Living Walls Conference: Debate Continues

In the comments section of the Burnaway article…

There’s this, from MTM:

“My disappointment with the City is not in the lack of public work or ’street art’ but in the lack of discourse about it especially after this very egocentric grand stand of self professed street art is largely over.

I’m not sure if the conference or Pecha Kucha presentations approached any of the important questions about the act of graffiti and it’s place in art history because I didn’t attend. But from a outsiders critical and curatorial perspective, I think the project lacked some grounding and rigor. There were questions that occurred to me over the course of the thing and I wish there was more discourse about it here. Instead all I hear is “what a great party that was!” So if nothing else, yeah, it was a great gathering.

Living Walls Conference, part 2

Part 1 lives here.

Friday afternoon and evening, there were panels and lectures (and one amazing cake!) at Georgia Tech. There was a lot that was awesome and a little that wasn’t about this part of the conference. Awesomeness #1: the lectures were packed, right up till the end of the night (10:30-ish). And yeah, some of the people were Living Walls affiliates, artists and such, but there were also a ton of Georgia Tech students and sundry other locals.

Keep reading at Juxtapoz. For more pics of Living Walls, check out my Picasa page.

Living Walls Street Art Conference

Part 2 to be posted tomorrow…

Swampy, Gaia and Greg Mike’s legal mural

Back from Atlanta, back from three days of street art summer camp aka the Living Walls Conference. Those three days were pretty intense—can’t imagine how it must’ve been for those artists who lived in the common quarters and spent a full ten days painting, pasting and partying.

Jason Kofke working outside of the Eyedrum garage

Ming Donkey and I rolled into town around 9pm Thursday, August 12 and headed to Eyedrum. A gated art compound in a seedy neighborhood, Eyedrum is a warehouse and a crumbling garage with a maze of back sidewalks, which line railroad tracks and wind to privately leased studios. Travel-bleary, we tumbled out of the truck with our dog, Booger, blinking dumbly at the spread before us—the grungiest, rowdiest art squat in the history of Atlanta.

Keep reading at Juxtapoz.

Living Walls Conference Interview, Part 2

Here is the second part of my interview with Blacki Li Rudi Migliozzi and Monica Campana, two Atlanta street artists who almost serendipitously organized the deep-south’s first ever international street art festival, happening August 13-15. Living Walls is a colloquium of culture jammers, flash-lectures, architecture students and profs. It’s a gallery show and film screenings, it’s fifteen walls around the city, including an 11-story downtown wall–it’s essentially street art summer camp, and everything’s free and open to the public! All artists are welcome to participate and if you can’t come, send a poster. Check out Living Walls here and read the first part of this interview here.

(Participating artist Ripo, NYC and Barcelona)

Cheree: Okay, remind me again what month all this started?

Blacki: November.

Monica: It took them a week to award us the grant.

B: They were really impressed, we had a presentation, they thought we were so organized. We were thinking, ‘actually, we were just fucking around.’

M: The second that we got the okay, the next day we met at a bar and wrote down everything that we needed to do. We were really on point since day one, and we haven’t taken a break at all.

Keep reading at Juxtapoz.

Art News Digest

MOCA’s Dennis Hopper retrospective becomes a memorial, Kate Moss’s stolen Banksy, and Rome’s first Modern Art museum were among the week’s headlines. Keep reading at ArtWeLove.