

Graffiti in BCN

As always, no shortage of incredible art to be found at street level in Barcelona. A few selections from the many world-class paintings I´ve already seen in just a week of ambling around.









This interesting 26-letter piece is one element in a tremendous international project by Claudia Walde in which more than 150 graffiti artists around the world are painting complete alphabets. This piece is from a series of 8 such alphabets on a single wall in Horta, designed and painted by the artists of Arteurbano. Doubtless, more soon.

Transformer

Doc Popular found himself with some time to kill in San Francisco, so he wandered around checking out the tags and street art. Turns out the sidewalks of the city are covered with stencils of Lou Reed from the cover his Transformer album. Doc went ahead and made this sweet animated GIF from 25 photos of the stencils! So nice!



The original photos look like this:

Getting Up Underground

All kinds of new work going up at the Underground Events Center. When I left on Sunday, most of the painting was still happening at street level. Were the artists waiting for me to leave before breaking out the paint-filled fire extinguishers? Not sure, but the result is stunning. Follow the work in progress by NKO, One Seven Nine, EGO and the Sign Savant right here.

Honor the Treaties

Beautiful images from the Honor the Treaties project have begun to appear around Seattle and, I assume, around the country. The project is being led by Seattle-based photographer Aaron Huey who has been documenting the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for the past six years. Recently Huey came to the realization that another expensive book or a gallery show would be an inappropriate and ineffective way to conclude his heartfelt project, which ultimately seeks to give voice to a great social injustice and a forgotten history.

Huey’s photographs depict high unemployment, broken families, alcohol abuse and life expectancy lower than that in Afghanistan. But more than that, Huey’s photographs show the legacy of the lies and broken treaties of the US government stretching back over a century. If the Treaty of Fort Laramie from 1868 had been observed, for example, then the Lakota and associated Sioux tribes would own land stretching across five states.

Huey enlisted Shepard Fairey to turn selected photographs into posters, and is now calling on students, graffiti artists and assorted volunteers to take the images straight to the public — pasting them on the sides of buses, subway tunnels, bus stops and billboards. You can buy an 18×24 print here, signed by Shepard Fairey and Aaron Huey, to support the project.

Martyr Murals

Very interesting article in The Guardian from a few weeks back about Ganzeer, an Egyptian graffiti artist. After the uprising in Egypt brought a new sense of change possibility to the street, this story surfaced about a young man who used the rare opportunity to paint unsanctioned murals on the walls of Cairo. His Martyr Murals project aims to produce public portraits of every single Egyptian killed in this year's uprising. As soon as he paints a mural, the government officials paint it over, but

"...in Tahrir and in protests all over the country, people got a taste for expressing themselves openly, and the government can't easily regain that control over public space again...Creating graffiti involves taking ownership of the streets, just like we did during the uprising. And so of course it's political, and illegal."

Read the full article here and check out Ganzeer's blog here.

Unintended Calculations

Nice new walls on the streets of Vancouver, BC from Remi Rough, Augustine Kofie, Jerry Inscoen and Scott Sueme. The murals, on the walls of the Moda Hotel, were the opening salvo in the foursome's group show Unintended Calculations at Becker Galleries. See it now, it's not up for long.

Lexier vs Bok

Smart and simple collaboration between Micah Lexier and poet Christian Bok. Found on the streets of San Francisco by Jacklyn Atlas.