Global Graphica

Another look at the Uniqlo mobile pop-up store that was set-up at the recent DUMBO Arts Festival in Brooklyn, in New York City. This time we view it in the light of day, rather than at night.

The previous post has photos of the shop as it appeared at night in its full luminescent glory. Below we see the shop in daylight across the plaza under the Manhattan Bridge at Plymouth Street.

The last image below shows the Uniqlo structure through the stairwell window of a massive warehouse of residential lofts and artists studios, where Global Graphica was temporarily headquartered for a few weeks this past Spring.

Detailed street art paint-up in DUMBO, Brooklyn, of an old lady right next to Pedro’s Mexican restaurant on York Street. The lady depicted in this image has an “ethnic” look reminiscent of images of immigrants to New York as seen in archival footage from the early part of the 20th century. But the woman’s appearance is ambiguous enough that she could be perceived as from any one of a number of different cultures and and countries: Is she Eastern European, Latin American, Middle Eastern, Greek, Tunisian, Portuguese, Moroccan, Italian? Maybe, quite possibly, she’s American.

Large wheat-paste street art of illustrated black-and-white faces near next to the Mexican restaurant (we forget the name) near York Street Station in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), in Brooklyn, New York City.

The infamous Neckface in a classic rooftop tag atop a building in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge) neighborhood of Brooklyn. Part of what makes Neckface’s graffiti relatively well-known is the many instances of his name that appear in high-visibility locations on the New York City skyline and near freeways and billboards.

Well-worn classic wheatpaste by Brooklyn-based artist Bast in downtown Manhattan, New York City.


© Ivan Corsa Photo – Street Art Photos

Photography gear: Canon PowerShot SD 630 ELPH digital camera
Music on our iPod: Blur – “Coffee and TV”
Sneakers of the Day: Puma “Easy Rider”

© Ivan Corsa Photo – Street Art Photos

Photo gear: Canon PowerShot SD 630 ELPH digital camera
On our iPod: M.I.A. – “Bucky Done Gun”
Sneakers on our feet: Adidas “Marun”

© Ivan Corsa Photo – Street Art Photos

Photo gear: Canon PowerShot SD 630 ELPH digital camera
On our iPod: M.I.A. – “Bucky Done Gun”
Sneakers on our feet: Adidas “Marun”

© Ivan Corsa Photo – Street Art Photos

Photo gear: Canon PowerShot SD 630 ELPH digital camera
On our iPod: M.I.A. – “Bucky Done Gun”
Sneakers on our feet: Adidas “Marun”

Great little interview clip with Skewville.

Since late autumn 2006, around the time of the final, great explosion of street art at 11 Spring St. in Nolita, in downtown New York City, we started to notice that a lot of work by some well-known street artists was suddenly being defaced with splashes of paint. Works by Swoon, Shepard Fairey, Faile and many others were attacked with bright colors of paint that appeared to have been intentionally splashed on to the work. The paint never covered the pieces completely — the underlying art was always identifiable. The mysterious person(s) defacing the art was dubbed “The Splasher.” The atttacks continued through the winter and spring months that followed. Only recently have we noticed that “The Splasher” has slowed down.
New York Magazine chronicles and investigates the mystery in
a recent article. The irony of the Splasher’s attacks is that they amount to a form of vandalism upon vandalism itself. Most street art is destruction of property in the eyes of the law. The paint splashes can also, as some have pointed out, be construed as an act of art in and of itself, as a crude, shocking commentary upon the street art it targets.

Ivan Corsa Photo

Photo gear: Canon PowerShot SD 630 ELPH digital camera
On the iPod: The Rakes – “22 Grand Job”
Kicks on our feet: Adidas “Marun”

More in our Brooklyn graphica series. Here is a tag toward the lower-rent end of the Park Slope neighborhood, now the center of an anguished New Yorker real-estate condo- and apartment-buying frenzy. It’s increasingly rare to see graff in Park Slope these days with all the gentrification that has swept the nabe during the past decade.

Ivan Corsa Photo

Here’s another shot, from another angle, of the shark stencils near the 7th Ave. subway stop in Park Slope, Brooklyn, NYC

Background
The well-groomed and excessively gentrified (and real estate crazy) Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope isn’t full of the street art and graf so common in other parts of New York’s largest borough, such as Williamsburg. But the street art is there, tucked between apartments and brownstones, especially the further down the slope and away Prospect Park one heads. Such is the case of these wonderful stencilled silhouettes of sharks near the 7th Avenue F-Train subway station.

Ivan Corsa Photo

A wheat-paste graphic of a badminton shuttlecock (that’s “birdie” in American English) in downtown NYC, somewhere on a wall amid the luxury lofts and apartments of Nolita and Soho. THe graphic is a poster for the “Badassminton” event in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Ivan Corsa Photo

This huge mural in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, “rocks the rockingest!” This well-executed work has the look of a magazine illustration writ extra-large. But what really makes this mural pop is the explosive tag painted in the center, which is polished, highly-stylized and pristine. It’s rare to see such a juxtoposition of representative painting and graf integrated into a single, flawless piece of street art. The artist(s) has the skillz.

Ivan Corsa Photo

We love the bold, yet weathered, exterior of this car body shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It certainly gets your attention and tells you what they’re about with vivid, effecive simplicity: collision work. And it does it with a simple aesthetic — but an aesthetic nonetheless. Check out the combination of crimson and gold paint and the bold, all-caps typography. When you get in an car accident you might have more important things to worry about than the condition of your car or the exterior colors of an auto body shop’s garage–you should probably try to figure out first whether you need medical attention or the use of a good car accident or injury attorney.

Ivan Corsa Photo

Contextual shot of DUMBO, Brooklyn street art on a renovated factory building that now has multi-million dollar condos and lofts apartments. See next entry for more detailed view of the art and notes.

Ivan Corsa

Found this beautiful pastel-colored and wheat-pasted banner artwork in DUMBO, Brooklyn on the sealed brick archway of a renovated factory building. The neigborhood attracts street art and artists, but is scarcely affordable to most creative types now that the former industrial area has been fully gentrified and filled with multi-million dollar condos, duplex penthouse apartments and gargantuan, airy lofts that have — as the real estate brokers like to say — stunning city views. There’s a West Elm furniture store in DUMBO now, which tells you everything about where this nabe is going in the minds of the city’s aspirational and overly status-conscious real estate peeps. While the loft apartments keep coming, let’s hope the street art does, too.

Ivan Corsa Photo

These black-and-white photos of a woman wearing large 1970′s-style sunglasses were pasted up on the side of a large building across from St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo, in Brooklyn, in area filled with street art. The photos are in all sorts of sizes and are cropped in many different ways. We don’t know who the woman in the photo is nor the source of the image. Note the red, white and blue sticker with the words “The Streets Are Saying Things,” the name of an organization with an excellent Web site devoted to documenting graffiti writing.

Ivan G. Corsa Photo

Walk the streets of Dumbo in Brooklyn and you get a feel for the kind of ambiance that SoHo had twenty years ago, after the first waves of gentrification had wrapped up but before the entire area became a giant outdoor shopping mall with brand names everywhere. In Dumbo (the name is an acronym for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass”) you’ll see a once industrial neighborhood finding its feet as a now mostly residential area. You’ll also discover a ‘hood filled with moneyed and not-so-moneyed creatives. Multi-million-dollar loft conversions with spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline are surrounded by beat-up cobblestone streets, artists studios and plenty of graffiti and street art like “Thinking,” a piece of graphica we found pasted up across from St. Ann’s Warehouse, an arts-perfrmance space. Part of the poster has been ripped away (was it an advertisement), but enough remains that it still communicates and resonates. The person in the bunny suit (or is it an anthropamorphic rabbit) has something of a Japanese-anime look about his or her or its face. Why is the bunny amid the clouds? What does the kite represent. Is thinking akin to riding a cloud? Or is thinking here simply a substitute for “daydreaming.” Maybe that is the message, that daydreaming is a form of thinking. Or maybe that we shouldn’t be thinking too much about it at all. Notice the clouds pasted up separately to the right of the main picture. C’est cool. Anyway, we just like the way it looks.

Ivan Corsa Photo

The Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg (sometimes called “Billyburg” by local hipsters) is not a part of the borough generally known for lots of graffiti. But the ‘hood, like SoHo three decades ago, has become a well-established colony for artists, who settled in Williamsburg throughout the 1990′s and into the ’00′s. They were attracted to the area by relatively low rents and big spaces. With artists, naturally, came art. Some of it has spilled onto the streets like this first-rate example of a retro Wild Style-esque graffiti tag painted over a mural we found just off Union Ave. Notice how the tag has been dedicated “For Natkoa and Joce” and dated “’98.”

Ivan Corsa Photo