This fresh wheatie street art piece by UnCuttArt (the artist a.k.a., “UnCasso”) went up on a wall on Ludlow Street last night. It’s inspired by Nike’s classic Air Jordan high-top basketball sneaker and rendered across color bars in UnCasso’s typical illustration style. The artist has in recent months been bombing much of lower Manhattan and Williamsburg, Brooklyn with images of Steve Jobs and a young Michael Jackson.
We recently started seeing a random few of these wheat-paste street art images of a young, Jackson 5-era Michael Jackson appearing on walls around downtown Manhattan. But then this past weekend, these seemed to multiply exponentially and appear everywhere, from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn’s Greenpoint. In the LES, we counted dozens of the “Young MJs” on Ludlow Street alone. These Young MJ wheat-pastes are the work of a mysterious New York-based “celebrity stylist” and artist who goes by the moniker “UnCasso” (a.k.a., “UnCuttArt”). The “Young MJs” come in a variety of colors . In some cases, as pictured below, a single, larger image is composited with several pieces in different colors. Needless to say, we love ’em. This isn’t the first time the “King of Pop” has inspired street art.
Literally within 24 hours of our previous post about the blank black-painted wall on Ludlow Street (“the Ludlow Street Art Gallery”) in New York’s Lower East Side, somebody took a spray-can to the wall and tagged it in a large silver-paint scrawl of graffiti in the crudest way. It would be awesome to actually see some real art instead. But the graffiti signifies the first volley returned after the wall was repainted a day earlier in the ongoing cat-and-mouse game of what the wall looks like.
