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      ‘Good for the Soul’: Giant Murals Turn São Paulo Into Open Air Gallery

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      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

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      Candid Murals by Street Artist Escif Cleverly Respond to Political Issues and Current Events

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      Art

      #humor
      #murals
      #public art
      #site-specific
      #street art

      May 13, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      “Espoire” in Lozzi, France. All images © Escif, shared with permission
      Street artist Escif (previously) utilizes muted color palettes and straightforward motifs to convert walls around his home city of Valencia and other locations throughout Europe into perceptive ruminations on capitalism, politics, and society. He paints sparse scenes and objects with ties to their environment and current events, often relying on humor and wit to convey an underlying message. Although the Spanish artist has spent much of the last year in his studio working on drawings with his two-year-old son, some of his more recent artworks include a brick shattering an already damaged window, a military officer armed with a vaccine like a bazooka, and a touching tribute to the late street artist Hyuro, who died last November.
      Escif just completed a series in Corse and is headed to Lithuania and northern Italy in the next few months, which you can follow on Instagram. Shop available prints on his site.

      “Aguja” in Valencia
      A tribute to the late artist Hyuro in Valencia
      “Break” in Charleroi, Belgium
      Left: “Low Cost” in Valencia. Right: “Brote”
      “Underground” in Barcelona

      #humor
      #murals
      #public art
      #site-specific
      #street art

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      James Prigoff, Who Documented Street Art, Dies at 93

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      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

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      Trompe L’oeil Textiles Billow Across Murals by Rosie Woods in Iridescent Ripples

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      Art

      #fabric
      #murals
      #public art
      #spray paint
      #street art
      #trompe l’oeil

      April 29, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      “Veils of Knowledge” at Grenoble Street Art Festival in France. Photo by Andrea Berlese. All images © Rosie Woods, shared with permission
      As if lifted by a breeze, oversized ribbons and bunches of fabric float across the trompe l’oeil murals by London-based artist Rosie Woods. The gleaming, prismatic textiles sway and subtly twist into folds and ripples in the spray-painted works. Through the flowing movements, Woods explores the fluid, ever-changing nature of the human experience by synthesizing abstraction and realism. She explains:
      I often wonder what my soul would look like if it manifested itself as an object I could see and touch on this earth.  My artwork today looks to express the depth, growth, and complexity of the mind as well as its ability to encompass both light and dark spaces emotionally. I’d like to think you can “feel” my artwork with your eyes.
      Woods translates her massive, lustrous textiles to smaller canvases, which she sells in her shop. Although she’s sold-out at the moment, you can watch for upcoming releases on Instagram, where she shares a variety of process shots and news on where she’s headed next.

      “Veils of Knowledge” at Grenoble Street Art Festival in France. Photo by Andrea Berlese
      “Veils of Knowledge” at Grenoble Street Art Festival in France. Photo by Andrea Berlese
      “Veils of Knowledge” at Grenoble Street Art Festival in France. Photo by Andrea Berlese
      Woods working at Grenoble Street Art Festival in France. Photo by Andrea Berlese
      Photo by Daniel Vaughan
      Photo by Daniel Vaughan

      #fabric
      #murals
      #public art
      #spray paint
      #street art
      #trompe l’oeil

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      Monumental Murals of Anatomical Creatures by ROA Celebrate Puerto Rico’s Biodiversity

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      Art

      #animals
      #murals
      #public art
      #Puerto Rico
      #street art

      April 26, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      Red Tail Hawk in Humacao, November 2018. Photo by Edgardo Santiago, image courtesy of Taller 2C1, shared with permission
      Belgian street artist ROA (previously) has been touring Puerto Rico painting his signature monochromatic menagerie around the island. Depicting both native creatures like parrots and seahorses and invasive species like lionfish, the massive pieces celebrate the region’s biodiversity and the biologists and conservationists working tirelessly to preserve it. Many of the murals are anatomical and juxtapose life and death, a recurring theme in ROA’s body of work and one that’s apparent in his most recent rendering in Isla de Cabras. Spanning 160 feet, the massive artwork positions a plump, wrinkled manatee alongside a lengthy skeleton.
      The ongoing project has produced 15 murals so far and is a collaboration with Elegel Group. You can find out more about the impetus behind each animal on Instagram. (via Street Art News)

      Manatee in Isla de Cabras, April 2021. Photog by Four Two Photography
      Puerto Rican Parrot in Utuado, July 2019. Photo by Edgardo Santiago, image courtesy of Taller 2C1, shared with permission
      Octopus in Playa Escambron, July 2019. Photo by Edgardo Santiago, image courtesy of Taller 2C1, shared with permission
      Lionfish in Naguabo, June 2019. Photo by Pedro “Huck” Rosa, image courtesy of Taller 2C1, shared with permission
      Seahorse in Playa Escambron. Photo by Edgardo Santiago, image courtesy of Taller 2C1, shared with permission
      Snail in Aibonit, January 2019. Photo by Edgardo Santiago, image courtesy of Taller 2C1, shared with permission
      Monkey in Naguabo, November 2018. Photo by Edgardo Santiago, image courtesy of Taller 2C1, shared with permission
      Lizard in San Juan. Photo by Edgardo Santiago, image courtesy of Taller 2C1, shared with permission
      Tortuga. Photo by Edgardo Santiago, image courtesy of Taller 2C1, shared with permission

      #animals
      #murals
      #public art
      #Puerto Rico
      #street art

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      Candid Moments Captured in Vintage Photos Are Magnified in Mohamed L’Ghacham’s Murals

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      Art
      Photography

      #found photographs
      #murals
      #public art
      #street art

      April 13, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      “Confinamiento” (2019), Cheste, Valencia, Spain. All images © Mohamed L’Ghacham, shared with permission
      Whether depicting a birthday party or a child’s first steps, the expressive murals by Mohamed L’Ghacham (previously) enlarge sincere, unposed moments into monumental celebrations of everyday life. The Moroccan artist recreates vintage photographs as wall-sized artworks in locations across Europe that portray a woman readying for bed or the chaotic minutes before a family portrait at a massive scale.
      L’Ghacham tells Colossal that his relationship to the original images has evolved in recent years from a simple juxtaposition of the site and the quiet, unassuming beauty of the domestic scenes to a more complex understanding. “Those first murals were done in abandoned, demolished places or simply on the outskirts of cities and public spaces. The impact of seeing an image of this type painted with a technique closer to classical painting than graffiti in such spaces created a concept by itself for me,” he says.
      Today, the Barcelona-based artist sources reference photographs and home videos from neighbors and city archives to connect more directly with the local culture. While his style is unchanged—L’Ghacham continues to use loose brushstrokes and layers of muted tones to achieve the vintage aesthetic—the streetside works reflect those living nearby. “I think (the murals) can be very symbolic and that many people can feel represented even if they are not necessarily the protagonists portrayed,” he says. “Until now my intention was to pay tribute and give visibility to situations that we all live in and that maybe sometimes we find it hard to value.”
      Starting next month, L’Ghacham will be traveling around Europe for a few projects and has a solo exhibition at PDP Gallery slated for this summer, which will be comprised of the smaller paintings he’s been sharing on Instagram.

      “Pillando el globo” (2019), Mataró, Spain. Done in collaboration with Ivan Floro
      “Matança do porco” (2019), Figueiró Dos Vinhos, Portugal
      “Indoor II” (2019), Schiedam, Netherlands
      “Dormitorio III” (2019), Mantova, Italy
      “La Fondue” (2019), Crans-montana, Switzerland
      “Family portrait” (2020), Wevelgem, Belgium
      “El dormitorio de Aina” (2020), Torrellas, Spain

      #found photographs
      #murals
      #public art
      #street art

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      How to Remove Graffiti

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTip How to Remove GraffitiHumans have been marking up walls for millenniums. Carry the paint colors you’re most likely to need, but never get attached to a clean, monochromatic surface.Credit…RadioFeb. 23, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET“Graffiti is not going away ever,” says Thomas Corrales, 53, who works for the Los Angeles Department of Public Works training and overseeing crews of graffiti cleaners. Some 175 cleaners fan out across the city every day; in the second half of last year, they removed 3.5 million square feet of graffiti. Corrales grew up in a neighborhood where spray-painted tags were so pervasive that he became almost blind to them. Then one day in 1993, the unemployment office got him a graffiti-abatement job. Now he can’t help spotting even the tiniest Sharpie tags.Unauthorized paint on a wall can be many things — art, hate speech, social and political messaging, vandalism, the claiming of space. However it manifests, it often has a multiplier effect: Graffiti begets more graffiti, and tags will be tagged over. On occasion, when Corrales paints over graffiti, someone shows up to tag it anew before he can even drive away. Remember that humans have been marking up walls for millenniums; don’t get angry or take it personally. “We’re trained not to confront anyone,” Corrales says. If you ever feel unsafe, leave and come back later. Wear long pants and boots, preferably the steel-toed kind if you plan to use a water blaster (water sprayed at 3,500 pounds per square inch can take off skin). As you traverse streets, carry the paint colors you’re most likely to need, including gray, beige, tan and white. If you don’t have the exact color, use a spectrophotometer to measure hue and make a match. For walls, paint with either a roller or a paint sprayer. For stop signs, murals and most metal surfaces, use a water-based chemical remover mostly known by its brand name, Krud Kutter. City-approved murals are sealed with a clear coat that makes them easier to wipe clean. For the multistory spatterings that people make by filling fire hoses with paint and shooting it out with a fire extinguisher, you’ll want cherry-picker trucks. Clean sidewalks with a high-pressure water and sand blaster.Cityscapes are covered in layer after layer of paint, like an ever thickening skin. Never get attached to a clean, monochromatic surface. “You know that it’s going to be retagged,” Corrales says. “And you’re going to come back again, too.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A Technicolor Flower Bed Sprouts From a 70-Foot-Tall Water Tower in Arkansas

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      Art

      #flowers
      #murals
      #public art
      #site-specific

      January 13, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      All images © Justkids, shared with permission
      A drab water tower in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, is overrun with a 70-foot-tall garden of technicolor flowers and vines thanks to artists Darren and Emmelene Mate, aka DabsMyla. The Australian wife and husband are known for their hand-painted psychedelic dreamscapes, which envelop the otherwise utilitarian tank with oversized flora. Titled “Magical Unity,” the circular mural features plants native to the region, along with a fuzzy bumblebee mid-pollination, all rendered in the duo’s playful style.
      DabsMyla completed the public project in just one week, which they describe:

      Color plays a big role in our work and how we create. For this piece, we wanted to produce an uplifting feeling through flowers and running a rainbow of hues from the bottom to the top. This is a really large work, and we hope that it will positively impact the community and bring happiness to everyone who passes by it.

      The transformative artwork is the latest commissioned by the women-led curators of Justkids (previously) and OZ Art, which have been collaborating to revitalize areas around Arkansas in recent years. Shop pins and stickers of DabsMyla’s quirky characters in their shop, and check out more of the couple’s work on Instagram.

      #flowers
      #murals
      #public art
      #site-specific

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