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Posts Tagged ‘mural’

Street Art on Trucks

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 18, 2016| 3 Comments »

Street art is not just for stationary walls any more. According to Kate Essig at WNYC radio, some pretty amazing specimens are now on the move.

“Art in Spain got a sweet new set of wheels thanks to the Truck Art Project,” she writes. “In this collaboration between a transport company and the local art community,  street art takes the form of stunning mobile murals on  — you guessed it —  trucks.

“The project works with popular urban artists like Javier Arce, Suso33, and Marina Vargas to take their works off the wall and put them in motion. …

“The goal of the project is to make contemporary artwork accessible to all, even if it’s just a surprise sighting at a stoplight — so those in Spain who aren’t frequent gallery go-ers can still glimpse this art on the go.” An inspiring array of truck-art photos can be seen here.

And be sure to check out the project website, which reads in part, “Truck Art Project is an original art patronage project launched by the entrepreneur and collector Jaime Colsa, and curated by Fer Francés in contemporary art and Óscar Sanz in urban art. …

“The trucks working with the project will be the gigantic backdrops for the artworks. The initiative thereby becomes a living display of the most current tendencies in the country’s painting, drawing, and urban art (although the ambitious program intends to be even more multidisciplinary, involving other art forms such as photography, music, or cinema), away from the confines of a museum and aimed at non-traditional spectators and contexts that don’t usually lend themselves to contemporary art.”

Photo: Panci Calvo
This freight truck was painted by artist Okuda San Miguel for the Truck Art Project.

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Snow and Other Wonders

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on February 17, 2016| 3 Comments »

Time for a photo round-up. Winter in New England: warm days, cold days, snow, ice, complicated shadows, empty facades, food and drink.

If you get any time to be alone and quiet — maybe just nursing a head cold — use it well. Everyone needs time to think.

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A Mural That Speaks

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 20, 2015| 2 Comments »

111315-Lawrence-Weiner-artistLawrence Weiner discusses art in Dewey Square.

The latest Greenway mural in Dewey Square comes courtesy of MIT’s List gallery and is the work of Lawrence Weiner.  I admit to liking it even though it seems to be nothing more than bright orange letters on a blue background, with words saying, “A translation from one language to another.”

I am letting it sink in. Perhaps it’s about the translation from the artist’s idea to a work that others see. Perhaps something is lost in the translation. Perhaps it’s about how differently we understand one another, even without so-called language barriers.

Here’s what the Greenway writes, “Lawrence Weiner is considered a key figure in the Conceptual Art movement, which includes artists like Douglas Huebler, Robert Barry, Joseph Kosuth, and Sol LeWitt.

“A primary motivating factor behind Weiner’s work is the desire to make it accessible, without needing to purchase a ticket or understand a secret visual language. He contended that language reaches a broader audience, and situating language in contexts outside traditional art-viewing settings, such as art museums, furthers that reach.

“Thus, he began creating works consisting of words and sentences or sentence fragments that he displayed in public spaces, books, films, and other accessible media, as opposed to the cultural institutions that might deter broad and diverse viewership. Click here for an interview with Lawrence Weiner.” More at the Greenway site.

Malcolm Gay at the Boston Globe adds, “For Weiner, the work is less about art historical knowledge, outrage, or relating to other people. It’s about a viewer’s individual response to an object in the world — an object that’s been created by another person.

“ ‘Our job is not to throw things at people,’ he said. ‘The work doesn’t exist unless somebody decides to deal with it. You can pass it on your way work, and it’s not going to screw up your day. But if you pay attention to it, it might screw up your life.’ ”

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Missing Muralist Found Baking Pies

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 19, 2015| Leave a Comment »

When the MBTA subway system decided to rebuild the stop called Government Center a couple years ago, it began a search for the artist who created the original murals there to see if she would like them back, and if not, if she would be OK with selling them.

It wasn’t easy to find her.

As Malcolm Gay writes at the Boston Globe, she was baking pies as part-owner of the Pie Place Café in Grand Marais, Minnesota.

“ ‘I got a phone call one day,’ [Mary] Beams explained, ‘and a voice I didn’t know said, “How does it feel to know that all of Boston is looking for you?” I had no idea what to say.’

“Beams, it turned out, hadn’t disappeared at all. An animator who had been a teaching assistant at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, and whose work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, she’d simply left the art world …

“With her blessing, the MBTA plans to hold an online public auction of the artworks, giving Bostonians a chance to own a piece of the city’s history.

“The online auction and display of murals will run Oct. 20-29, with a kick-off event at the state Transportation Building at 10 Park Plaza on Oct. 21. … The event will be something of a homecoming for Beams, who left Boston soon after completing the murals. She has never been back.

“ “I am so curious to see them again,’ she said. ‘I’ve gone on and lived this whole other life. But to be able to confront something that you made 35 years ago and ponder what they’ve been through? It’s quite amazing.’ ”

Pictures of the murals — and more information on the artist — here.

Mural by Mary Beams, for sale at Skinner

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City of Murals

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 20, 2015| 4 Comments »

Graffiti is not what it used to be. At the Studio 360 radio show, Jack D’Isidoro recently reported on an American city that wanted to be a tourist destination for murals on every wall.

“For decades, street art was bemoaned as a symptom of urban decay and detritus — a sign that system had lost control. …

“Times have changed, however; mainstream culture now recognizes that street art can be iconic, sensational, and good for business.

“But what if it was created with the intention of being a public good, as a tool that could revitalize and beautify a neighborhood? Richmond, the capital of Virginia, decided to find out.

“Now in its fourth year, the Richmond Mural Project brings internationally renowned mural artists to install pieces (with the building owners’ permission) throughout the city. The mission: create the highest concentration of murals in the world, turning Richmond into a global destination for street art lovers.

” ‘I thought, “I can make a change in Richmond,” ‘recalls Shane Pomajambo, a Washington, D.C., art gallery owner and organizer of the project. Initially, he had met with the mayor and city council members with the intention of creating an arts district within the city, but it quickly expanded into a wider effort …

“With a total of 84 murals since the project’s inception, it’s inspired local artists as well, who have added to the impressive displays across Richmond’s brick walls.”

More at Studio 360, where you can also see more Richmond murals.

Photo: Richmond Mural Project
A mural by the artist Ever in the city of Richmond, Virginia

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Walls for Peace

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 28, 2015| 2 Comments »

Once again, the Christian Science Monitor comes up with a story about a person creating positive change in the world.

Jessica Mendoza writes, “Behind a low, unobtrusive brick building [in Boston’s inner city] is a lush, green forest. Brown and silver-gray trees cover the building’s wall, their leafy canopies blocking the sky. Sun-dappled stones sit on tangles of grass. A boy perches on the largest rock, gazing at a distant meadow.

“On the wall’s lower left corner, the word ‘Love’ appears in bright green; opposite is the word in Spanish, ‘Amor,’ in vibrant red.

“The forest is a mural, and even in the dead of winter the 18-by-85-foot painting gives a sense of beauty, warmth, and life – qualities that artist Alex Cook tries to convey in all his work.

“ ‘Art was always a deeply spiritual thing, the most real thing in my life,’ Mr. Cook says. ‘You want to share that kind of feeling.’ …

“An artist for most of his life, Cook has painted on walls all over the United States and has even packed his brushes to travel to and paint in Kenya, Nigeria, and most recently Panajachel, Guatemala. …

“The project began in the fall of 2013 when Cook was performing in New Orleans. There he met Amy Hoyle, then a principal at a local elementary school. Ms. Hoyle was looking for new ways to engage her students and invited Cook to paint a mural on campus, based on the motto of Woodland West Elementary School: ‘Stay curious.’

“Cook delivered, painting two huge faces side by side in a strange, beautiful picture that prompted more questions than answers.

“But he did more than that. Touched by the students, many of whom were poor and had difficult home lives, Cook decided to paint something that would remind them every day of how special they were. The result was a hallway filled with a palette of colors and messages telling all who passed by that they were beautiful, needed, important, and loved. “It’s like walking through a warm hug,” Hoyle says.

Read how Cook made his projects increasingly collaborative, inspiring people from all walks of life (here).

Photo: Ann Hermes
Alex Cook stands in front of one of his large murals, an 18-by-85-foot depiction of a forest in Boston.

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Mural Artist Still Painting at 98

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 29, 2015| Leave a Comment »

I do like stories about people who love their work so much that they never want to stop.

Perhaps it helps to have a talent like muralist Eric Bransby, who got to study with one of my favorite artists, Thomas Hart Benton. (Suzanne says I have a personal aesthetic, which is a polite way of saying I’m crazy about anything wavy, like Benton’s energetic American landscapes.)

Chloe Veltman writes at National Public Radio, “Eric Bransby is one of the last living links to the great age of American mural painting. He studied with one of this country’s most famous muralists — Thomas Hart Benton — and went on to create his own murals in prominent buildings across the west. The artist is now 98 and still painting.

“At his Colorado Springs studio, Bransby attacks a drawing with tight, sharp strokes, a pastel pencil grasped between gnarled fingers. His studio is unheated, but he doesn’t seem to notice the cold. He’s completely engrossed in the image taking shape on his easel. It’s a study for a new mural that he hopes to install at nearby Colorado College. He says he draws between two and eight hours every day.

” ‘Drawing has been a continuous thing for me, like exercises for a musician,’ he says. ‘It’s refreshing. I draw better. I paint better.’ …

“His parents didn’t encourage his artistic pursuits. It was during the Depression, and when he demanded that he get sent to art school, he remembers his parents said: ‘Well, he’ll do one year and he’ll come back so discouraged that we’ll make something else out of him.’

” ‘But that didn’t happen,’ Bransby says. ‘I found heaven.’ ” Read more here.

Photo: Nathaniel Minor/Colorado Public Radio
Eric Bransby, pictured above in his home in Colorado Springs, is still creating art at 98. “I try to make each mural a project that will somehow expand my abilities a little bit more,” he says.

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Third Giant Mural in Dewey Square

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 24, 2014| 2 Comments »

I blogged about the two previous murals in Dewey Square, here, and now there is a third one. The first two were by artists who had shows at the nearby Institute for Contemporary Arts (the ICA). The new one is by an artist associated with the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA).

According to Geoff Edgers at the Boston Globe, Jill Medvedow, ICA director, was not pleased that the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy chose a different museum. “Really?” she said. “It’s walking distance to the ICA.”

WBUR radio’s “The Artery” covers more of the story: “Shinique Smith, the creator of the latest work, recalls seeing pictures on the Internet of that earlier mural by the Brazilian twins Os Gemeos. Standing in the grass below her piece, she told me she thought the wall was amazing, ‘and I wanted to do something like them.’ ” More here.

In case you’re wondering, Smith didn’t stand there painting it all herself like the Os Gemeos twins who did the first mural. Instead she gave a kind of map to skilled painters from a company that does this sort of thing, translating a smaller work into a giant one.

I took four photographs of the progress.

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Inside the Lotus

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2014| Leave a Comment »

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Inside my neighbor’s lotus flower is something that looks like a shower head. I think I will make a new year’s resolution on it (the school year, say): “Because you can never imagine what’s inside the lotus, try to be alert to the subtext.”

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Paint by Numbers Mural Builds Community

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 27, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Zachary Sampson has a nice article at the Globe today. It’s about a project in Boston enlisting passersby to help create a mural.

The mural “was created by artist Ernest McKinley English. He joined with ArtLifting — a Boston organization that works with homeless and disabled artists — to organize the project, which he said was meant to foster collaboration. …

“Liz Powers, cofounder of ArtLifting, said English’s vision dovetails with her organization’s purpose. ‘Both Ernest and ArtLifting have the mission of bringing people together through art, building community through art,’ she said.”

The mural “held a hidden message that would be revealed upon completion. …

“The part-in-a-whole ethic resonated with many of the artists who worked on the piece, both amateur and professional.

“ ‘I think the greatest message,’ [artist Randy] Nicholson said, ‘is as a community, we can accomplish what we can’t as individuals.’ ” More here.

Years ago, Suzanne and John helped paint a beautiful mural about our town for the commuter rail station. Their names were included in the credits and we always felt proud reading them when we passed by.

Photo: Michele McDonald for the Boston Globe
Sisters work on paint-by-numbers mural outside the Prudential Center.

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New Dewey Square Mural

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 26, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Remember the new Dewey Square mural I blogged about recently, here?

The Boston Globe has a brief update for you, but their picture is blocked by a cherry picker. As soon as the Greenway moved the heavy equipment, I shot my own picture.

Be watching for more on Dewey Square. I have blogged about the two months that Occupy Boston camped there. I have blogged about the Greenway’s teaching garden alongside the Big Dig exit and about the farmers market that sets up Tuesdays and Thursdays. Soon I will show pictures of the pianos that arrived today — with people playing them, I hope.

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Interactive Street Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 20, 2013| 4 Comments »

Candy creates interactive street art. Her “Before I Die” wall garnered a lot of attention — and contributors. Folks wanted more.

So she decided to create a website explaining in detail how others could replicate the wall.

Here she tells how it all started: “It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget what really matters to you. After I lost someone I loved very much, I thought about death a lot. This helped clarify my life, the people I want to be with, and the things I want to do, but I struggled to maintain perspective. I wondered if other people felt the same way. So with help from old and new friends, I painted the side of an abandoned house in my neighborhood in New Orleans with chalkboard paint and stenciled it with a grid of the sentence “Before I die I want to _______.” Anyone walking by could pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on their lives, and share their personal aspirations in public space.

“It was an experiment and I didn’t know what to expect. By the next day, the wall was bursting with handwritten responses and it kept growing: Before I die I want to… sing for millions, hold her one more time, eat a salad with an alien, see my daughter graduate, abandon all insecurities, plant a tree, straddle the International Date Line, be completely myself…  People’s responses made me laugh out loud and they made me tear up. They consoled me during my toughest times. I understood my neighbors in new and enlightening ways.”

Candy’s how-to page reads, in part, “Once you’ve created a wall, you can share your wall here by creating a mini-site! A mini-site is a page where you can post photos and responses and document the story of your wall. It’s super easy to use, absolutely free, and no technical skills are required. Visit the Budapest mini-site to see an example.”

Everything you need if you’re going to create a “Before I Die” wall is here.

Photo: Before I Die

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Giant Art in Greenway

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 18, 2013| 3 Comments »

You may recall a past post about the Greenway mural by Os Gemeos, Brazilian twins who had a show at the Institute of Contemporary Art and painted street art around Boston when they were here. I posted pictures of their work-in-progress for the Greenway, here.

Geoff Hargadon photographed the finished work for the Boston Globe, below.

That giant mural is gone now, and Matthew Ritchie is working on the next one. I took a picture of it today and plan to take more for the blog as Ritchie wraps up.

Geoff Edgers at the Globe gives some background on this new piece. “The Institute of Contemporary Art has commissioned British-born Matthew Ritchie, known for using scientific principles to inspire his work, to take over the enormous outdoor canvas.

“Ritchie’s 5,000-square-foot seascape will be installed the week of Sept. 16 and remain up for as long as 18 months.

“The collaboration … is part of a residency for Ritchie that will include a multimedia performance with members of the rock bands The Breeders and The National, concerts at the museum and elsewhere, and a video project to be produced with the ICA’s teen program. But the biggest splash for the public will come on the exterior of the Big Dig ventilation building in Dewey Square.”

Read more at the Globe, here, and at the Greenway site, here.

Photo: Suzanne’s Mom

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Artist John Wilson at Danforth Museum

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 5, 2013| 2 Comments »

Unless you are going to the Danforth Museum of Art, I do not recommend ever going to Framingham (traffic issues, strip mall issues).

But I am very glad I finally made it to the Danforth today because it is a lovely museum with a community outreach effort that I admire.

The exhibit I went to see was described in the Boston Globe by by Sebastian Smee.

“One of the things you notice first in ‘Eternal Presence,’ a terrific career survey of John Wilson at the Danforth Museum of Art, is how attentive Wilson is to the faces of children. From his earliest days sketching his brother to his most recent large-scale drawings in charcoal, the impulse has remained the same: It is an impulse toward clarity, toward truth. He doesn’t sentimentalize or caricature children. …

“What you notice later is the high number of pictures showing children in the arms of adult men and women. … Wilson is after something elemental and profound. But the resulting image is not just another mother and child, or dad with young kid. There is instead, each time, something tender and hard-won about what you are looking at. A hope, a promise, a lament all in one.

“Wilson, 90, is one of Boston’s most esteemed and accomplished artists. He was born in Roxbury, the son of parents from British Guiana (now the nation of Guyana), was admitted to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1939 after developing a natural aptitude for art at the Roxbury Boys Club, where he attended classes taught by SMFA students.”

Smee goes on to describe Wilson’s long career, including a stint in France, his interest in the Mexican muralists, and his sculptures of Martin Luther King Jr. (one is in the Capitol rotunda).

Amazing that the artist is around and will be giving a talk at the museum. Try to go. The show is up until March 24. And you may enjoy as much as I did the African American sculptures by Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller from the permanent collection and the joyful Harlem watercolors of Richard Yarde.

More at the Globe.

Lithograph by John Wilson

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Thomas Hart Benton

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 17, 2012| 2 Comments »

Suzanne says I have an art esthetic. That makes me laugh.

My esthetic, as far as I can tell, is mostly a preference for painting that is wavy: Charles Burchfield, Virginia Lee Burton, Grant Wood, Marsden Hartley, Kate Knapp, Edvard Munch, Reginald Marsh.

A massive mural by one of my wavy favorites, Thomas Hart Benton, has recently been rescued from storage. Carol Vogel has the story in the NY Times.

“On New Year’s Day 1931, a new and radically different building opened amid the town houses of West 12th Street: Joseph Urban’s International-Style New School for Social Research, with one room in particular as a star attraction. Thomas Hart Benton, the American realist painter, had lined the third-floor boardroom with nine panels of what would be a 10-panel mural, ‘America Today,’ depicting a panoply of pre-Depression American types, from flappers to farmers, steel workers to stock market tycoons. Lloyd Goodrich, a prominent art historian, pronounced it a breakthrough that heralded a new approach to mural painting, ‘of actually taking reality and making mural art directly out of it.’

“Eight decades later, ‘America Today,’ now considered one of the most important and famous examples of American scene painting, is languishing in storage. That will change, however, because AXA Equitable, the insurance company that bought it nearly 30 years ago, has decided to donate it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. …

“The only problem,” writes Vogel, “is that the museum is so squeezed for space that the mural’s first public appearance after the handover won’t be until at least 2015, when the Met takes over the Whitney Museum of American Art’s landmark Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue (after the Whitney’s move to the meatpacking district).” More.

Something to look forward to in 2015.

Photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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