Cool Hunting

I first became an ESPO (aka Steve Powers) fan a few years back when he roller-brushed over graffiti with his own tag during an undercover stint with LA's graffitti removal team. His next-level street art and candyland aesthetic (check out the bakery he staged at Deitch's Armory booth earlier this year) came together perfectly with his Dreamland Artist Club 2004.
This year's version of Powers' project, the Dreamland Artist Club 2005, opens next week and picks up where the last one left off, continuing to spruce up Coney Island with artist-painted signs and murals and adding a few new features. Brazilian twin artists Os Gemeos spent three weeks in May painting a mural (pictured), winners playing select games will take home artist-created prizes, and Powers, sign writer Matt Wright, and a rotating cast of sign-painters will paint commissioned signs at the Dreamland Artist Clubhouse Thursday through Sunday, 1pm-7pm, from opening day until Labor Day. Powers conceived the space as a "nexus for the artists and the community...a combination social club, salon, and functioning sign shop...to de-myth the process of making art." The front room will act as a meeting space and showroom hung with floor-to-ceiling signs, while the rear will be the actual workshop. It all kicks off June 18th with an opening co-hosted by Tokion.
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If you've ever noticed a pair of wood sneakers dangling from power lines, you've likely witnessed the work of New Jersey-born identical twins Ad and Droo, aka Skewville. The fake sneaker installations (they call the project and their website When Dogs Fly) dates back to '99, but for over a decade the New York artists have been leaving sneaker footprints on walls, installing their...
Loosely curated around the mainstreaming of street art, The Everywhere Show, opening this Saturday at Mendenhall Sobieski in Pasadena, includes work by Marcel Dzama, Gary Baseman, Friends With You, and Dalek. While the premise seems to have its arms stretched a little too widely - the website makes the broad claim that the works "find small human truths" and a write-up by critic Peter...
Carol Chung reports on Ghetto Fab: The Photo-Graf Collection Public urban art!!… scaled down for your viewing pleasure. Last Thursday was the opening night of the month long Ghetto Fab: Photo-Graffiti exhibition. As the title implies, it contains photographs of graffiti mural art from the boroughs of New York City. The photographer, Jonathan Singer, is hailed as “The Ansel Adams of Graffiti Photography.” There...
Wangechi Mutu’s new show “Little Touched” at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is so complete and polished that it feels more like walking into a museum than a gallery. Originally from Kenya, Mutu’s work focuses on the constant exploration and discovery of identity as a woman, immigrant and African in New York City. Known for her lyric collages like “A’gave you” (pictured right), this...
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Swoon's first Los Angeles solo exhibition, "Drown Your Boats" opens tomorrow, 16 February 2008 at New Image Art. Partially inspired by Angela Carter's collection of short stories "Burning Your Boats," which reinterprets traditional tales and twists the mundane, you can see the connection as Swoon work combines glimpses of everyday life, legends and variations on mythic themes in her own graceful style. Over the...
