Sep 222023
 

Nuestro Andar Florece by artist, muralist, arts educator and filmmaker Michelle Angela Ortiz, is located on the wall of Mixteca Organization in Brooklyn, NY. Mixteca is a community-based organization established by “a group of concerned community members to address critical needs in health, education, social and legal issues facing the burgeoning Mexican and Latin American immigrant community in Brooklyn”.

About the mural from the artist’s website-

Nuestro Andar Florece (Our Journey Blooms), celebrates the stories of Mexican immigrant women that have planted their roots in Brooklyn, New York. As part of the Barrio Roots Festival that took place in late October 2016, I led this mural project along with artist Federico Zuvire. The project was supported by Habitajes. They offered a series of creative workshops at Mixteca Organization with women that shared their immigration stories. The women are mothers, students, educators, and some survivors of domestic violence that found a new home in New York. The women decided on the messages that are conveyed in the mural. For three weeks, the artists, workshop participants, local Brooklyn artists, and neighbors participated in the creation of the mural.

 

Sep 212023
 

This two story mural of Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is located in his hometown of Springfield, Oregon.  It was designed by Craig Ferroggiaro of Portland and painted by Old City Artists of Los Angeles.

Sep 112023
 

This mural was created by Bikismo for 352walls/The Gainesville Urban Art Initiative. For more of his work check out his website and Instagram.

Aug 252023
 

This mural was created by Hyland Mather, aka The Lost Object, in 2017 for Anti Gravity Project and The Foosaner Art Museum in the Eau Gallie Arts District in Melbourne, Florida. The museum, sadly, closed in 2021.

Aug 172023
 

This mural by Kelie Bowman in Eugene, Oregon was created in 2017. For more work by the painter and muralist, check out her Instagram.

Aug 012023
 

Sun and Moon, created by Jia Sung, is one of the artists chosen by The Collision Project, whose work can be seen in Industry City, Brooklyn.

About the mural-

The mural depicts two goddesses from Chinese mythology, flanking the courtyard door. The lunar deity Chang’E floats on the left with her companion rabbit, while solar goddess Xihe sits on the right with her ten sun-crow children. The paired murals reimagine protective door guardian imagery through the lens of the divine feminine.

 

Jul 242023
 

This mural by Shark Toof was created for the 2015 edition of the SHINE Mural Festival in St. Pete, Florida.

About the mural from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance website

The artist hails from Los Angeles and is known around the world for his iconic shark illustrations. Although the shark’s reputation is fearsome, Shark Toof uses the image of a shark to give strength, optimism and possibility to the viewer. He sees the shark as a voice of rebellion, and a conduit for the unheard.

At the artist’s request, the wall was painted red before he got to St. Pete. Even so, the mural took four days and almost one hundred cans of aerosol paint – and it was a challenge because of wires and the architectural details of the wall.

When the painting was done, the artist stepped into the doorway on the bottom right, closed the iron grate and said, “See? Now I’m in a shark cage!”

For more of Shark Toof’s work also check out his Instagram.

Jul 032023
 

There are currently two exhibitions in New York celebrating Richard Avedon’s photography. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art is Richard Avedon: Murals. Pictured above are two of the large murals included. The first is of Andy Warhol and members of The Factory and the other is of members of the Mission Council in Saigon.

From The Met’s website about the show-

In 1969, Richard Avedon was at a crossroads. After a five-year hiatus, the photographer started making portraits again, this time with a new camera and a new sense of scale. Trading his handheld Rolleiflex for a larger, tripod-mounted device, he reinvented his studio dynamic. Instead of dancing around his subjects from behind a viewfinder, as he had in his lively fashion pictures, he could now stand beside a stationary camera and meet them head-on. Facing down groups of the era’s preeminent artists, activists, and politicians, he made huge photomural portraits, befitting their outsized cultural influence. On the centennial of the photographer’s birth, Richard Avedon: MURALS will bring together three of these monumental works, some as wide as 35 feet. For Avedon, the murals expanded the artistic possibilities of photography, radically reorienting viewers and subjects in a subsuming, larger-than-life view.

The murals are society portraits. In them, Avedon assembles giants of the late twentieth century—members of Andy Warhol’s Factory, architects of the Vietnam war, and demonstrators against that war—who together shaped an extraordinarily turbulent era of American life. Presented in one gallery, their enormous portraits will stage an unlikely conversation among historically opposed camps, as well as contemporary viewers. The formal innovations of Avedon’s high style—of starkly lit bodies in an unsparing white surround—are best realized in these works, where subjects jostle and crowd the frame, and bright voids between them crackle with tension. Uniting the murals with session outtakes and contemporaneous projects, the exhibition will track Avedon’s evolving approach to group portraiture, through which he so transformed the conventions of the genre.

About Andy Warhol and members of The Factory

Avedon fantasized about throwing an annual fete for New York society and watching the group evolve over time. This mural is his downtown take on such a party, featuring a new “smart set” of sexual revolutionaries. They were affiliated with Andy Warhol’s Factory, the studio and gathering place for a coterie of avant-garde filmmakers, artists, and socialites. Avedon summoned them to his own studio, where they met over a series of weeks. Working in his most directorial mode, he arranged his subjects—including transgender actress Candy Darling and adult film star Joe Dallesandro—in a lateral frieze across adjoining frames, the fracture and repetition of their bodies in space suggesting the filmic passage of time.

The culmination of much trial and error, the mural’s composition took time to perfect, as evidenced by session outtakes displayed nearby. Avedon later praised the professionalism of his cast but joked, “You couldn’t keep the clothes on anybody in those years. . . . Before you could say ‘hello,’ they were nude and ready to ride.” If this unabashed undress tests gallery decorum, it is a provocation grounded in art history: in the central panel Avedon presents a male version of the “three graces,” riffing on a gendered tradition in allegorical painting with an ironic, Warholian wink.

About The Mission Council, Saigon, South Vietnam

Avedon knew he would have mere minutes to photograph the U.S. generals, ambassadors, and policy experts who ran the war in Vietnam—not the weeks he spent refining his first mural. Planning in advance, he requested the heights of the men known collectively as the Mission Council and mapped out their positions, with careful attention to rank and influence. He rigged a makeshift studio at the embassy in Saigon, and recalled that once assembled, they “lined up like high school boys. They all wanted to be in the picture.” This is true of all but Ted Shackley, the camera-averse CIA station chief known to colleagues as the Blond Ghost, who begged out of the sitting for “a meeting,” leaving a void in the rightmost panel.

As blunt and procedural as a police lineup, the mural recalls Avedon’s first photography gig as a teenager in the Merchant Marine, where he made mugshot-style portraits of new recruits. Here, scrutinizing the faces of the war’s top brass, Avedon invokes their unseen operatives and victims. When the work was later published, one critic deemed it “a terrifying picture of business as usual.”

This exhibition closes 10/1/23.

For a more comprehensive look at Avedon’s career, Gagosian’s Chelsea location is showing Avedon 100, “a collection of Avedon photographs was selected by more than 150 people—including prominent artists, designers, musicians, writers, curators, and fashion world representatives—who elaborate on the impact of the photographer’s work today.”

The gallery’s website has a video of the installation that is well worth checking out, especially if you can’t see the exhibition in person.

This exhibition will close on Friday, 7/7/23.