A painting by Jesse Edwards.
 
Artist Jesse Edwards came of age in Snohomish County, an idyllically beautiful area of Washington State about two hours outside of Seattle. Growing up Edwards spent time skateboarding and experimenting with graffiti to get his kicks. The experience of using spray paint led Edwards to explore the medium more intimately in order to learn how to manipulate it, ultimately succeeding in changing the texture and consistency of the paint. Proficiency with spray paint runs in Edwards family. His brother Travis, (aka Tred who has done jail time for his art) is probably the most well-known graffiti artist in Seattle.

Edwards’ experimentation paid off quite literally, and he was not only accepted to Cornish College of the Arts, but he also scored a partial scholarship to the school. The union between Edwards and higher academia was short, and he was kicked out after having a nasty word fight with one of Cornish’s professors. In an interview with the Seattle Times in 2010, Edwards revealed his only passion was to make “beautiful things.” This quote is quite compelling when you consider art—much like beauty—is determined by the perception and preference of the beholder. As it pertains to Edwards’ “beautiful things” you will either love them or, perhaps loathe them. One thing is sure, Edwards’ work is flush with old-world mastery and color pallets, though you’ll not be seeing any still life bowls of fucking fruit or portraits of frilly aristocrats dressed to the nines. Instead, Edwards’ subjects include representations of weed and drug culture, dick pics, porn, and the occasional amusing pop culture reference. In addition to painting, Edwards also excels at ceramics many of which were displayed for a time at the Museum of Sex in New York City where they fit right in.

I’ve posted a large selection of Edwards work below, much of it is very NSFW. Yay!
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
On the morning of November 19th, 2013, the artists of 5POINTZ arrived at the giant canvas to find that their work had been whitewashed overnight. The graffiti mecca was located in New York’s Long Island City neighborhood, which since 2010 has seen “the most new apartments built among neighborhoods across the country” (12,533 apartments in over 41 new developments). It was no surprise then, that 5POINTZ building owner Jerry Wolkoff eventually saw the dollar signs and razed the building in favor of a new luxury high-rise apartment.
 

 
The five-story building was originally constructed in 1892, but didn’t become 5POINTZ until street artist Meres One took over as head curator in 2002. Since then, some of the world’s greatest aerosol painters have made the pilgrimage to make their mark on the exterior walls of the 200,000 sq foot “United Nations of Graffiti.” The location became a “must-see” for tourists visiting Queens, soon transforming this place of artistic culmination into a living, breathing (legal) graffiti museum. The community backlashed when plans were announced to demolish the building, but to no avail. New York’s Landmark Preservation Commision turned down an application for landmark status because “the building lacked architectural distinction and the artwork was less than 30 years old.” They are currently underway in completing a pair of forty-story apartment towers.
 

 
As Hyperallergic points out, the 5POINTZ legacy will live on through this new development, in its own fucked up way. After several lawsuits were made by artists whose work had been buffed without permission (believed to have been intended to prevent landmark status), Jerry Wolkoff has successfully registered the complex to bear the namesake of the location’s former urban glory, 5POINTZ. If that wasn’t obnoxious enough, this half-hearted homage will also see the building’s interior presented in an embarassing attempt to evoke street art. Renderings from architecture firm Mojo Stumer Associates reveal an official logo in an urban “Wild Style” font and graffiti-inspired paintings on the walls of common rooms. When completed, the buildings will also host twenty available studios for artists. But how many of them will attempt to paint their exteriors?

Take a look at the real estate developer’s unpalatably idiotic tribute to New York guerilla art below.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

A massive mural of Frank Zappa under a bridge in London by artists James Mayle and Leigh Drummond.

I recently came across images of some beautiful street murals of both the sadly recently departed Lemmy Kilmister and David Bowie—which is what got me cooking up this post chock full of graffiti and street art homages to notable musicians and rock stars who are no longer with us.

Of the many public pieces, photographed at places all around the globe, I’m especially fond of the Lemmy/Bowie hybrid that popped up on a utility box in front of a restaurant in Denver, Colorado shortly after Bowie passed on January 10th, 2016, as well as a haunting image of Joe Strummer that was painted on the side of a rusted old van.
 

Lemmy/Bowie street art mashup in Denver, Colorado.
 

Joe Strummer mural painted on the side of a van by French artist, Jef Aerosol.
 
Inspired street art dedicated to everyone from Joy Division’s Ian Curtis to James Brown, after the jump…

 
In 1974 Norman Mailer wrote an essay for Esquire called “The Faith of Graffiti”—a gripping and sympathetic investigation on the defacement of public and private property as an urban art movement of complex and fascinating depth. Mailer’s work eventually produced two collaborative pictorial books—The Faith of Graffiti and Watching My Name Go By. The beauty of tagging and graffiti art is almost taken for granted today, especially since artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat legitimized the genre to the art world in both its unlawful execution and its distinctive aesthetic, but Mailer was doing something new by recording the phenomenon as an organic outpouring of artistic expression, and this short 1976 documentary—also named “Watching My Name Go By”—is equally open-minded in its portrayal of graffiti artists and their critics.

The documentary isn’t just mindless cheerleading either; time is given to community members who hate seeing their city constantly vandalized (though quite a few also admire the work), and on some level you have to feel bad for the public servants charged with cleaning up after the kids. At the same time, no one is shocked by it; in addition to the graffitists’ own reflections on their craft, the “civilian” interviewees offer thoughtful insights on the phenomenon. There is a certain amount of juvenile nihilism of course, but some theorize this outlet of masculine delinquency as youthful rebellion. One official points out that graffiti isn’t a practice relegated to “minorities” or “kids from broken homes,” and from the accounts of the kids themselves, the graffiti “craze” appears to be appealing most of all as a hobby, rather than a denouncement of society or conscious act of dissent.
 

 
Via Flavorpill

Anyone who works in the medium of graffiti can’t be too enamored of the possibility of permanence for his or her work. The destruction or evanescence of the works is kind of built in, whether the antagonist is the cops, the weather, or rapacious developers. But as graffiti becomes a more accepted part of the art world, the hopes for longer durations rises. A year ago, in October 2013, the incredible exterior of the legendary 5 Pointz space in Long Island City in Queens, New York, was painted over in stark white, a sobering reminder that the exigencies of commerce will generally trump a technically illegal grassroots art movement.

It looks like something of the sort will happen to the remarkable murals of the Italian street artist Blu in Berlin—murals that Artnet earlier this year named one of the five most important murals in the city. The Blu murals are located on Curvystraße, in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, and were painted in 2007 and 2008. One mural shows the torso of a man straightening his tie and wearing gold watches on both wrists which are connected by a chain. The second one shows two figures trying to unmask each other, with the one holding his fingers into a W (for West) and the other into an E (East).

Graffiti art has a special status in Berlin. Since 1989 the city has been defined by squatter culture, after the unused living spaces of the then-squalid Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg neighborhoods in East Berlin were occupied by young people—that tone has come to define the famously “poor but sexy” world capital. I visited the city in the summer of 2013, and the preponderance of graffiti was a little bit mind-blowing, it’s clearly semi-legal there and a source of scruffy, anti-establishment local pride. I was strolling in Kreuzberg when I happened upon a tour group that was on the theme of urban art and local left-wing activism—you’d be hard-pressed to find such a tour in New York City, let me tell you. I followed the group for the second half of the tour, and in fact the guide showed us the number three entry on Artnet’s list, the “Cosmonaut Mural” by Victor Ash on Mariannenstrasse.

It was reported last week that real estate investor Artur Süsskind and the architectural firm Langhof plan to tear down the buildings and replace them with 250 apartments, a kindergarten, a supermarket, and an open air terrace facing the Spree River. Not to be deterred, Berliner Jascha Herr has launched an online petition calling for the artworks to be protected under Germany’s monument protection statute. As Herr writes, “The city of Berlin loves to promote its alternative scene—and more precisely the cultural value of its artists—but it simultaneously discards them. It is simply about selling to investors who only see personal profit in the alternative landmarks of the city. But the cultural identity of the city belongs to all of us.” Unfortunately, it would be unprecedented for the landmark protections to be extended to artworks as young as seven years old.
 

 

 
Two nifty time-lapse videos documenting the creation of the two murals after the jump…..

 
For what New Yorkers pay to ride “public transportation,” you’d think the MTA wouldn’t feel compelled to sell every square inch of subway car to bloodsucking corporate pirates—much less that aesthetic villain, Dr. Jonathan Zizmor. M.D.. But where there is a square inch to monetize, “public” space will never really be public. Two anonymous artists, going by SKI and 2ESAE, have decided to take the commons with some slick guerrilla tactics.

Now defacing ads is nothing new, and their messaging might be a little platitudinous (“be who you are don’t be sheep”), but the project itself is a kind of a cool ad campaign against ads. While the duo’s traditional idiom is graffiti, the plastering of polished “ad copy” is a subtler, more formal approach to anti-advertising protest—you have to look twice, something straphangers almost never do for a scrawl of Sharpie or an artless tag in spray paint. While very few people probably saw the installation itself (I’ve been on the J train at 3AM—it’s pretty dead), the folks at ANIMAL videotaped it for posterity—YouTube is the last town square, I suppose.

I’d hope actions like this might take off, but the MTA has already announced plans to put cameras in cars... you know… for safety.
 

 
Via ANIMAL

 
This stern, cheerful, inane PSA from Counselor Films about graffiti says a lot of things that are mostly true, and yet doesn’t seem to get anything right at all. The graffiti depicted in the video (some of it concocted for the video, of course) is indeed a blight in visual terms—it’s hard to argue the point. Either they didn’t know that some graffiti can be aesthetically appealing or the “golden age of graffiti” hadn’t really happened yet—I suspect it’s a bit of both.

Meanwhile, the need to express oneself, the benefits of outlaw behavior, the fundamental need for protest—you won’t hear about any of that here.
 

 
The video features a sublimely silly pop song that suggests what might have happened if your parents had descended into the rec room and wrested control over Rod Torfulson’s Armada:
 

Hey is it fun or just dumb?
Yes, either it’s fun or just dumb
You know there are kids in school
Some of them break the rules
Hey is it fun or just dumb?
Maybe what they’re doin’s funny
Maybe it may look that way
But maybe if it’s costin’ money
I wonder what it’ll cost—who’s gonna pay?
Hey is it fun or just dumb?
Yes, either it’s fun or just dumb
Either it’s fun or just dumb

 
From A/V Geeks

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Bad Graffiti’: Vulgar, juvenile, misspelled & ignorant wall scrawlings from Detroit (NSFW-ish)
Graffiti pioneer Stay High 149, R.I.P.

Photo: Mirgun Akyavas
 
Austin, Texas has some of the finest examples of street art of any city on the planet. Here’s something that recently went up in the downtown area. I don’t know who did it and they may want to stay anonymous. If not, and you see this, let us know who you are so we can give you credit for this splendid piece of art.

To the right of the portrait is the famous Bukowski quote: “Some people never go crazy, what truly horrible lives they must live.”

 
An extraordinary underground museum of graffiti art has been painstakingly assembled in the ruins of a formerly squatted grocery store in the north of Paris. Organized by two artists, Lek and Sowat, forty French artists and crews took over the building after police had cleared the space of its residents.

Sowat told Dangerous Minds:

On August 12, 2010, Lek and I found an abandoned supermarket in the north of Paris. For a year, in the greatest of secrets, we continuously wandered in this 430,000 sq ft monument to paint murals and organize an illegal artistic residency, inviting forty French graffiti artists to collaborate with us, from the first to the last generation of the graffiti movement. Together we built a Mausoleum, a temple dedicated to our disappearing underground culture, slowly being replaced by street art and its global pop aesthetics. Amongst other things, we made a stop motion movie of the whole experience, showing a years worth of work in 7 minutes of high speed sequence shot, a bit like watching Graffiti through the windows of New York Subway system.

To illustrate this movie, we chose Philip Glass’ ‘Opening’ track. When we reached out for permission to use the music, we were offered Mr Glass’ own master of the song, a version that is less known by the public than the track that was put out in the ‘glassworks’ album. We didn’t do this movie for financial reasons, we wanted it to be free and accessible to the most people possible.

 

 
The Mausolée space reflects French social, political and human drama today, as few museums or more traditional art spaces could. Due to the nature of the space, people can’t really visit there, so the artists have published a book commemorating their 40,000 m² “mausoleum” of graffiti art as well as posting this gorgeous Koyaanisqatsi-esque time-lapse video of how the project came together.

It’s a knockout.
 

 

 
Redditor cc132 says, “I live next door to this terrifying piece of shit. The longer you stare at it, the funnier it gets.”

Yes. Yes, it does.

 
I like this idea: “connect the street gum” to create graffiti portraits. BTW, this was spotted in SoHo in New York City.

(via Wooster Collective)

 
If you’re out of loop on the whole HANKSY graffiti thing popping up on the streets of NYC, here’s the first HANKSY that appeared about a month ago.

(via Wooster Collective)

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Morrissey brands Royal Family ‘benefit scroungers’
Rare interview with Morrissey on The Smiths, politics, song-writing and his autobiography

(via The High Definite)

 
Imagine walking down the street and seeing this! Pretty great, huh? 

(via Das Kraftfuttermischwerk)

 
Ace photographer Henry Chalfant who produced the classic 1984 documentary on New York City graffiti artists and hip hop, Style Wars, has a new website and it’s a beauty. An incredible resource for anyone interested in street art, hip hop culture and outlaw artists, check out Henry’s site here. It will blow your mind.

These photos were cropped in order to fit the page. See them in their full glory on Henry’s webpage, where you can actually scroll along the full length of the subway car.