Global Graphica

The “D” on the cap that hides a face of a dude wearing headphones. We found this crafty Sharpie marker illustration on a stickie in Tokyo, Japan.

Basic tag-quality graffiti art on a small building in near Tokyo’s hip and fashionable Naka-Meguro and Shibuya neighborhoods.

Bride of Frankenstein sticker by Cupco in Tokyo, Japan.

This billboard advertisement for Absolut, the Swedish vodka brand in NoHo, in downtown New York City, is striking for a couple of reasons.

One is that billboard champions the photography by announcing the “collaboration” of the model and photographer for the ad. This is in line with Absolut’s long-standing tradition of supporting, promoting, sponsoring and co-opting art.

The model is the hottish up-and-coming actress Zooey Deschanel, who appears here in a sexy, sassy style in sharp contrast to many of the characters she portrays in film.

The photographer is well-known former model and fashion shutterbug Ellen von Unwerth.

The second striking thing is that the billboard is actually two billboards that allow for a both the standard horizontal composition and the vertical part of the photography and Deschanel’s figure.

Here’s a much closer view of the ground in Tokyo: A curving street line in the fashionable Naka-Meguro neighborhood.

An awesome view of the gray-haze city looking towards Shibuya from the Mori Art Museum at Roppongi Hills.

More freshness from Primo on Broome Street. This life-size wheat-paste of a man with a dog’s head holding a pistol to his head continues a theme. Many of the artist’s images involve figures with guns and faces either grotesquely altered or wearing feral, quasi-psychotic facial expressions.

This piece was at a spot that has recently attracted a lot of street art, mostly wheat-pastes, by the likes of Shepard Fairey and Haculla, among others. Apparently this has started to attract the attention of the building’s owner. With his work of the past year or two, Primo has quickly become one of our group of favorite artists working the street-scape and gallery space.

Last week, the last time we walked by this building, all the artwork had been stripped off the wall and painted over in the generic beige color of the nondescript one-story structure at the corner of Broome and Bowery streets in the Lower East Side / SoHo / Nolita / Chinatown area (that overlapping, gray area where these neighborhoods merge like a a georaphica mashup, which we will start calling “LoSoNo Town.”).

We love the style and work of Masamichi Katayama and his company, called Wonderwall, one of the foremost contemporary Japanese interior designers. Check out his awesome website and be sure to roll over the grid of his various projects, which includes many A Bathing Ape (BAPE) stores.

From the mysterious Parisian artist(s) that is PIMAX, here’s a color stencil of the Hollywood acting legend Marilyn Monroe and a banana in downtown New York City.

Awesome architectural design and space for the tiny Macbar, a mac-and-cheese specialty restaurant in New York City.

Colorful low-rise buildings of 101 Exhibit gallery space in the Miami Design District, home to many galleries, clubs, studios and design showrooms. It’s our favorite neighborhood after South Beach.

French street artist JR has been painting giant eyes on the sides of the hillside favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The effect is that the perched shantytowns appear to be staring out at the city’s affluent high condos nearby. See more images on the Urban Revival Blog.

Mary Hodder Photo

Whimsical illustration wheat-paste street art in front of the Bess shop on Lafayette St. in SoHo, in downtown Manhattan, NYC.