This mural by Florida artist Tasko was created for the 2022 edition of the SHINE Mural Festival in St. Pete, Florida.
Aug 142023
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 292023
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.
Jun 182023
This work, by artist Cyla Costa, was part of the Ladies Who Paint all female mural festival in San Diego.
The subject of the mural is the Portuguese word “saudade“. It has no direct translation but she defines it as “a tangle of emotions both happy and sad about missing someone or something” (as seen in the second image).
Jun 032023
Rooted in the Community was created by Kenny Coil and Marc Merenguer of Break Maiden for the 2020 SHINE Mural Festival in St. Petersburg, Florida.
May 242023
Rachel Ratcliff, “Roll of the Kaleidoscope”, 2021, acrylic on canvas
Richard Logan “Sea Oats”, 2022, photographic transfer on metal with etched glass
Steven Spathelf, “Orange Blossom”, 2022, acrylic on canvas
This past Friday the city of Dunedin, Florida, celebrated the opening of its new City Hall. As part of the celebration, the building and all of its offices were open to the public. It was the first opportunity to see all the wonderful art by Florida artists- selected and commissioned by Elizabeth Brincklow.
Pictured above are works by Rachel Ratcliff (wave painting) and Richard Logan (photography). The third work is by Steven Spathelf whose oranges can be seen adorning buildings and homes all around town.
Scroll through the pages below to see the other works on view.
May 112023
This mural was created by Lara Nguyen in 2016 for The Refinery in Asheville, North Carolina. The local artist and teacher’s design was chosen for the building by the Asheville Area Arts Council.
From a Mountain Xpress article about the work-
Bowerbirds and butterflies decorate the building’s facade. Nguyen considers the former “the artists of the bird world.” Each year, for up to six months, the male bowerbird will spend its days building arches made of straw. He will then gather brightly colored objects and place them outside the construction in order to attract mates.
“They perform,” says Nguyen. “They use the hole [of the arch] as a stage. … They’re also great mimickers and singers. I thought that was interesting. They’re like actors, performance artists, builders, makers, collectors, [and] in some way they’re painters. They pick certain colors and situate them.”
Nguyen saw the creature as a perfect symbol for The Refinery Creator Space. She lists off the various types of artists (painters, photographers, sculptors, filmmakers, fiber artists…), in addition to the art-based organizations (Asheville Darkroom, Asheville Makers, The Bright Angle, Local Cloth and Mechanical Eye Microcinema) that now call the space their home. She views her mural, with its bright colors and visual appeal, as a way to help facilitate traffic; a way to intrigue the public to step inside and support the arts.
More recently, Nguyen contributed work to the 2023 annual ArtFields event in Lake City, South Carolina. The two pieces are from her series “Letters to My Children”.
Her statement about these works-
“Strong Arms” & “Keep Going” are from a series entitled “Letters to My Children.” I was diagnosed with uterine leiomyosarcoma in July 2018 when my kids, Atticus and Moon, were 7 & 9 years old. In January 2020, my lung collapsed and I underwent a lobectomy. Now with a stage 4 cancer diagnosis I have found myself up at all hours worrying about dying before my kids are grown. When I couldn’t sleep, I wrote letters to them, recording their favorite recipes and my fondest memories of them for them. In 2021, I decided to share my writing with them instead of saving all this pondering in a box for later. Making and sharing this work has allowed us to cry and grieve together, which, in turn, has opened up space to truly be honest and present for one another while we are all still alive. With my children’s permission, I present slices of difficult conversations we have had to a wider audience in hopes of easing any load the viewer might be carrying on their own personal journey.
Jan 312023
This wall of murals was created for the 2015 Pinellas Park Better Block event.
The artists who created these murals are- Derek Donnelly; Zulu Painter; Justin Wagher; James Oleson; Scott Hillis; and Sebastian Coolidge.
In addition to being a local muralist, Derek Donnelly also runs the Saint Paint gallery (formerly Donnelly Cove), also in Pinellas Park.