It’s really great to see some fresh street art from Franck Duval, a.k.a., FKDL, in New York City. It’s been a long time since we saw new work from the Paris-based artist in downtown NYC. For a while a few years ago, FKDL’s graphical wheat-paste images of glamourous women were popping up everywhere in Lower Manhattan. This artwork is on Elizabeth Street in the Nolita / Lower East Side interzone.
The Empire State Building in New York City as seen at twilight on a recent evening from the rooftop of an artists’ studio in Chelsea. We love that moment when the lights first come on atop this most iconic of New York skyscrapers, especially when the lights are just plain white and it’s still kind of bright outside. (We could live without the building’s other array of garish symbolic and seasonal colors.)
Last weekend this chest of drawers was left out on the sidewalk at the corner of Mulberry and Prince streets in Nolita, near SoHo, in New York City. Somebody who had been partying too much the night before got creative and wrote “Last night I got so f*cked up that now I’m here” with a gold marker pen. We like how the writer used each drawer for placing his words. Brilliant. Funny. Silly.
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.
Here’s another one of those massive “eye” wheat-paste street art pieces by the French artist JR. This one is on the side of a lofts apartment building next to the Williamsburg Bridge, in the Willamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. The placement of the artwork near the busy bridge ensures that a lot of people will see the eye, including the millions of passengers annually who ride the J/Z subway trains that pass over the bridge every few minutes. There’s a lot of new work by JR in New York City recently.
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).
The Domino Sugar Factory in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, ceased operations years ago, but the massive building and it’s iconic logo-sign near the East River are something of a New York City landmark. In fact the refinery has been officially recognized as an historic landmark by the city. The factory is undergoing a long process of renovation that will change it into shiny, new mixed-use property filled mostly with condos and office space. That vision involves demolishing some of the building. A group of activists have been fighting for years to save the more of the property as an historic landmark. To that end, this DIY “Save Domino” sign made from string-lights was put on the side of an apartment building near South 3rd St in 2007. The red-lighted message has become a kind of neighborhood meta-landmark of its own. There’s a great short video of what the factory looked like inside before renovation started..
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
Photos below of French artist Daniel Firman‘s life-size, realistic and sublime if slightly creepy sculpture of a woman with her head covered leaning against a wall. The artwork is titled “Linda, 2012,” and was recently sold by the Galerie Perrotin for $32,500 at the Frieze Art Fair NY.
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.
Alright, we’re here in Times Square, New York City, and here they are … lots more fresh photos, including close-ups, of the massive, epic street art building-takeover and billboard by French artist JR. The the giant-eye billboard artwork is the crowning touch on a project that’s been in the works the past few weeks. The images of people faces on the building itself has been a work in progress in since early May, when the artist set up a photo-booth and studio truck in Times Square and then pasted images of volunteer models on the sidewalk and building nearby. The giant eye on the billboard can be seen from quite far away, as photos below and in our previous post show.
