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 | 11 Spring Street 16 Dec 2006This is the shit that should be in MOMA, boys and girls, 'cause it's the only avant-garde art left in NYC. — JAC
11 Spring Street
(Between Elizabeth & Bowery)
Manhattan, NYC
15-17 December 2006, 11am-5pm
An old carriage house and stables at 11 Spring Street (in Manhattan, between Elizabeth Street and the Bowery) has been a mecca for street art for at least a decade. Taggers, bombers, posterers, stickerers, muralists, sculptors, you name it; all slapped their art up on 11 Spring. The owners had, for years, a policy of benign neglect (someone less charitable would say urban blight) and, as William Gibson so succinctly noted, the street has its own uses for things.
But all is flux and chaos in NYC, nothing ever constant. The cancer of gentrification has overtaken this bastion of street art, and the new owners are building luxury housing for yuppies. (Which warms my heart; every day yuppies are unable to buy condos inside their meager budget of ten million dollars and must, instead, pay fifteen thousand a month for shabby, cold-water tenement walkups in dangerous neighborhoods far from Manhattan.) In an effort to pacify the street art community, or to, perhaps, enhance the value of their condos by trading on the historicity of the place and the fact that underneath all that plaster is amazing street art, the new owners opened up the building's 30,000 square feet of walls for decoration by street artists. The catch, and there always is one, is that the exhibit only lasted for three days only, and then workers powerwashed the exterior and drywalled the interior, and the art vanished from sight.
I waited on line for two hours and twenty minutes to get in, but it was well worth it. (These are shot using a crappy point-and-shoot digital, since my balky 35mm was out of commission, again.) At the end of the day on Saturday, after they kicked me out with all the other stragglers, I made one final homage: I tagged the building. Then I headed north, never looking back. |
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Elevator Doors
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Each floor has a freight elevator, and the doors of the first four are decorated. There was, possibly, a fifth floor in the building, but it wasn't accessible. Or that stairway may just have gone to the roof. In all the excitement, I can't remember if there were four floors or five. But, being as how this is the most powerful art in NYC, it could blow your head clean off...
(The fifth stairway went to the roof, but was off-limits except to the artists who painted it. But knowing the floor count is no reason to ruin a perfectly good Dirty Harry riff...)
6 files, last one added on Dec 17, 2006
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Shepard Fairey
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"I make a very public body of art using stickers, posters, and stencils. I put these works on the street in order to send some static interference out into the world's sea of images and messages. The images I use include historical propaganda, black power, parodies of authority, and tweaks of popular culture icons. Whatπs the point? Well aside from satisfying my compulsive need to produce art, these posters are designed to start a dialogue about imagery absorption. Powerful and seductive images have historically been used for a variety of reasons, some noble, some sinister, some both, depending on subjective interpretation. My work uses people, symbols, and people as symbols to deconstruct how powerful visuals and emotionally potent phrases can be used to manipulate and indoctrinate. There is no specific political affiliation behind what I do, only the philosophy 'question everything', which is why I can use Jesse Jackson and Joseph Stalin in the same body of work." — Shepard Fairey
Fairey's 13x25 foot indoor piece (yeah, that's BIG) was hard to photograph because there wasn't enough light and the flash bounced off the glue (probably wheat paste) used to finish the surface.
8 files, last one added on Dec 18, 2006
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Random files - Street Art |
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Last additions - Street Art |
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Dec 18, 2006
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Dec 18, 2006
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Dec 18, 2006
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Dec 18, 2006
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