Christmas time is rapidly approaching so we, at Street Art London, thought it would be a good time to take a look at some street art books. We have already taken a look at Keith Baugh’s excellent book, Early New York Subway Graffiti 1972-1975 over here. Today we are having a look at The Art of Rebellion III: the book about street art
Street art in London isn’t just all about Shoreditch! There are many others areas of London with some great pieces waiting to be explored and Street Art London is planning to bring you a series of posts on some of these far off places and nooks and crannies. To kick us off, we are taking a look at some of the street art and graffiti around Parkland Walk in North London.
It’s Friday again, so here is a selection of street art videos from around the web. This week we have videos featuring Eine, Ronzo and Banksy.
This is a video of Eine at work on the well known wall in Holywell Lane as part of the Moniker International Art Fair 2010. The work took three days to paint and is significant because Eine had painted the very same wall illegally several years prior with the word “Vandalism”.
Although this site is about street art in London we couldn’t resist taking a look at Keith Baugh’s new book, ‘Early New York Subway Graffiti 1973-1975‘. In any event, there is a London connection because Keith himself hails from Notting Hill, although he now lives in Gloucestershire.
Early New York Subway Graffiti 1973-1975 captures the golden era of New York subway grafiti in the 1970s, a period in which graffiti was first emerging as an artform and exhisted then, perhaps, in it’s purest form. Through documenting this emerging scene, the book suceeds as an important historical chronical. The primary reason for this is because of the extreme rarity of the images contained in the book. In the 1970’s digital cameras and Flickr didn’t exist, street art and graffiti weren’t as mainstream as today and people simply weren’t documenting these artisitic mediums. As a result, there has always been scant historical documentation of the New York graffiti scene in the 1970s – until now.
This weekend saw the Pictures On Walls gallery release Banky’s much anticipated ‘Choose Your Weapon’ print at their East London gallery, Marks & Stencils in Soho and through an online lottery. 450 prints priced at £450 and over 15 colours were released (and all rapidly purchased) in total. Four other print colours were produced too (Gold, Silver, White and Warm Grey – more on these below). At POW’s East London gallery there were scenes of absolute bedlam as a huge queue formed outside the gallery from 10pm on Friday when the news hit peoples inboxes. Many had been erroneously tipped off about the relases and had started queuing over at Marks and Stencils in Soho early on Friday. Throughout the night and early morning there weere reports of fights, thugs pushing in to the front and scalpers hiring whole crews to stand in line. Many of the Choose Your Weapon prints sold by POW over the weekend rapidly found their way onto eBay with some reported sales rising to £10,000.
Full details of all 19 colourways after the jump.
For your viewing pleasure on those long friday afternoons, each week we’ll be scouring the internet and bringing you the finest street art videos that we can lay our hands on. All with a London twist of course. To kick us off this week we have videos featuring Mentalgassi, Code, Eine and Roa. This video … Read more
INVASION LONDON!!! In 1998 an invasion began on the streets of Paris as waves of Invaders began appearing on the street. Invaders were soon to spread to the streets of over 40 other cities throughout the world. The street artist responsible for this street art is known only as Invader, born in 1969 and working in anonymity, nearly nothing else is known about him.
Most of these Invaders are literally that – homages to the classic Space Invaders arcade game of the 1980s. Each piece is made up of tiles which represent the blocky pixel graphics of the original arcade game. No two Invaders are the same and many are infused with other cultural references, such as a swipe at today’s CCTV society. Invader has also played with other iconic video games characters such as Super Mario.
The installed Invaders become counterculture surveillance drones, reminding people that government and monolithic corporations aren’t the only ones watching – Swindle Magazine, Issue 3, Shepard Faireyz
London has not been spared this Invasion and Invaders may be found throughout the street of London if one knows where to look. Since Invader’s street art is “suspended between visibility and anonymity” you must be attuned to the correct frequency to see Invaders on the streets. Once you are on this frequency however, you will encounter Invaders all over the streets of London
Invaders come in different sizes but are usually very small, often found lurking in low down corners or high up on walls above street signs. They are not all small however and much larger Invaders have been reported across London. Check out Street Art London’s photos of Invaders from around London after the jump!
London has it’s first ‘Dead Drop’, located next to Brick Lane Gallery, 196 Brick Lane (check the pictures above for exact location). What is a ‘Dead Drop’? Dead Drops, from German artist Aram Bartholl, are anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing networks that are located in public city spaces. USB flash drives are embedded into … Read more
We went down to have a look at the Never Judge show at Stolen Space gallery, a show in association with Penguin Books celebrating book cover art and featuring lots of street artists. Here’s a selection of our favorites, there is some seriously essential reading here:
Art Under Pressure, ‘20,000 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
As part of the ‘Making the Invisible Visible’ street art project, German street art collective Mentalgassi have teamed up with Amnesty UK to highlight the plight of Troy Davis, a 42-year-old man on death row in the US state of Georgia.
Davis, the subject of a long-running campaign from Amnesty, has spent 19 years on death row for a murder he has always said he did not commit. No physical evidence links Davis to the crime and seven out of nine witnesses on whose evidence he was convicted in 1991 have since changed or retracted their testimony, with some citing police coercion. Despite these serious doubts, he still faces execution. Please take a look at the online petition to grant Davis a stay of execution here.
There are three installations which can be found at 4-7 Great Pulteney Street, 21 Great Pulteney Street, and 5 Berners Street (all London W1). We’ve been down to have a look today, check out the pictures below:
The invisible becomes visible:
There are some great ‘street art’ exhibitions opening around East London on 2/3 December. Check out Street Art London’s round up below:
“3”
This exhibition will be happening in 3 galleries in Paris, London and Los Angeles. In London, the exhibition is being hosted by Pure Evil Gallery at the LondonNewcastle space on Redchurch Street which is absolutley huge. The concept is that: “Each artist brings 3 pieces for each show. There’s no curation, there’s no wordy intellectual press release theres just 3”
Where and When?
Pure Evil @ the LondoNewcastle space, 28 Redchurch Street, London E2 7DP.
Opening 02.12.10 from 7.30 till 10.30 pm
Runs until 31.12.10
The Wild Hackney Project is a local grass roots response to Hackney Council’s current policy towards street art and graffiti in Hackney, which is essentially to paint over it. Recently Hackney Council threatened to paint over the Roa Rabbit on Hackney Road, a legal piece of street art painted with the permission of the building’s owner and beloved by the local community. Widespread uproar in the Hackney community, features in the Metro, an online petition signed by thousands and a flurry of angy letters from The Premises, upon whose building the Rabbit was painted, prompted a climb down from Hackney Council. Other pieces have not been so lucky, for example, a well known Banksy piece on Church Street was recently blitzed by Hackney Council along with many other pieces of street art.
@WildHackney are planning to lobby Hackney Council about a new approach to graffiti and street art that goes beyond painting it black by providing them with a policy written by local residents. If you want to have your say, go along to Wild Hackney’s first metting which is at 6:30pm on 2 December at the Fellow Court Community Center, E2 8LR.
We, at @StreetArtLondon, are never ones to miss the oppurtunity to show you some good street art, so take a look at what Wild Hackney are fighting to save. If you take a wander up Hackney Road this is what you can expect to see from street artists such as Roa, Eine and Christiaan Nagel:
Forget the Rabbit, it’s all about the Roa Beaver! Located a little nearer to the Shoreditch end of Hackney Road.
