Video: Swoon - "From Street Art to High Art"

Caledonia Curry, aka Swoon, started her career as a street artist, but leapfrogged to museums and galleries. Now she has expanded her work to include installation and performance art, often with an activist bent.  In the short video below Caledonia shares some thoughts on her most recent work and gets personal discussing life and death and how it has affected her recent pieces. There is also a charming story about the MOMA reaching out to her that keeps things equally lite and fun this morning.

Banksy Hits NYC Part 31

Well today is the final day of Banksy’s month long street art show taking place in New York and with it the final piece of Better Out Than In popped up in Queens. The balloon lettered throw up appeared around 6:30 a.m. and of course is already drawing massive crowds. The famed Bristol artist also gifted a design that’s intended to be printed on a shirt to commemorate the show, as is always the case with the provided graphic it’s free and up to you to do the printing. Funnily enough it resembles my own graphic I threw up for an earlier story on the exhibition.

For my money I’ve most certainly enjoyed the circus, some of the pieces are up there with the artists best works to date, rumor has it the LA is is up next for the month of December but only time will tell for sure.

Banksy had this to say about his experience of the thirty plus days spent in the Big Apple…

"Well, this is the last day of the show, and I'd like to say we're going out on a high note. And, I guess in a way, we are. [Cue "New York, New York"] This is a sideways take on the ubiquitous spray-painted bubble lettering that actually floats. It's an homage of sorts to the most prevalent form of graffiti in the city that invented it for the modern era. Or, it's another Banksy piece that's full of hot air.

So, what does the artist hope to have achieved with this so-called residency? "If just one child has been inspired to pick up a can of paint and make some art--well that would be statistically disappointing considering how much work I put in."

Banksy asserts that outside is where art should live, amongst us. And rather than street art being a "fad," maybe it's the last thousand years of art history that are the blip. When art came inside in service of the church and institutions. But art's rightful place is on the cave walls of our communities. Where it can act as a public service, provoke debate, voice concerns, forge identities.

The world we live in today is run, visually at least, by traffic signs, billboards, and planning committees. Is that it? Don't we want to live in a world made of art, not just decorated by it?

Thanks for coming.

[Fireworks]"

Banksy Hits NYC Part 30

Tomorrow should be the final day of Banksy’s month long Better Out than In street art exhibition in New York but we still have today’s to share, it came late in the evening and is a high profile Yankee’s stadium stencil piece.

In other news yesterday "re-appropriated" canvas has reached a current bid of $310,200.00 which when all said and done will go to the Housing Works organization.

Banksy Hits NYC Part 29

Only a couple days left of Banksy’s month long Better Out than In street art exhibition in New York. Today’s piece is called “The Banality of the Banality of Evil“ and is a high jacked/repurposed oil on canvas that’s located at the Housing Works thrift store on 157 East 23^rd street. The painting will eventually go on auction with the money raised going back into the organization who's mission is "to end the dual crises of homelessness and AIDS through relentless advocacy, the provision of lifesaving services, and entrepreneurial businesses that sustain our efforts."

Banksy Hits NYC Part 28

It’s Monday and with it Banksy is running the final lap of his Better Out than In street art exhibition in New York. The latest piece popped up in Coney Island and features a robot character we haven’t seen before, what’s in store for tomorrow?

Banksy Hits NYC Part's 25, 26, 27

Weekend fun and more from Banksy who on Friday launched his latest animatronic creation as his month long street art residency here in New York rapidly approaches the finish line. Check the video below to see the grim reaper enjoying himself in a bumper car, the piece was set up for public display behind a cage in the Bowery where is lived for two days. A suitable soundtrack was provided on site by both an accordion player and a recording of Blue Oyster Cult’s classic “Don't Fear the Reaper” which traded on and off throughout the day. Those who made it over to see the piece in person might have noticed the man hiding inside the door structure controlling the bumper car via remote control.

Saturday saw a simple tagged message on the back of a truck in Sunset Park that Banksy cheekily proclaimed to be an alternative New York bumper slogan, many would agree.

Sunday ended up being an impromptu piece in Greenpoint Brooklyn after the planned op-ed column in the New York Times was declined for publishing by the institution. Of course Banksy provided the unpublished article to the public regardless which was a comment on ground zero’s everlasting eyesore of a construction site that you can read below.

On a side note the free morning commute newspaper here in NY, AM NY, had an extremely poorly and under researched opinion piece today that is worth the read if you don't want to learn anything new or perhaps care for an opinion that might possibly be akin to someone as well versed in the subject matter as let’s say your local bodega owner.

Video: Costacos Brother's "Poster Boys" Documentary

“Seattle, 1984 – It all began with Prince. Naturally. One morning in his grandparents' house that sat atop his home city, John Costacos – just 23 years old – awoke to hearing “Purple Rain” on the radio.

A University of Washington graduate whose football team had the best defense in the country at the time, Costacos came up with the idea of making a "Purple Reign" T-shirt to honor the team, featuring a lineman in a purple jersey falling from a cloud in the sky.”

The rest, as they say, is history…

You may recall We covered a retrospective of the Costacos Bros work, "For the Kids" back in 2011 that took place at Salon 94 NYC, it was easily one of my favorite shows of the year and instantly transported me back to my youth and the posters that covered my bed room wall. Amy K. Nelson of SB Nation apparently shared the love because she put together a great documentary about the brothers featuring some killer footage of the original shoots, discussions with friends, family, former employees and of course many of the giants that where the models for these captivating posters.

The sixteen-minute film features the likes of Jim Mcmahon, Shawn Kemp, Jon Bois, Sir Charles Barkley and the very personable brothers themselves to name but a few and is absolutely worth your time if you were a child of the 80’s and celebrated sports with the Super Bowl Shuffle, The Reign Man and all the other larger than life personalities you just couldn’t get enough of.

Poster Documentary In The Works

Producer Johanna Goldstein and director Scout Shannon have been on the road filming an upcoming documentary about the poster world, and they’d like a little bit of help. The footage is looking awesome, check out the promo reel below. You can donate at a bunch of different levels with some very enticing gifts in return.  help them out at IndieGogo.com.


INDIEGOGO PROMO FINAL from Johanna Goldstein on Vimeo.

Rockin’ Jelly Bean video interview

Images of creatures and pin up girls posing provocatively with the illest luchador masks… Some say these characteristics define Japanese artist Rockin’ Jelly Bean. But as the man points out there's much more behind his work which has included familiar brands such as Hysteric Glamour, BBC, A Bathing Ape, and The Rolling Stones amongst others. The visual artist offers insights into his past, how the mask came about and ultimately how the industry has changed and the juxtaposition between  Japanese and American views on eroticism.

The following interview took place at Rockin’ Jelly Bean’s joint exhibition with fellow artist Sketch called “The Monster Show”.

HBTV Rockin' Jelly Bean: Women & Monsters from HBTV on Vimeo.

Costacos Brothers' "For the Kids" at Salon 94 NYC

Lots of 80’s Nostalgia this week and we save the best for last with Salon 94’s “For the Kids”, an exhibition of sports lithographs from the archives of John and Tock Costacos. The show serves as a mini-retrospective of early Costacos posters from 1986 through 1990. In addition to these works, pieces will be presented from Jeff Koons’s first solo exhibition, Equilibrium, the 1985 show that included basketballs floating in display tanks, cast bronze standard scuba diving tanks and framed advertising posters that appropriated imagery contained in Nike advertisements that preceded the earliest Costacos work. The Nike posters were purchased by Koons with the permission of the manufacturer, and were presented as his own artworks.

Costacos Brothers, originally a sports t-shirt manufacturer, built a reputation for “fantasy” sports posters that gave professional sports heroes a larger-than-life look and appeal. Their products captured the imagination of sports fans at a time when athletes were becoming pop stars. Without a license from professional sports leagues, they were unable to produce game action shots. Instead, they made personality posters, marrying pop culture to an athlete and his persona. They understood that at a certain point a player gains a public profile that transcends their team, catapulting them to individual stardom.

My buddy Alex used to have The Chicago Vice one up in his bed room seeing these again took me right back.

Costacos Brothers' "For the Kids" NYC - make slideshow