Global Graphica

The awesome architectural design of the floor-through stairs at advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi in Los Angeles.

Giant silhouette painting of a worker on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, in Los Angeles.

Pix of the enormously the band Sway Machinery performing with members of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Antibalas recently at the magnificently restored Eldridge Street Synagogue in the Lower East Side of downtown New York City.

We love this artwork. The piece is a Herman Miller Aeron-like office chair quickly being spun 360 degrees at various speeds in large glass case.

It’s one of dozens of works being shown at MoCA in Los Angeles as part of its “The Artist’s Museum” exhibition. The show is a survey of influential L.A.-based contemporary artists.

There’s a short video clip on the Web of the same artwork live and in action as it appeared at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh a couple of years ago. For another view, here’s another video clip.

Now if only we could remember the name of the artist.

Wheat-paste street art of iconic Patrick Demarchelier photo of Madonna outside the Geffen Contemporary at MoCA in Little Tokyo, downtown Los Angeles.

Some pix below of the beautiful interior of the Abbot-Kinney outpost of Intelligentsia Coffee in Venice, in Los Angeles.

Famed British painter David Hockney embraced first the Apple iPhone and then the iPad as medium for creating a collection of colorful impressionistic drawings which recently debuted in Paris at Fondation Pierre Berge – Yves Saint-Laurent. See still images below and check out the mini-documentary video on Artivi. Great stuff. More information in this article in the U.K. newspaper the Telegraph

Some more yarn-bombing street art in Santa Monica, in Los Angeles. Lovely.

Stumbled upon some yarn-bombing street art in Santa Monica, in Los Angeles, on the weekend. Beautiful stuff that softens the otherwise hard surfaces and edges of the built-up urban landscape. When we see stuff like, it gives us a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, puts smiles on our faces. That sort of thing. We love it.

As part of her artwork “Refresh,” Bay Area artist Kristin Sue Lucas had her name legally changed. Lucas’ work explores the impact of the Web on identity

Central to “Refresh” is the idea that like a Web page in a browser people can be “refreshed” and yet be the same, yet a newer version of the same thing.

Thus the fact that Lucas’ official new name is, letter for letter, exactly the same as her old name, as the image of the newspaper clipping below shows. That is, she has her named legally changed by the courts from “Kristin Sue Lucas” to “Kristin Sue Lucas.”

The art work is being shown as part of the exhibition “Free” at the New Museum in New York City

“Skateistan: To Live and Skate in Kabul” is a fascinating short documentary about the nascent skate-boarding scene in the Afghanistan capital. Video plus some still images from the film below.

We were on location in Santa Monica Beach on Saturday doing a day-long commercial shoot when these dudes arrived with  a small remote-controlled blimp. They spent the whole day flying it around the beach and testing it.

The aricraft has a camera mounted to it and the pilot on the ground uses a pair of sunglasses outfitted with video screens to see what the cam on the blimp sees .  The blimp is owned by a start-up called GoBlimps.com that is going to sell their services to production companies.

It’s pretty cool and they got some aerial shots of us doing our shoot nearby, though in the process the blimp almost crashed into a bunch of cars in a nearby parking lot. A little more testing required, perhaps.

Wheat-paste line drawing of a man’s head on the building hoarding outside the former site of Gus’s Pickles on Orchard St. in the Lower East Side, NYC. (The space is being turned into a cigar shop and the artist Mumblefuck is doing work in the space and curating artwork around it.) The man looks like he’d be a conservative congressman appearing as a talking-head pundit on cable news.

FOA! = “full of awesome!” The 2010 costume of George Schnakenberg, a 3D, living replica of Banky’s famous “flower-thrower” stencil street-art piece. (Thanks, Richard!)