BRIGHTSTONEMARBLE

GATS Comes Out at “Midnight”

The perks and drawbacks of being a masked figure are roughly the same: nobody can know you. While this anonymity frees graffiti artists like GATS (Graffiti Against the System), it also means the painter has had to connect with their audience beyond a personal identity. Over decades of painting city walls, warehouses, underpasses, and highways worldwide, GATS has built a community that instantly recognizes the bearded or toothed mask as representing the artist’s presence. In their newest solo exhibition with Harman Projects, Midnight, GATS recontextualizes the familiar masked face with a sense of play and irreverence, leaning into the freedom of being a masked figure themselves.

After 50 Years, FUTURA 2000 is Finally “Breaking Out”

Right from the jump; it’s all here. FUTURA 2000, the Bronx, graffiti, street culture, 50 years of art history…, like there are few art forms, and an artist for that matter, that represent a particular era (and the transcendence of said era to move through the years) quite like FUTURA. He and graffiti go together, even though FUTURA didn’t linger in graff for too long. He took the freedom, the expression of it, and took it with him. I think that is an important part of the lore of the great FUTURA; his is a story of taking the essence of a thing and moving it through his life, applying it to all endeavors while not repeating the act to…

JIM JOE’s “Practice in Public” is a Fascinating Exploration and Use of Public Space

It’s a process of patience. JIM JOE, famous in that he is famously mostly reluctant to take a spotlight or showcase himself in public, made an entire project in public. Perhaps the most public place he could, at the New York Public Library, exploring two branches located on Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Street in their rich and vast resoruces of pictures they have in their archive. As the 2023 Picture Collection Artist Fellow, JIM JOE made all the works in this show, Practice in Public, now on view at Entrance, all inside the library. What is fascinating about this, even through his reinterpretations and reimagining imagery both obscure and iconic is the discipline in which JOE have himself.…

Luca Sára Rózsa and Dickens Otieno Find an “E-scape” in Los Angeles

Steve Turner is pleased to present E-scape, a two-person exhibition featuring new paintings by Budapest-based Luca Sára Rózsa and new weavings by Nairobi-based Dickens Otieno. Both artists make works about the environment and humanity’s connection to it. Rózsa uses loose and expressive brush strokes in lustrous color to depict feral humans in nature. Four of her works relate to the elements of fire, water, air and earth while two relate to war and peace. Otieno creates large-scale colorful wall weavings and floor sculptures made of strips of soda cans. Whether depicting a rural or urban scene, he uses aluminum cans to emphasize the impact of humans on the environment. E-scape suggests a new genre of landscape painting, one that conveys the widespread anxiety for…

Sewn Into Daily Life: An Interview with Erick Medel

Erick Medel doesn’t just take pictures, he sews them. Through a unique process involving denim and brightly colored threads, Medel documents through photography his Boyle Heights neighborhood in Los Angeles and finds the most mundane city scenes to then transform into highly detailed works that come from his sewing machine rather than oil paint. On the occasion of his solo show, Vidas, on view at Charlie James Gallery, we talked to Erick about his relationship with his neighborhood as he painstakingly recreates it with thread.

Things That Have Always Been There: An Interview with Michael McGregor

The idea and practice of getting away, going on vacation, emerged simultaneously with the expansion of railways across Europe and the United States in the 19th century; the American middle-class family vacation didn’t become popular until the 1950s. And yet, there is this idea that the impulse and practice of “getting away from it all” has always been there. The images that come back from friends and family who ventured to other lands feature classic tourist spots—the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, the Pyramids of Giza, the Tower of Pisa—but they also feature everyday objects—a cup of coffee, a pigeon, bottles on the side of the road—that seem to glow anew in a foreign light.

Radio Juxtapoz, ep 141: The (Color) Theory of ACHES

Ah, its nice to have a little color talk here on the podcast. Dublin, Irelands’ ⁠ACHES⁠ is a theorist of color. He combines a multitude of ideas and styles into his work, whether graffiti, murals, painting, graphic design, all into an aesthetic that is deservedly his and one of the more unique in the street genre. When you see an ACHES, you know its him.

Lee Quinoñes: In Graffiti We Trust

In spring 1974, thirteen-year-old Lee Quiñones took his schematic drawings into a tunnel and spray painted “LEE” in gold, white, and black on the small panel of a New York City BMT train. An inspired outlaw with a meticulous design process and precision painting skills, his voice responded to the social and civil unrest of the era and found expression in painting graffiti, an ancient art form that he and many of his peers had to defend in the larger art world. On a clear, crisp morning, we met to talk about his legendary 50 years of painting, which is celebrated in his new book, Lee Quinoñes: Fifty Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond, as well as solo…

Radio Juxtapoz, ep 125: Tim Conlon Knows Freight Train Graffiti

There are just certain artists who know their subject. For Tim Conlon, freight train graffiti is his muse, his subject, his love, his investigation. As a freight graffiti artist himself, Tim took that passion and understanding of the North American railroad system and turned into wonderfully constructed photoreal paintings of graff on trains as well as a series of train set works featuring graffiti pieces. His work is about not only a love of graffiti, but a story of movement, of communication and connection, friendship and the insight to a subculture of America that collect rail ephemera. It’s a story of the industrial revolution, but also of the power of moving art.

Angela Anh Nguyen Slays Softly: Are You Tuft Enough?

Angela Anh Nguyen is a self-educated textile artist referencing colonial hypocrisy, death metal and a wild array of perspectives. She stays tough while tufting, broaching hardcore topics with soft materials. Her utilitarian, substantive rug art is imbued with a fierce objective and a dedicated hand. If any artist could be described by the old adage, “kicking ass and taking names,” Angela is the one.