On the street … you turn it on its side and lean it against a building, of course. The trampoline pictured below was on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side of New York City. It was only there for a day and was used for a scene in a video shoot in which a dude does a series of flips on the trampoline while water is sprayed on him. Fun stuff. Ludlow Street has been the hub of lot more than the usual volume of creative activity in recent weeks.
Brooklyn-based American artist Erik Den Breejen is the latest painter to be commissioned by clothing brand Rag & Bone to put up artwork on the side of its downtown New York City flagship jeans store at the corner of Houston and Elizabeth streets. The photos below show Den Breejen’s meticulous work-in-progress on an image that will eventually that be David Bowie. We’ll be back later in the week to see the finished work. Check out more of Den Breejun’s work on his Tumblr and at the Freight and Volume Gallery website.
We ran into artists Serban Ionescu and David Nordine on Ludlow St, in New York’s Lower East Side, where they were collaborating on a large street art painting. The mural is a work in progress and was commissioned by the owner of a building that’s currently being renovated and turned into luxury condos. The artwork is on the large roller-shutter that fronts the building, which is at 55 Ludlow Street, just south of Grand Street (and near Global Graphica HQ).
Last weekend Global Graphica paid a visit to a new design exhibition at the New Museum’s Studio 231. The show is titled “Adhocracy” and we can’t recommend it enough. It’s a fascinating survey of the work of designers, architects, hackers, makers, artists, technologists and programmers around the globe who are redefining design and how things are made and used. These practitioners are working either independently or collaboratively, in academia or within commercial or corporate organizations, and sometimes illegally, as part of a DIY underground of people who fix public infrastructure that local governments neglect. It’s also a look at how sustainability, re-use and recycling, open-source systems, life-hacking and the economics of design are being addressed. Among the highlights is a working 3D body scanner called “Be Your Own Souvenir” that feeds data to a 3D printer to make a resin model of a person, and a short film documenting a group who secretly broke into the Pantheon in Paris at night, where they staged film events, built their own secret members lounge, and fixed the broken clock atop the historic building, which hadn’t chimed in four decades.
Photo credit: New Museum
Hey, it’s Mr. Miyagi! Ya’ know, the sensei in the “Karate Kid” movies of the 1980s? To be more specific, this piece of stencil street art is the face of actor Pat Morita, who portrayed the Miyagi character in the films series. We began noticing these stencils in SoHo this past weekend. This one appears next to the Deitch Wall at the corner of the Bowery and Houston Street, an intersection where SoHo, NoHo, the East Village and the Lower East Side/Nolita converge, a kind of “four-corners” of downtown Manhattan.
We caught a crew of graffiti artists painting a new piece of artwork on one of those graff-covered wholesale delivery trucks that seem to be everywhere in New York’s Chinatown and Lower East Side (LES). We’re not sure, but we think the graffiti writers might be Tats Cru (if anybody know, send us an email). The truck they were painting was parked on Essex Street in the art-fashion part of the LES.
It may not look like much. It may look divey. But Cheung Wong Kitchen on Hester Street is one of the better kept dining secrets of New York’s Lower East Side. It’s a go-to for the LES neighborhood regulars and Chinatown locals seeking cheap, yummy Chinese food in the late evening.
