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A visual account of the birth of graffiti and street art, showcasing as-yet-unseen works collected by preeminent artist Martin Wong. Referred to by the New York Times as an artist "whose meticulous visionary realism is among the lasting legacies of New York’s East Village art scene of the 1980s," Martin Wong (1946–1999) was firmly entrenched in the NYC street art world of the late ’70s and ’80s. City as Canvas chronicles the most important chapter in the street art movement and the artists involved. Showcasing Wong’s enormous graffiti art collection, the book contains artwork, photographs, black books, letters, postcards, posters, and flyers made by Wong and his artist friends. The book contains previously unpublished art by famous street artists such as Futura 2000, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Christopher "Daze" Ellis, LA II, Lady Pink, and Keith Haring, to name only a few. City as Canvas traces the origins of urban self-expression and the era of "outlaw" street art in New York, which primed the floodgates for graffiti art to spread worldwide. Exhibition Schedule: Museum of the City of New York: Opens October 2013
"Magic City is always changing; the entire city has become an artists' studio, an urban museum of the imagination. More than 40 of the world's best street artists specially painted, sprayed, scratched, glued, or even crocheted for this tailor-made city of dreams. With every stopover, new works will appear as others disappear, just as in the streets of any city. In each host city, the organizers support new collaborations, guest artists, and happenings. Magic City: the Art of the Street documents the beginning of this exceptional touring exhibition."--Page [4] of cover.
Contemporary trompe l'oeil artist Richard Haas transforms the drab exteriors of neglected buildings into breath-taking facades. The City Is My Canvas documents his most important projects of the last two decades in lavish double-page spreads which illustrate the "before" and "after" phases of each site. From Italian Quadrata paintings to Baroque and Rococo interiors, trompe l'oeil murals have a long tradition as decoration and didactic illustration. Muralist Richard Haas brings this tradition into the 21st-century as he revitalizes forgotten buildings in eroding city centers by creating new "false" facades that seamlessly blend into the existing environment. "The world is constantly changing, and the needs of the city change with it", says Haas. "Even if blank urban walls at key locations of the city are now primarily seen as opportunities for computer-generated advertisements, whole segments of the mid-range urban American landscape and large areas of our edge cities remain in drastic need of refinement, softening, and improvement".
Urban art - the decoration of public spaces - combines street art and graffiti and is an international creative practice. Many urban artists address issues such as human rights, the environment and lifestyle choices by challenging and confronting established thinking. Some artists feature heroes or icons in their work, others use illusions to lure the viewer into examining the art and trying to figure out what is real and what is not. Others still pay homage to less wellknown people who have worked for the good of humanity. Along with the urban landscape, this art form is evolving all the time, reflecting the zeitgeist, asking questions, and grabbing the attention of the passing city dweller.
At an unprecedented and probably unique American moment, laboring people were indivisible from the art of the 1930s. By far the most recognizable New Deal art employed an endless frieze of white or racially ambiguous machine proletarians, from solo drillers to identical assembly line toilers. Even today such paintings, particularly those with work themes, are almost instantly recognizable. Happening on a Depression-era picture, one can see from a distance the often simplified figures, the intense or bold colors, the frozen motion or flattened perspective, and the uniformity of laboring bodies within an often naive realism or naturalism of treatment. In a kind of Social Realist dance, the FAP’s imagined drillers, haulers, construction workers, welders, miners, and steel mill workers make up a rugged industrial army. In an unusual synthesis of art and working-class history, Labor’s Canvas argues that however simplified this golden age of American worker art appears from a post-modern perspective, The New Deal’s Federal Art Project (FAP), under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), revealed important tensions. Artists saw themselves as cultural workers who had much in common with the blue-collar workforce. Yet they struggled to reconcile social protest and aesthetic distance. Their canvases, prints, and drawings registered attitudes toward laborers as bodies without minds often shared by the wider culture. In choosing a visual language to reconnect workers to the larger society, they tried to tell the worker from the work with varying success. Drawing on a wealth of social documents and visual narratives, Labor’s Canvas engages in a bold revisionism. Hapke examines how FAP iconography both chronicles and reframes working-class history. She demonstrates how the New Deal’s artistically rendered workforce history reveals the cultural contradictions about laboring people evident even in the depths of the Great Depression, not the least in the imaginations of the FAP artists themselves.
(Book). For more than 30 years, Grit Laskin has been building guitars, and his striking inlay work places his instruments in a class all their own. He is credited with single-handedly taking the ages-old tradition of musical instrument inlay from its purely decorative roots into an art form, a means of expression. In his hands, shell, stone, legal ivory and metal emerge as the palette of a re-invented medium. A sumptuous, full-color-throughout, coffee-table quality tome, this is the first book to document the breadth of his work and the techniques he has devised. Grit Laskin is the first and only musical instrument maker to receive Canada's prestigious Saidye Bronfman Award for Excellence. The Museum of Civilization, Canada's equivalent to the Smithsonian, has four Laskin guitars in its permanent collection. Includes an essay on the history of inlay by Chuck Erickson. Photography by Brian Pickell. "(Grit's) work is more than adornment it's mind-blowingly interesting." Bob Taylor, Taylor Guitars
It will be essential reading for anyone interested in arts and culture in the city.