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A Graffiti Master’s Final MuralDavid Gonzalez📍 Reporting from the BronxDavid GonzalezAlfredo Oyague, a well-known graffiti artist, wanted to promote peace through his work. Although diabetes forced him to stop painting murals in 2018, he hoped to bring together two crews to paint a wall in the Bronx.Here’s what happened → More
His paintings at the contemporary gallery PPOW are a bridge to his train-tagging days and a paean to Bronx street life.The Tribeca gallery PPOW, where Chris Ellis’s work is on view, sits around the corner from the old Mudd Club space, which in the late 1970s and early ’80s functioned as a clubhouse for New York City’s downtown demimonde. Graffiti writers from uptown and the outer boroughs mixed with art world habitués, and Keith Haring had the run of its fourth floor gallery. It was where Ellis, who began tagging trains as Daze in 1976, first showed his studio work indoors, a piece he made with Jean-Michel Basquiat for the 1981 show “Beyond Words,” curated by Leonard McGurr (a.k.a Futura) and Fred Brathwaite (a.k.a. Fab 5 Freddy).“The Mudd Club was the first place that I ever sold a piece of work,” Ellis said at PPOW recently, his graying curls peeking out from under a knit cap. “This impromptu collaboration with Jean-Michel, where we both tagged up this piece of newsprint, and Rene Ricard bought it. I think I got 50 bucks from that, so I was happy.”Chris “Daze” Ellis, “A Memorial” (2020), in acrylic, oil, spray paint, respirator on canvas.Chris “Daze” Ellis and P·P·O·WThat version of New York — of artistic production abetted by cheap rent and creative permissiveness — can feel very far away. A plaque marks the spot where the Mudd Club stood; there’s a boutique hotel nearby, its sleek lobby lit by designer lamps. Ellis’s exhibition at PPOW, “Give It All You Got,” which is on view until Feb. 12, attempts to create a bridge between that fertile time in the city’s history and its current iteration: richer, pandemic buckled and more atomized. It brings together pieces from Ellis’s 40-year studio practice, and new paintings that are both mournful and exultant. They elegize, in a collision of figurative precision and emotive abstraction, the artist’s friends and contemporaries, many of whom have died, but also a feeling of wonder that has, if not entirely dissipated, been tempered by a lifetime in the city.“A Memorial” (2020), for instance, depicts a train tunnel shrouded in icy blue darkness, a construction of the ones Ellis spent countless hours in. On its walls and the sides of a subway car he’s committed the tags of writers he’s known. For writers, the visual representation of one’s name is sacred currency, and Ellis renders each in the precise style of its originator, an affecting devotional act. They largely represent first and second generation graffiti writers — Dondi, DON1, IZ, NIC 707, Phase 2. “Each one of these guys had their own story to tell,” he said.The tunnel scene rises into a washy field of bright greens and vaporous pinks, as if leaving the earthly plane for something celestial. The canvas is crowned by a serious-looking respirator — Ellis’s own — that hangs over it like a halo. Ellis, 59, was one of the few graffiti writers that used a respirator while using aerosol paint, which in the ’80s could still contain lead. He credits it with saving his life. It’s a memento mori, charging the canvas with the specter of death but also salvation, ideas that for the graffitist go hand in hand; the art at once a source of peril and a lifeline.Chris “Daze” Ellis, “Untitled (City),” (1984), spray paint, acrylic, collage at PPOW.Chris “Daze” Ellis and PPOWHis other recent work continues in this mode: realist, sober depictions of subway stations or the interiors of train cars dissolving into drippy splatter and intense bursts of color. They address Ellis’s split consciousness, his studio practice and his train days. In some, massive letters spelling “DAZE” creep up, interrupting the plane (As with other writers, Ellis’s nom de graf doesn’t hold special significance; he simply chose the letters he was best at rendering.)Along with artists like Futura, Zephyr, John “Crash” Matos, Lee Quiñones, and others, Ellis is one of the surviving members of a clutch of figures that achieved recognition in that era for their innovations in aerosol art, a distinctly American expressionism that prized dexterity and bravado and eventually became a movement with global reach. The careening lines and splashy strokes in Ellis’s latest work are reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism’s muscular gestures, and are a reminder that style writing is a form of action painting).“It very quickly took over my whole life,” Ellis said. Born in Brooklyn, he grew up in Crown Heights and began painting trains in 1976 while enrolled at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. “I spent a lot of time sketching and drawing and hanging out at train stations for hours waiting to photograph pieces that went by,” he said. “I knew I was creative, I didn’t know that I was calling subway painting art.”Ellis juggles spray paint cans in his Bronx studio in front of “Eastern Parkway” (2016) at left; “Untitled” (2021) in the center, and a cutout from the 1980’s at right.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesBy the early 80s Ellis had transitioned into a studio practice that translated the energy of its moment. “Untitled (City),” from 1984, shows a crowded club scene, a Reginald Marsh-like crush of punks and poets and people simply trying on new personas the way one might a fez, as a figure in a lower corner does.“This would have been the scene in Danceteria or Area, this weird mixture of all these different characters from all levels of society,” he said. “I was a part of that, too.” Nightclubs provided space for experimentation, exhibiting work that established galleries were less keen on. Ellis recalls a night at the Mudd Club when Basquiat pressed a fresh copy of “Beat Bop,” his spacey, panoramic record with Rammellzee and K-Rob, into his hands. Today it’s considered a blueprint of modern hip-hop.“I feel like when you read about the history of what happened then, it looks like these events could have taken place over 20 years, but it was only a few years. Every week something was going on you didn’t want to miss out on.”Chris “Daze” Ellis, “The Explorers” (2021), spray paint, acrylic on canvas.Chris “Daze” Ellis and P·P·O·WMuch of the new work invokes Mr. Ellis’s sons Indigo and Hudson, 9 and 12. They provide the models for two life-size resin sculptures, as well as the figures in “The Explorers” (2021), an expansive painting of a rail yard, a site stitched from Mr. Ellis’s memory, and now marked with homages (off to one side, the front end of Blade’s “Dancin’ Lady” train, an early influence, is visible). The site is both indelibly the Bronx and also not; the yard and trains cast in numinous ultramarine and violet signal that this is a kind of psychic haven. “It’s not that important to me to have a specific representation of a place, it’s more like you recognize it, but not really,” Ellis said. Honeyed light shines from apartment windows.In its desire to present a corrective portrait of a misunderstood place, “The Explorers” has an affinity with an older work, “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” from 1992, also on view, a pastoral toile of daily Bronx street life — the botanica, the mother and child, stoops, the subway — joined by a Rauschenbergian construction of studio flotsam: a mousetrap, a T-shirt silk-screen, a “Danger” sign. “My studio has been in the Bronx for decades now. I always loved being up there. Where there’s a lot of negative connotations about the Bronx, I always saw the positive.”When Ellis began making paintings he wasn’t yet in a studio of his own. He would paint on rooftops or in corners lent by friends. “Reflections in a Golden Eye” is one of the first pieces of art Mr. Ellis made in his own space, and it shows an artist expanding both formally and metaphorically, as well as the ways artists of his generation absorbed diffuse source material into hybridized forms, like cartographers redrawing the shape of the city in real time.Installation view, “Chris Daze Ellis: Give It All You Got,” PPOW, New York.Stan NartenIn recent years there’s been a revived interest in this period of art: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exhibition, “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation,” from 2020; “Beyond the Streets,” in 2019, and “Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts that same year (Ellis’s work figured in both). Work by Futura and Mr. Quiñones has been the subject of recent gallery shows, as has Rammellzee’s oracular oeuvre, which Red Bull Arts surveyed in 2018. Jeffrey Deitch recently announced his representation of Rammellzee’s estate.“At one point I felt that it was being swept under the carpet,” Ellis said. “I like that people are trying to fill in the blanks about what they didn’t know.” He traced this to a combination of nostalgia and clarifying hindsight, but isn’t interested in being lodged in either.“I don’t want to be stuck in a certain era. You can’t recreate a period that no longer exists. The generation that’s coming up now, they will be affected by things like social media, the immediacy of being able to see something right away. It’s not word of mouth anymore, but I believe there is still this community.”Ellis in his Bronx studio with studies for paintings.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesA few months ago, Ellis visited McGurr at his studio in Red Hook after an extended period out of contact. “When I was getting started he was one of the people that let me use his studio to paint,” Ellis said. “We have a shared history. More recently I’ve done some projects with Pink and Crash. We don’t speak to each other everyday, we may see each other once a year,” he said. “But people are still very much evolving.”Chris Daze Ellis: Give It All You GotThrough Feb. 12, PPOW, 392 Broadway, TriBeCa; 212-647-1044; ppowgallery.com. More
Geometric rock carvings that are believed to be at least 3,000 years old were scratched with names and dates at Big Bend National Park in Texas.Abstract geometric designs at Big Bend National Park in Texas that had survived for thousands of years were “irreparably damaged” by vandals who scratched names and dates into the prehistoric designs, the National Park Service said.The Park Service said on its website that the ancient rock art was damaged on Dec. 26 in the Indian Head area of the park, which encompasses more than 800,000 acres in southwest Texas and stretches along 118 miles of the United States border with Mexico.Since 2015, archaeologists at the park have documented more than 50 instances of vandalism, the Park Service said.Damaging park resources is against federal law and defacing rock art and ancient cultural sites violates the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, which aims to protect archaeological resources and sites on federal and Native American lands.Tom Alex, an archaeologist who retired from the park in 2014 after working there for 32 years, said that the damaged abstract designs were known as petroglyphs and that they had been pecked into the rock panel.“There’s wavy lines, curvilinear lines, geometric patterns, squiggles and things that just kind of meander across the rock surface,” Mr. Alex said on Saturday.Mr. Alex said it was difficult to determine precisely how old the art was, but, based on the weathering, the petroglyphs were most likely made somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 years ago. He said these types of designs represented some of the oldest rock art in North America. In the more recent time period, rock art included more representations of people and animals.The abstract pecked art is common across the southwestern United States. It is not yet possible to determine what group of native people were responsible for the designs at Big Bend, Mr. Alex said.It was also not known who damaged the rock art, though the person, or people, responsible left some clues. Four names were scrawled on the art: Adrian, Ariel, Isaac and Norma, according to photos shared by the Park Service. The year 2021 and the date “12-26-21” were also scratched on the rock.Tom VandenBerg, the chief of interpretation and visitor services at Big Bend, told Texas Monthly that the park had received “pretty strong potential leads” about who was responsible for the vandalism. Mr. VandenBerg added that the park avoided providing maps and directions to the carvings to prevent damage to the ancient site.Bob Krumenaker, the superintendent of Big Bend, condemned the vandalism in a post on the park’s website. “Damaging natural features and rock art destroys the very beauty and history that the American people want to protect in our parks,” he said.Park staff members tried to repair the damage, but much of it was permanent, the post said.Mr. Alex said some of the scratches on the panel were superficial and possible to clean up so they would be less obvious, but others had penetrated the prehistoric designs. “Those scratches are going to be there forever,” he said.Stewards of public lands have complained about an increase in vandalism and graffiti in recent years.In December 2020, Zion National Park in Utah said that nearly every day, staff members there found “words and shapes carved, drawn, painted (with mud, dirt, pigment, paint) or scratched on rocks.”In January 2019, several of the signature spiky-leafed Joshua trees at Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California were damaged during a government shutdown. More
New York’s longest running alternative art space celebrates its own near-mythic history — as well as the twists and turns of the city’s cultural scene.“I’m going to use a word you’re not supposed to say,” the sculptor Jeffrey Lew declared with a touch of bravado. “I’m sort of a sociopath.”In 1969 Lew and Rachel Wood, then his wife, purchased a decrepit six-story rag-salvaging factory in SoHo for $110,000. They moved into its upper floors with an assortment of kindred artists and, with fellow sculptors Gordon Matta-Clark and Alan Saret, turned the unheated ground floor and basement into a 7,400-square-foot exhibition space named 112 Greene Street (and later 112 Workshop), after its location. Subsequent shows featured a wall-mounted piece made of 500 pounds of decaying carrots, massive holes cut into the floor, and a dance troupe swinging overhead from the 17-foot-high ceiling.Installation view of the inaugural group show at White Columns’ first home at 112 Greene Street, Oct. 1970.Cosmo Sarchiapone, via White ColumnsThe Glenn Branca Ensemble performing at White Columns’ “Noise Fest,” June 20, 1981.Terri Slotkin, via White ColumnsThose early ’70s spectacles have since attained near-mythic status; work staged there that Lew felt museums and established galleries either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, show has since been feted in museums and blue-chip galleries. But Lew soon grew tired of the creeping professionalism brought on by a National Endowment for the Arts grant. “When I got the N.E.A. grant they said, ‘Give us your schedule.’ A schedule?” Lew recalled with a laugh. “The minute people start acting like curators, that’s when the good stuff ends.”By late 1978, Lew said he’d had enough of committees and payroll issues. He’d already turned the building’s upper-floor lofts into co-ops, but he was still the art space’s landlord. Citing his hefty tax bill, he tripled its $550 monthly rent, fully aware that its governing board could never afford the new rate. “Like I said, I’m a sociopath,” Lew explained. “I just didn’t have any feelings whether it went under.”Audience at a concert by the Italian folk group Pupi e Fresedde, held in conjunction with a White Columns exhibition of Peter Schumann’s puppets and masks, September 1977. Peter Schumann and White ColumnsYet 112 Greene Street didn’t die. Quite the opposite. It eventually found a new home in the West Village, as well as new leadership. Rechristened White Columns, the nonprofit became not only New York City’s longest running alternative art space, but one of its most enduringly vital. The evidence is on its walls as part of its 50th anniversary exhibition, which Matthew Higgs, the gallery’s director and chief curator since 2004, describes as part celebration and part tribute to the ongoing story of the New York art scene.Poring over the archival installation photos and printed ephemera, what emerges is a dizzying array of artists who began their careers with solo debuts there. From John Currin and Cady Noland in the ’80s to Rachel Feinstein and Glenn Ligon in the ’90s, no one style predominates. The common thread is simply that a given director found an artist interesting enough to present work and offer it for sale with no strings — one of 15 to 20 such shows every year — relying on grants and donations to cover its now approximately $1 million budget.Jeffrey Lew with his installation “Drawerings,” Jan. 25 – Feb. 6, 1975.Jeffrey Lew and White Columns; Cosmo SarchiaponeOne of Lew’s parting gifts may be precisely what allowed White Columns to continue past his brinkmanship. In late 1979, sensing a simpatico spirit, Lew encouraged Josh Baer, then 23 years old, to apply for the space’s vacant director position. Baer had no formal administrative or curatorial experience. But he’d grown up at the heart of the ’70s New York art world — his mother and stepfather were the acclaimed painters Jo Baer and John Wesley. Even more crucially, he was immersed in the new art forms bubbling up downtown. “Everything was blending together,” Baer recalled. “Hip-hop was breaking out, break dancing, graffiti art, noise music. That Gordon Matta-Clark era, that minimalist sculpture thing of SoHo, had now been replaced by a generation that’s more at home at the Mudd Club.”Baer insisted that being chosen to run White Columns in 1979 “wasn’t a glamorous thing to walk into. It was in impossible shape.” Sighing over his own naïveté, from his current perspective as an art adviser, he added, “Only somebody that young would be dumb enough to do it.” Monthly rent may have only been $415 at the space’s next home near the West Side Highway, but that was hardly a well-trafficked art burg. Moreover, the entire year’s budget was a mere $8,000 — with no provision for a director’s salary.From left, the artists Gretchen Bender, Cindy Sherman with Josh Baer, the White Columns director, at a fund-raiser, May 27, 1982.Robin Holland, via White ColumnsThe crowd inside a Danceteria benefit for White Columns, May 27, 1982.Robin Holland, via White ColumnsThe artist and new board member Mike Roddy suggested that Baer rebrand the space as “White Columns,” an architectural nod to the classically styled features of both its old and new addresses. It was also a droll statement about the rigid hierarchy of the art world being 100 percent white, Baer said critically. Hoping the frisson of spotlighting artists of color under the new name wouldn’t be lost on anyone, the updated moniker was made public for a September 1980 show featuring a sprawling subway-style mural by Lee Quiñones and Fred Brathwaite, a.k.a. Fab Five Freddy, one of the first times graffiti had been brought indoors into a prominent gallery setting.“We were both planting our flags in a whole new atmosphere,” Quiñones said recently, speaking of Baer’s invitation to spray-paint White Columns’ interior. Indeed, his show drew a host of downtown luminaries, from the critics Edit DeAk and Rene Ricard to the writer and cable TV host Glenn O’Brien, all of whom in turn helped spark a thorny love affair between the worlds of contemporary art and graffiti which continues to this day. The buzz-laden response also firmly linked White Columns’ new identity with both the nascent East Village art scene and the art market boom as each gathered steam in the ’80s.Lee Quiñones’s and Fred Brathwaite’s Sept. 1980 show at White Columns, one of the first prominent gallery exhibitions of graffiti in New York City.Charlie AhearnThat soaring market — and the ability of a White Columns show to catapult an unknown artist into its midst — could take on almost ridiculous aspects. “The commercial art world is a genius in finding ways to sell things that seem unsellable,” noted Bill Arning, who became director in 1985 and is now a Houston gallerist. At the March 1988 solo debut of Cady Noland’s unsettling installations — including a pair of geriatric walkers slung over a stanchion with a photo of a pistol leaning nearby — Arning said he fruitlessly tried to convince the collectors Don and Mera Rubell to purchase a piece for $400. He said Mera Rubell eventually admitted to him that she’d ended up buying that same piece a year later, once Noland’s career exploded — for $40,000.As the ’80s ended and the market mania collapsed, the resulting tensions rebounded inside White Columns. The painter Marilyn Minter said her 1988 solo debut there resulted in no less than 10 galleries pursuing her. Grateful to the space for plucking her out of semi-obscurity, she joined its board in 1991, happy to put her growing cachet at its service, even as her own sales slowed. “We were lucky to keep the doors open back in the ’90s,” Minter remembered. “Just keeping the air-conditioning on in the summer was a big deal!”Jeff Lewis studying a selection of White Columns publications from the 1990s and early 2000s.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesDespite the ’90s deepening recession, artists continued to see a White Columns show as transformational. “It changed my life completely,” John Currin said of his 1989 debut there, long before his portraits would fetch seven-figure sums at auction. “I made $5,000, that was huge! My entire income for the whole year before was $9,000 slaving away on drywall jobs.” A decade later, his wife, the sculptor Rachel Feinstein, said her own debut quickly moved her from working at the front desk of the Marianne Boesky Gallery to becoming one of its represented artists.Accordingly, Paul Ha, Arning’s successor in 1996 — and current director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, in Cambridge, Mass. — said he learned to set aside his misgivings at having White Columns act as a de facto “talent scout” for commercial galleries. “When you see so many people struggling, you just want to help them with their career,” Ha explained. Some of Esteban Jefferson’s work at his Nov. 2019 solo debut at White Columns.Esteban Jefferson and White Columns; Marc TattiHiggs continued that tradition, with a notable tweak. “When I arrived at White Columns,” he said, “the question for us as an organization was what could we do that would make a difference?” The inclusion of both Black and female artists was finally on the cultural world’s radar. However, “What was strikingly obvious to me was that the work of artists with developmental disabilities was just completely underrepresented in the field of contemporary art. There were these extraordinary organizations like Creative Growth in Oakland or Visionaries + Voices in Cincinnati, supporting extraordinary communities of artists. But they just didn’t have access to the same kind of networks that artists coming out of Yale or Columbia’s M.F.A. programs might.”Enter White Columns. Higgs has presented 25 solo shows of developmentally disabled artists so far, including William Scott, who he notes finally had a work acquired by the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art — 14 years after his debut at White Columns. “Patience is a key factor here,” he quipped.Matthew Higgs, left, and the artist B. Wurtz during the opening of White Columns’ 50th anniversary exhibition.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesYoung art school graduates haven’t been entirely nixed: The painter Esteban Jefferson was an immediate sensation with his 2019 solo debut, an expanded version of his Columbia M.F.A. thesis vividly contrasting a Paris museum’s African statues with the faces of its staffers and their blandly institutional setting. But Higgs has also made a point of spotlighting barely seen older figures, from David Byrd, who drew chilling drawings of the Westchester psychiatric ward where he worked for 30 years until 1988, to Ben Morea, who created abstractions in 1964 before becoming better known as an art world provocateur and political activist. Even other venues have received attention: In 2010, the artist Margaret Lee was asked to put together a retrospective on the raucous, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink group shows she began staging in 2009 at her semi-legal 179 Canal space in Chinatown.Lee said she was pleasantly shocked by her discussions with Higgs as she explored recreating 179 Canal’s chaotic vibe and messy energy within White Columns. “He never said ‘I don’t like the aesthetics of this.’ It was more ‘I’m around if you want to talk, but you’re free. Just be responsible.’” So, echoing the anti-guidelines first offered by Jeffrey Lew on Greene Street decades ago — Do what you want, just don’t burn the place down? “Actually,” Lee recalled wryly, “we did almost burn White Columns down. We wanted to leave a microwave running for 24 hours. Matthew said, ‘No, you cannot do that. You need a fake microwave.’ That’s where he drew the line!”From the Archives: White Columns & 112 Greene Street/112 Workshop — 1970-2021Through July 31 at White Columns, 91 Horatio Street, Manhattan; 212-924-4212; whitecolumns.org. More
Los funcionarios de esa ciudad brasileña antes acosaban a los artistas del graffiti y los muralistas, tratándolos como vándalos. Ahora el gobierno incluso financia esas expresiones artísticas que hacen de la metrópolis una galería al aire libre.1 de junio de 2021SÃO PAULO, Brasil — Cuando Eduardo Kobra comenzó su trabajo artístico pintaba las paredes de São Paulo en las horas cercanas al amanecer con representaciones crudas de la vida urbana, pero siempre trabajaba rápido y estaba muy atento de las patrullas de la policía.Por esa época, en Brasil no se podía ganar dinero como artista del graffiti y los riesgos abundaban. Los transeúntes solían insultarlo, la policía lo detuvo tres veces y acumuló docenas de citaciones por daños a la propiedad pública.“Muchos artistas de ese periodo se cayeron de los edificios y murieron”, recuerda Kobra. “Y hubo peleas muy violentas entre las bandas rivales de grafiteros”.Pero eso es el pasado: muchas cosas han cambiado desde que Kobra llevó su arte a las calles de São Paulo hace dos décadas.Ahora es un muralista aclamado internacionalmente, y São Paulo, la ciudad más grande de América Latina, ha llegado a impulsar, e incluso financia, el trabajo de artistas que las autoridades acosaron y difamaron en el pasado.El artista Eduardo Kobra frente a un mural que pintó en honor a las víctimas de la COVID-19, en São Paulo.El resultado es un auge del arte que utiliza las paredes de los edificios, antes monótonos, como lienzos de gran tamaño. Las decenas de murales recién pintados han suavizado los bordes de una de las megaciudades más caóticas del mundo, salpicando destellos, poesía y comentarios agudos en su horizonte.Esta forma de arte ha prosperado durante la pandemia, ya que los artistas encontraron consuelo e inspiración bajo el cielo abierto durante los meses en que las galerías, los museos y los espacios de actuación estaban cerrados.Muchos de los murales que fueron pintados el año pasado abordan la crisis de salud que ocasionó la muerte de más de 440.000 personas en Brasil, y que profundizó la polarización política.Kobra pintó un gran mural afuera de una iglesia que muestra a niños de diferentes religiones usando mascarillas. El artista Apolo Torres pintó un mural en honor a los repartidores que proveyeron de alimentos a la ciudad de 12 millones de personas cuando estaban en vigor las medidas de cuarentena.Aunque los alcaldes recientes de São Paulo a veces han sido hostiles y ambivalentes con los artistas callejeros, el gobierno actual ha apoyado plenamente la realización de murales.El año pasado, la oficina del alcalde lanzó una plataforma en línea llamada Street Art Museum 360, que cataloga y mapea más de 90 murales que pueden ser apreciados virtualmente por personas de todo el mundo o experimentados al recorrer la ciudad.Es fácil dejarse cautivar por el mural de Mag Magrela, “I Resist”, que muestra a una mujer desnuda arrodillada, con las manos en una pose meditativa y la palabra “presente” garabateada en su pecho.Un mural de Mag MagrelaUna obra de Mauro Neri de una mujer negra mirando hacia el cielo, con los ojos bien abiertos bajo la palabra “Realidad”, es una de las piezas que fueron creadas el año pasado con la intención de resaltar la injusticia racial.“La experiencia de toparse con estas obras de arte hace que la vida de la ciudad sea más humana, más colorida y más democrática”, dijo Alê Youssef, secretario de Cultura de São Paulo. “Es bueno para el alma”.Desde 2017, la ciudad ha gastado alrededor de 1,6 millones de dólares en proyectos de arte callejero.El arte del graffiti despegó en Brasil en la década de 1980 cuando los artistas se inspiraron en la escena del hip-hop y el punk en la ciudad de Nueva York. Fue una búsqueda dominada por hombres e impulsada, en gran medida, por artistas de comunidades marginadas.Los garabatos y bocetos eran una forma de rebelión, dijo Kobra, para las personas que se sentían impotentes e invisibles en la metrópolis, que es el motor económico de Brasil.“Crecí en un mundo lleno de drogas, crimen y discriminación, donde las personas como yo no tenían acceso a la cultura”, dijo Kobra, de 46 años. “Esta fue una manera de protestar, de existir, de difundir mi nombre a través de la ciudad”.La mayoría de los artistas que se hicieron famosos durante la era en la que el arte callejero todavía era una escena clandestina aprendieron observando a sus compañeros en vez de asistir a las universidades, dijo Yara Amaral Gurgel de Barros, de 38 años, quien escribió su tesis de maestría sobre el muralismo en São Paulo.“Aprendieron en las calles, viendo a otros dibujar, estudiando cómo usaban pinceles y rodillos para pintar”, dijo De Barros. “La mayoría son autodidactas y han transmitido sus habilidades de persona a persona”.Kleber Pagu, un muralista, bajando la pintura de un tejado para un nuevo mural en São Paulo.En la década de 1990, la proliferación del arte callejero se sumó a un paisaje desordenado y visualmente abrumador. Durante años, São Paulo tuvo pocas regulaciones para la publicidad exterior, dejando gran parte de la ciudad, incluidos muchos edificios con al menos un lado sin ventanas, envuelto en vallas publicitarias.En 2006, los legisladores de la ciudad concluyeron que la ciudad estaba inundada de contaminación visual y aprobaron una ley que prohíbe los anuncios grandes y llamativos al aire libre.A medida que se retiraron las vallas publicitarias, los muralistas comenzaron a tratar la repentina abundancia de paredes desnudas como invitaciones a pintar, primero sin permiso y luego con la aprobación del gobierno de la ciudad.Esos gigantescos espacios en blanco fueron una suerte de lienzos fascinantes y atractivos para Mundano, un conocido muralista y grafitero de São Paulo que dijo que las obras de arte exhibidas en galerías y colecciones privadas nunca le habían llamado la atención.“Siempre me sentí incómodo con el arte convencional porque era principalmente para las élites”, dijo Mundano, quien solo usa su nombre artístico. “En la década de 2000 salí a las calles con la intención de democratizar el arte”.Las paredes monótonas de los edificios se han convertido en lienzos de gran tamaño. En la foto se muestra “Trabajadores de Brumadinho”, una obra del artista Mundano.En 2014, Mundano comenzó a pintar los carros gastados y monótonos de los recolectores de basura reciclable, convirtiéndolos en exhibiciones coloridas e itinerantes. La iniciativa, a la que denominó “pimp my cart”, llenó de orgullo a los trabajadores. Más tarde, el artista creó una aplicación de teléfono que permite a las personas comunicarse con los recolectores de basura cercanos.“Siempre quise que mi arte fuera útil”, dijo Mundano. “El arte puede abordar los problemas más cruciales de Brasil”.Uno de ellos, según Mundano, es la tendencia de muchos brasileños a olvidar los momentos de trauma, un fenómeno que se encuentra en el corazón de su trabajo como muralista.“Brasil es un país sin memoria, donde la gente tiende a olvidar incluso nuestra historia reciente”, dijo Mundano, frente a uno de sus grandes murales ubicado en una concurrida intersección del centro. “Necesitamos crear monumentos para los momentos que nos marcaron como nación”.El mural “Trabajadores de Brumadinho” es un homenaje a los 270 trabajadores asesinados en enero de 2019 en un sitio minero en el estado de Minas Gerais, cuando estalló una presa llena de fango y lodo.Un primer plano del mural de Mundano, cuya pintura fue hecha con barro del desastre de la presa Brumadinho.Mundano viajó al lugar del accidente en la localidad de Brumadinho, donde recogió más de 250 kilos de lodo y sedimentos, que utilizó para pintar el mural.La obra es una réplica de una pintura icónica de 1933 de Tarsila do Amaral, una de las pintoras más reconocidas de Brasil, y muestra varias filas de trabajadores, cuyos rostros reflejan la diversidad de Brasil, luciendo cansados y abatidos.Mundano dijo que decidió replicar la pintura de Do Amaral como una manera de subrayar lo poco que han cambiado las cosas en casi un siglo.“Siguen oprimidos por las industrias”, dijo.La muralista Hanna Lucatelli Santos también se inspira en temas sociales y dice que se sintió llamada a representar cómo las mujeres muestran su fuerza.Hace años descubrió el poder único de los murales, incluso a pequeña escala, cuando dibujó una imagen de lo que ella define como una mujer “fuerte, pero delicada” en su propia casa. De repente, las relaciones en el hogar se volvieron más armoniosas y la energía más positiva, dijo.Hanna Lucatelli Santos dijo que sus murales de mujeres fuertes pueden “equilibrar la energía de la calle, que tiende a ser tan masculina”.“Eso hizo que nos tratáramos de una forma más amable”, dijo Santos.Santos, de 30 años, ha tratado de replicar ese efecto a mayor escala pintando murales de mujeres que miran la ciudad abarrotada con un aspecto sereno y místico. Sus creaciones también son una refutación a la forma en que las mujeres a menudo son retratadas en la publicidad brasileña y en el arte creado por los hombres.“Ves mujeres pintadas por hombres que tienen cuerpos artificiales, están totalmente sexualizadas”, dijo. “Esas figuras hicieron mucho más para oprimirme que para liberarme”.Uno de sus trabajos recientes, un par de murales ubicados en unas paredes adyacentes, muestran a la misma mujer de frente y de espaldas. La imagen frontal incluye la frase: “¿Te has dado cuenta de que somos infinitos?”, y el otro lado muestra a la misma mujer cargando a un bebé en su espalda y sosteniendo la mano de un niño pequeño.“Quería que la gente se cuestionara cómo la sociedad ve a las madres”, dijo. “Y sé que una mujer de ese tamaño, una mujer mística, tiene el poder de cambiar el entorno debajo de ella, de equilibrar la energía de la calle, que tiende a ser tan masculina”.Un mural de la artista Soberana Ziza en el centro de la ciudad.Lis Moriconi colaboró en este reportaje desde Río de Janeiro.Ernesto Londoño es el jefe de la corresponsalía de Brasil, con sede en Río de Janeiro. Antes formó parte del Comité Editorial y, antes de unirse a The New York Times, era reportero en The Washington Post. @londonoe More
Officials in São Paulo, Brazil, once hounded graffiti artists and muralists, treating them as vandals. Now the city champions, and even funds, their art, and it’s everywhere and supersized.May 30, 2021SÃO PAULO, Brazil — When Eduardo Kobra started out as an artist, he was tagging walls in São Paulo in the pre-dawn hours with gritty depictions of urban life, always working fast and always on the lookout for police cars.At the time, there was no money to be made as a graffiti artist in Brazil, and the risks abounded. Passers-by routinely cursed at him, cops took him into custody three times, and he racked up dozens of citations for defacing public property.“Many artists in that period fell from buildings and died,” Mr. Kobra recalled. “And there were very violent fights among rival bands of graffiti artists.”That is a bygone era: Much has changed since Mr. Kobra first took his art to the streets of São Paulo two decades ago.He is now an internationally acclaimed muralist, and São Paulo, Latin America’s largest city, has come to embrace — and even fund — the work of artists the authorities once hounded and maligned.The artist Eduardo Kobra in front of a mural he painted to honor the victims of Covid-19 in São Paulo.The result is a boom of art using the formerly drab walls of buildings as supersized canvases. The scores of freshly painted murals have softened the edges of one of the world’s most chaotic megacities, splashing flare, poetry and pointed commentary on its skyline.The art form has thrived during the pandemic, as artists found solace and inspiration under the open sky during months when galleries, museums and performance spaces were shuttered.Many of the murals painted in the past year have touched on the health crisis, which has killed more than 440,000 people in Brazil and deepened political polarization.Mr. Kobra painted a large mural outside a church showing children of different religions wearing masks. The artist Apolo Torres painted a mural honoring the enormous army of delivery workers who kept the city of 12 million fed when quarantine measures were in effect.While recent São Paulo mayors were at turns hostile and ambivalent toward street artists, the current administration has fully supported mural-making.Last year the mayor’s office launched an online platform called Street Art Museum 360, which catalogs and maps more than 90 murals that can be perused virtually by people around the world or experienced on an in-person exploration of the city.It’s easy to be captivated by Mag Magrela’s mural, “I Resist,” which features a nude woman kneeling, her hands in a meditative pose and the word “present” scrawled on her chest. A mural by Mag Magrela.A mural by Mauro Neri of a Black woman looking toward the sky, with her bright eyes wide open under the word “Reality,” is among several works created last year with the intent of highlighting racial injustice.“The experience of running into these works of art makes city life more humane, more colorful and more democratic,” said Alê Youssef, São Paulo’s culture secretary. “It’s good for the soul.”Since 2017, the city has spent about $1.6 million on street art projects. Graffiti art took off in Brazil in the 1980s as artists drew inspiration from the hip-hop and punk scenes in New York City. It was a male-dominated pursuit fueled largely by artists from marginalized communities.The scrawlings and sketches were a form of rebellion, Mr. Kobra said, by people who felt powerless and invisible in the teeming metropolis, which is Brazil’s economic engine.“I was raised in a world full of drugs, crime and discrimination, where people like me didn’t have access to culture,” said Mr. Kobra, 46. “This was a way of protesting, of existing, of spreading my name across the city.”Most of the artists who became prominent during the era when street art was still an underground scene got their training by observing peers rather than by attending universities, said Yara Amaral Gurgel De Barros, 38, who wrote a master’s thesis on muralism in São Paulo.“They learned in the streets, watching others sketch, studying how they used brushes and paint rollers,” Ms. De Barros said. “Most are self-taught, and they’ve passed on their skills person-to-person.”Kleber Pagu, a mural artist, lowering paint from a rooftop for a new mural in São Paulo.By the 1990s, the proliferation of street art added to a cluttered and visually overwhelming landscape. For years, São Paulo had few regulations for outdoor advertising, leaving much of the city — including many buildings with at least one windowless side — draped in billboards.In 2006 city lawmakers concluded that the city was awash in visual pollution and passed a law banning large, flashy outdoor ads.As billboards were taken down, muralists began treating the sudden abundance of bare walls as invitations to paint, first without permission and later with the city’s blessing.Those giant blank spaces were enthralling and enticing for Mundano, a well-known São Paulo muralist and graffiti artist who said the artwork displayed in galleries and private collections had never spoken to him.“I always felt uncomfortable with conventional art because it was mainly for the elites,” said Mundano, who uses only his artistic name. “In the 2000s I took to the streets with the intention of democratizing art.”The drab walls of buildings have become supersized canvases. Pictured is “Workers of Brumadinho” by the artist Mundano.In 2014, Mundano began painting the beat-up, drab carts of recyclable trash collectors, turning them into colorful, roving exhibits. The initiative, which he dubbed “pimp my cart,” filled the workers with pride. The artist later created a phone app that allows people to contact nearby trash collectors.“I’ve always wanted my art to be useful,” Mundano said. “Art can tackle the crucial problems in Brazil.”One of those, in Mundano’s view, is the tendency of many Brazilians to forget moments of trauma — a phenomenon at the heart of his work as a muralist.“Brazil is a country without memory, where people tend to forget even our recent history,” Mundano said, standing in front of one of his large murals at a busy downtown intersection. “We need to create monuments to the moments that marked us as a nation.”The mural “Workers of Brumadinho” is a homage to the 270 workers killed in January 2019 at a mining site in the state of Minas Gerais when a dam holding back sludge burst.A close-up of the Mundano mural, the paint for which was made with mud from the site of the Brumadinho dam disaster.Mundano traveled to the site of the accident in the town of Brumadinho, where he collected more than 550 pounds of mud and sludge, which he used to make paint for the mural. The mural, a replica of an iconic painting from 1933 by Tarsila do Amaral, one of Brazil’s most renowned painters, shows rows of workers, whose faces reflect Brazil’s diversity, looking tired and glum. Mundano said he decided to replicate the earlier painting as a way to underscore how little has changed in nearly a century.“They remain oppressed by industries,” he said.The muralist Hanna Lucatelli Santos is also animated by social themes, saying she felt called to depict how women show their strength.She discovered the unique power of even small-scale murals years ago when she drew an image of what she called a “strong, but delicate” woman in her living room. Suddenly, relationships in the household became more harmonious and the energy more positive, she said.Hanna Lucatelli Santos said her murals of strong women can “balance out the energy of the street, which tends to be so masculine.”“It sparked a more gentle way of treating each other,” Ms. Santos said.Ms. Santos, 30, has sought to replicate that effect on a larger scale by painting murals of women who stare down on the crowded city looking serene and mystical. Her creations are also a rebuttal to the way women are often portrayed in Brazilian advertising and art created by men.“You see women painted by men who have artificial bodies, are totally sexualized,” she said. “Those figures did more to oppress me than liberate me.”One of her recent works, a pair of murals on adjacent walls, shows the same woman from the front and back. The frontal image includes the words “Have you realized we are infinite?” The other side shows the woman carrying a baby on her back and holding the hand of a toddler.“I wanted to make people question how society looks at mothers,” she said. “And I know that a woman that size, a mystical woman, has the power to change the environment below her, to balance out the energy of the street, which tends to be so masculine.”A mural by the artist Soberana Ziza in the city’s downtown.Lis Moriconi contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro. More
In thousands of pictures, Mr. Prigoff captured the often ephemeral but complex works that were once dismissed as vandalism.James Prigoff, who after beginning his career in business turned his attention to photography, documenting public murals and street art in thousands of pictures taken all over the world and helping to legitimize works once dismissed as vandalism, died on April 21 at his home in Sacramento, Calif. He was 93.His granddaughter Perri Prigoff confirmed his death.Mr. Prigoff was the author, with Henry Chalfant, of “Spraycan Art” (1987), a foundational book in the street-art field that featured more than 200 photographs of colorful, intricate artworks in rail tunnels, on buildings and elsewhere — not only in New York, then considered by many to be the epicenter of graffiti art, but also in Chicago, Los Angeles, Barcelona, London, Vienna and other cities. It included interviews with many of the artists and even captured some of them in the act of creating their work.The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Mr. Chalfant, in a phone interview, said a British newspaper had also given it a less financially rewarding distinction: It said “Spraycan Art” was the second-most-stolen book in London. (The most stolen book, Mr. Chalfant said, was the similar “Subway Art,” which he and Martha Cooper had published three years earlier.)“Spraycan Art” came out at a time when street art had grown fairly sophisticated but the artists who made it were still regarded by many as mere vandals. Mr. Prigoff, in subsequent books and in the talks he gave, argued otherwise.“‘Vandalism’ may be a matter of point of view, but it is clearly art,” he told The Press-Telegram of Long Beach, Calif., in 2007. “Museums and collectors buy it, corporations co-opt it, and it matches all the dictionary definitions of art.”“Spraycan Art,” written by Mr. Prigoff and Henry Chalfant and published in 1987, was a foundational book in the street-art field. Those who dismiss street art, he contended, are missing its significance. That was certainly the case for the Black artists he and Robin J. Dunitz documented in “Walls of Heritage, Walls of Pride: African American Murals” (2000), who were long marginalized by the white art elite, as was their culture.“Given limited access to the more formal art venues,” he wrote in the preface to that book, “African-American artists chose the streets and other public places to create images that challenged negative messages.”In a 1993 talk in Vancouver, British Columbia, he decried what he called a double standard in cities that continued to conduct a war on graffiti but allowed billboards for Camel cigarettes, with their images of Joe Camel.“You tell me what’s uglier,” he challenged the audience, “a wall of spray-can art or the cartoon character with the phallic face?”James Burton Prigoff was born on Oct. 29, 1927, in Queens. His father, Harold, was a mechanical engineer, and his mother, Fannie Bassin Prigoff, was a homemaker who the family said graduated from Syracuse Law School.Mr. Prigoff grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y., and graduated from New Rochelle High School at 16. He studied industrial engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in 1947. Among the positions he held in the business world were division president at Levi Strauss and senior vice president of the Sara Lee Corporation in Chicago.He first made headlines not for his photography, but for his squash playing. “Prigoff Triumphs in Squash Tennis; Beats Bacallao to Win 6th U.S. Title in 8 Years,” read one such headline in The New York Times in April 1967.“The Lion’s Den” (1982), by the street artist known simply as Lee.James PrigoffMr. Prigoff said that his interest in street art and public murals was piqued in the mid-1970s when he attended a lecture by Victor A. Sorell, an art historian who had been documenting the work of Hispanic street artists in Chicago.“I quickly found that documenting murals satisfied three interests that strongly motivated me,” he wrote in the preface to “Walls of Heritage.” “I enjoyed photography, I respected the community aspect of public art, and I had a strong concern for social and political justice — often the subject matter of street art.”Mr. Prigoff retired from the business world in 1987 and two years later settled in Sacramento. He continued to pursue his passion for photographing public murals of all kinds, sanctioned and otherwise.“Sometimes it takes a book to help us ‘see’ the artistic merit of places we drive or walk by daily,” Patricia Holt wrote in 1997 in The San Francisco Chronicle, reviewing “Painting the Towns: Murals of California,” an earlier Prigoff-Dunitz collaboration.Mr. Prigoff, who also photographed archaeological sites, viewed street art as part of a very long historical chain.“Go back thousands of years,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1995. “People have been writing their names in the damnedest places for so long.”One of his favorite cities for mural hunting was Philadelphia, and in 2015 he lent 1,500 images he had taken there to Mural Arts Philadelphia, where Steve Weinik, the digital archivist, has been working to create an archive of them.A work by the artist Futura 2000, photographed in 1986.James Prigoff“Jim was early to recognize the fact that graffiti is both legitimate art and ephemeral,” Mr. Weinik said by email. “He understood that the photograph was the record, and worked to document graffiti and murals at a time when virtually no one else recognized these things. His photography and his push to share it with the world helped to both preserve and validate the work.”Mr. Prigoff loved to travel, and he took pictures everywhere he went. One seemingly harmless picture landed him in hot water, and in a civil suit against the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2004 he was near Boston and took a photo of the so-called Rainbow Swash, a colorfully painted gas storage tank.“Private security guards filed a suspicious activity report on Mr. Prigoff simply because he photographed public art on a natural gas storage tank in the Boston area,” Hugh Handeyside, senior staff attorney for the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, said by email, “and F.B.I. agents later visited him at his home in Sacramento and questioned his neighbors about him.”Mr. Prigoff became one of several plaintiffs in a 2014 lawsuit against the Department of Justice contending that, in its zeal after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the government was overreaching in its definition of “suspicious activity.” The suit, Mr. Handeyside said, ultimately failed to change policy, but Mr. Prigoff thought the issue was important.“I lived through the McCarthy era,” he wrote of the incident, “so I know how false accusations, surveillance, and keeping files on innocent people can destroy their careers and lives.”Mr. Prigoff’s wife of 72 years, Arline Wyner Prigoff, died in 2018. He is survived by two sons, Wayne and Bruce; two daughters, Lynn Lidstone and Gail Nickerson; 11 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.Mr. Chalfant said that Mr. Prigoff had just recently sent him images he had shot of Sacramento during the coronavirus pandemic.“He took pictures all around the city,” Mr. Chalfant said, “of the emptiness of it.” More
