MURALS
Cecilia Collantes & @outersource
Cecilia Collantes is a multidisciplinary artist, originating from Peru and based in New York City. She creates her artistic universe by combining found objects, performance and powdered pigment on fixed paper and canvas. Much of her work focuses on the concepts of time, transformation, and ritual expression linked to her heritage.
This mural, inspired by 3000-year-old pre-Incan supernatural shamanic characters, was executed in collaboration with graffiti artist @outersource. It depicts ancient wind guardians (Paracas) colliding in cosmic space in a melange of void and colorful riot. 2018.
Ayakamay
Born in Tennessee and raised in Japan, Ayakamay presents her hybrid cultural identity in appropriating traditional Japanese cultural aesthetics with contemporary American urbanity and femininity. Presented through the whimsical lens of her personal experience as a Japanese-American woman, her multifaceted work often combines videography, photography, and live performance with fantastical elements, frequently bending gender and sexual identity. 2018.
Douglas Landau & Julie Hair
A construction of "fate, randomness, chaos and contradiction," EYE GEVAULT is an enrapturing collage mural by Douglas Landau, with assistance from downtown music revolutionary Julie Hair. Simultaneously a fixture of the East Village and a citizen of the world, Landau has delved in film, nightlife, and visual arts, and is well known as the founder of King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, an East Village art bar that was recreated as at the Whitney Museum.
Inspired by color, texture, concept, and shape, Landau works primarily in decoupage. He randomizes his materials by mixing images in a box and selecting pieces at random, finding that "synchronicity comes from the chaos." 2018.
David Humphrey
David Humphrey is a New York artist who has shown nationally and internationally. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize among other awards. An anthology of his art writing, Blind Handshake, was published by Periscope Publishing in 2010. He teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University and is represented by the Fredericks & Freiser Gallery.
Humphrey's piece, THE LAST MURAL, presents an Arcadian social allegory in which plants, animals and humans establish a skewed harmonic adjacency. 2017.
Samuel Jablon
OUTDEMONSOUT, a mural by artist and poet Samuel Jablon, pushes language towards the brink of the unintelligible. The artist removes words and phrases from the lofty realm of the poetic and reshapes them as objects that can be grasped. The title of the mural is adapted from lyrics of the legendary East Village band, The Fugs. Their song, “Exorcising the White House” ends with the chant “Out, Demons, Out”. As we face a presidential administration utterly lacking in humanity, Jablon's work calls to take them down and throw them out. 2017.
Jen Hitchings
Ctrl+alt+reality, Jen Hitchings' first mural, demonstrates the notions of escapism and suburban recreation in a playful yet drab manner, contrasting with the dense urban surroundings of the studio. Consisting of vibrant greens and pinks, it provides a whimsical sense of space and respite.
Hitchings' work investigates the significance of communication, camaraderie, perception, and memory, utilizing imagery of social interactions and celebrations such as birthday parties, camping scenes, picnics, family vacations, drug-induced raves, and art openings as source material. Her work seeks to study psychological states, the significance of group gatherings, and the human relationship with nature within the context of suburban American culture. 2017.
Chuck Webster
Chuck Webster’s practice is a marriage of disparate traits: he paints whimsical forms that are the result of months of careful deliberation, and recreates recurring forms without loyalty to a single style. Webster says that he is drawn to “the just-off symmetry of things,” and this serves as a fitting description of his subjects. His works, which are often composed on panel or found paper, feature geometric and biomorphic forms, and have been described by critics as cartoon-like. Though abstract, Webster’s subjects often have real-world counterparts, like his childhood town or the act of whale watching. One critic described Webster’s images as “always realized without tape or rulers, giving his work personality, humor, and warmth.” 2016.
Drea Cofield
Drea Cofield conceived this mural to address notions of intimacy, particularly by scaling up works initially conceived as expressive yet confidential experiences. With this piece her intention is to shift towards a more composed, graphic, and physically immersive encounter for the viewer. “Rise and Grind” is both a private confrontation and a larger visceral exploration for passersby.
"Bacchanalian, violent, and altogether human," Cofield’s work involves figures interacting – or pointedly not interacting – in otherworldly landscapes. Bodies are sleeping or dead, facial expressions and gestures are enacted incongruously with violence and spectacle. Cofield explores the challenging language of allegory to see, experience and feel. 2016.
Ori Carino
Born and raised in the Lower East Side, Ori Carino has been a demonstrated muralist and graffiti artist since age 12, with exhibitions in New York, Europe and Asia. His decade of murals at Mars Bar is an integral part of the hyper-local history surrounding Ideal Glass’s block.
For this mural, Carino painted a cast of characters representing spiritual protectors or talisman defenders of the LES. The artist depicts these spiritual patrons as guardian of the neighborhoods’ culture: its people, its art, its history. One of the figures is the Japanese character Anpanman, whose head is made of bread. He offers a piece of himself for the benefit of others, allowing hungry children to eat his head. 2016.
David Paul Kay
David Paul Kay developed his first figurative mural, EAST SIDE ORGY, as an ode to the public intimacy and invisible boundaries of New York City. With dancing figures reminiscent of Henry Matisse, he employs his signature black-and-white style to capture the kinetic energy of our neighborhood.
"Curiosity is where my work is born," Kay explains, "I ask questions and I try to answer them while I create. Anything is a medium and anywhere is a gallery. " 2016.
James Rubio
Based out of Bushwick, Brooklyn, James Rubio is a painter, photographer and street artist. After joining the Antagonist Art Movement in 2006, he began regularly exhibiting paintings at the East Village's Niagara Bar. Alongside fellow Antagonist Chris Yearington, he has painted murals internationally, including in New York, Austin, Texas, Chihuahua, Mexico, and Quito, Ecuador. Rubio's current focus is on his Black Flowers series, a solo work exploring notions of love and mortality. 2015.
AYAKAMAY
This fantastical mural depicts one of Ayakamay's performance characters: Mimikaki. As a New Age Geisha, she brings ancestral Japanese tradition to the streets by approaching strangers around the world and offering to heal them by cleaning their ears. 2015.
Sophia Dawson
Sophia Dawson’s Every Mother’s Son depicts portraits of mothers who have lost their children to police brutality are presented.
Dawson aspires her art to be "a tool to bring people of different ethnicity, social status, beliefs and backgrounds together, to educate them and to develop a dialogue between them and the characters I depict." Through portraiture, she illuminates the significance of these figures and the relevance of their struggle.
"They have been intentionally excluded from mainstream American History and their stories must not be forgotten… I always start working from black, as a conscious artistic exercise but also as a statement: it represents my opposition to the art education I received in institutions where I was taught that art had to begin on a ‘pure and white’ surface,” she explains.
Assistant artists for this piece included Shianti Bratcher, Rashawn Love, Micaela Anava, Sarah Fowler, Javier Gaston, Camilo Greenberg, Michele McPaun, Sepa Heimuli. 2014.
Choco Moo
Originating from the city of Kyoto, Choco Moo is a Japanese street illustrator and artist with a distinctive monochromatic aesthetic. The story of her nom de plume involves Spike Lee, a chocolate drink, and a trip to New York. A rarity in the Japanese entertainment industry, the young artist remains committed to her underground roots, influenced by punk culture as well as the traditional art of calligraphy. 2014.
Paul Indrek Kostabi
Paul Kostabi's work is "fraught with careless care." A figure of the Lower East Side for more than 30 years, the interdisciplinary artist pays homage to the gritty, vibrant life of Downtown New York City in his mural entitled A MURDER OF CROWS. Others may see darkness for grittiness; Kostabi sees a dark cloud of crows waiting to feast on the intangible feeling of community, leaving only inert property speculation in its wake or as beseeched in the ironic caption, a "Newer York." 2014.
Levan Mindiashvili
Presented by Fourth Arts Block, in partnership with Ideal Glass, Mindiashvili's GHOST is part of FABLES, a series of public works exploring the history of the Lower East Side. With this mural, Levan Mindiashvili strives to raise awareness for the importance of historical heritage, outlining the overwhelming expansion of gentrification and its effects on architecture and sense of place in the contemporary world.
The work is based on an original photograph, 1936 East Houston Street – N.E. Corner – Second Avenue by Percy Loomis Sperr © Milstein Division, The New York Public Library. Mindiashvili wants to express special thanks to Patricio Gonzalez Vivo for his contribution with technical support. 2014.
Peelander
Yellow
Peelander Yellow's place in New York City history was perhaps cemented in 1998, when he formed the unscrupulously animated music group Peelander-Z, "the Japanese Action Comic Punk band hailing from the Z area of Planet Peelander." A prolific painter and muralist, his works have adorned walls, galleries and even street trucks in Osaka, Japan, Oaxaca, Mexico, New York, New York, and Austin, Texas. 2014.
Sheryo
& The Yok
Based in Brooklyn but "will travel for cold beers, good surf and good times," Sheryo and The Yok are an internationally renowned street artist duo with works throughout Australia, Asia, and the United States. The stylistic influences of skateboarding, surf culture, and pulp illustrations manifest in the retro, hypnagogic nature of their pieces, populated with kitsch, quirky characters captured in exquisitely sketched lines. 2013.
Contemporary Adult Music
Contemporary Adult Music is the collaboration of New York artists Chris Yerington and James Rubio. Both artists are members of New York’s Antagonist Art Movement. Their work can be seen in Berlin, Lisbon, Chihuahua, Mexico City and New York.
This mural serves as part of LILY AND RITA, a series paying homage to recluse artist and author Henry Darger, whose posthumously published ‘In the Realms of the Unreal’ is, at 15,145 pages, among the longest manuscripts in literary history. In this piece, adopting metaphor from Darger’s work, Contemporary Adult Music depicts girls in vibrantly colorful vintage dress patterns equipped with rainbows to symbolize blood and weaponry. 2013.
LNY
LNY describes GOLDEN HOUR as depicting "a beached whale found dead in NYC after Sandy, the battle between nature and human technology and the economic factors that facilitate this situation... this struggle for survival between the whale/oil transit ship and the two headed heron snake that represents nature turning to technology by literally changing its body from one end to the other… I also decided on the title after the medical term meaning the period of time after traumatic injury during which treatment is most likely to prevent death.” 2013.
JANUSZ GILEWICZ
Janusz Gilewicz is a painter whose work has carried him around the world, with numerous solo and group exhibitions in Poland, Italy, Japan, Brazil and the United States. Inspired by Renaissance artists such as DaVinci and Botticelli, he expatriated from his native Poland to Italy, where his work painting sidewalks as a madonnari connected him to an expansive community of artists and producers. Since then, he has melded both Eastern and Western styles of painting to create a 4-dimensional method he dubs 'Sculpted Painting Moving in Time.'
His mural, All things and events in the multiverse are interconnected through Magical Experience, cultivates his aspirations to utilize art in sharing the mystery, beauty and harmony of life. He cites art as "the mirror reflecting the artist, beyond boundaries of beliefs, race, politics and language." 2013.
FELIX MORELO
Born in New York City, Felix Morelo is a Colombian-American painter and performance artist. Based in Brooklyn, he has rightfully earned the casual moniker of ‘The Face Guy,’ having adorned the sidewalks of New York City with over 15,000 chalk faces since 2009. His mural, MAD SUPPER, demonstrates his bold, liberated style, presenting a simultaneously inviting yet haunting aesthetic with a diversity of expressions across his signature chalk faces. 2012.
FAITH 47
Curated by Keith Schweitzer in collaboration with Fourth Arts Block, THE WEIGHT OF AIR is a mural by visual street artist Faith47. Born in South Africa and currently based in Los Angeles, Faith47 fosters an exploratory approach to art, delving into a wide array of media including found & rescued objects, shrine construction, painting, projection mapping, video installation, printmaking and drawings. Drawing inspiration from her international experiences, she strives to disarm the strategies of global realpolitik and reclaim forgotten space through art. 2012.
KNOW HOPE
Over the past decade, Addam Yekutieli (pseudonym Know Hope) has developed a visual iconography and language used to mirror real-life situations and observations, and document the notion of a collective human struggle.
By creating parallels between political situations and emotional conditions, there is an attempt to perceive the political process and dialogue as an emotional mechanism, therefore making it a process that can be understood and participated in intuitively and not solely intellectually.
Yekutieli has worked and exhibited internationally and has projects and exhibitions scheduled in Cologne, London and Tel Aviv throughout 2016 and 2017.
SEBASTIAN WAHL
Sebastian Wahl has made it his mission in life to take collage to new and uncharted territories.
Wahl’s work encompasses everything from psychedelic landscapes to iconic, mandalic and spiritual surrealism. His attention to detail and sense of symmetry, balance and color bring all the elements included in his pieces together to create countless harmonious mirages.
Wahl fell in love with collage in 1995 and has since been fully committed to the medium. In 2006 he started using resin in his work. He was looking for a challenge and for a way to elevate his process and he found it. Wahl spent the next couple of years perfecting this dynamic approach to his craft and in 2009 he had his first solo exhibition in New York City with these three-dimensional collages.
Mr. BRAINWASH
Mr. Brainwash (often written MBW) is a name used by French-born, Los Angeles-based street artistThierry Guetta. According to the 2010 Banksy-directed film Exit Through the Gift Shop, Guetta was a proprietor of a used clothing store, where he began as a security guard, and amateur videographer who was first introduced to street art by his cousin, the street artist Invader, and who filmed street artists through the 2000s and became an artist in his own right in a matter of weeks after an off-hand suggestion from Banksy.