Results tagged “graffiti”

Two graffiti taggers who have been leaving their mark all over Brooklyn Heights have been caught by the coppers. The Brooklyn Paper reports that “Rex” and “Guder” have been hitting the area for months, with one local saying it "makes you feel like your neighborhood hasn’t been maintained, like back in the 1970s.” Fear not graf-phobes, earlier this week "Officer Freddy Ahmetaj of the 84th Precinct collared the painters outside a building on Henry Street at Clark Street."

This seems like one of those instances when it's best to keep your mouth shut. Brooklyn sculptor Diego Medina's "14-foot-tall tagger's dream" has remained graffiti-free in front of the Bronx River Arts Center since the unpainted plywood sculpture was installed in July — a fact so astounding to the Daily News that the tabloid decided to jinx celebrate the artwork by dedicating an entire article to the shocking lack of tagging.

The Cooper Square Hotel is draping itself in glamorously gritty graffiti. They've commissioned artists Joyce Pensato, Nick 1, Vizie and Shinique to deck the walls of an adjacent building it recently bought, according to the NY Post. Vizie told the paper, "The only real unifying theme is the colors, black and white," but his section is "a tribute to a friend who died over the summer."

       

You may have noticed teams of people in orange vests whitewashing advertising billboards in Manhattan and Brooklyn today. They weren't employees of NPA, the company that maintains the billboards. In fact, they were part of a subversive network convened by the Public Art Campaign to take back hundreds of advertising locations that NPA has placed around the city.

As the first section of the High Line park was poised to open last April, the mayor's office began painting over the graffiti next to the elevated tracks. And workers are still busy trying to make sure every last vestige of urban character and uniqueness is removed from sight! Last year the city identified about 20 buildings along the entire High Line as candidates for graffiti removal, and 18 owners are permitting the city to scrub them clean. Last year, Gothamist's resident graffiti expert Jake Dobkin vowed war if the city buffed the Revs/Cost mural at 23rd Street (seen here). So is Dobkin headed to the barricades with other street art aficionados?

The Sunnyside blog posts about smidgen of paint spotted on a neighborhood tree (can you see it?). They report back enraged from the scene of the crime: "Graffiti bandits have sprayed a tree on 44th Street in the Gardens with purple paint. The oak tree is not in any danger, but it shows that some of these vandals will not stop at anything." What's next... banana peels on the sidewalks?! These heathens will stop at nothing! Seriously though, it sort of just looks like an accident.

Graffiti gal and Queens resident Danielle Bremner, recently busted for putting up her UTAH tag around most of the world, is heading back to jail after finishing her time at Riker's Island. She was sentenced this morning in Boston, and will also have to "complete five years of probation, undergo a mental health evaluation and make restitution payments." During her probation period she will be supervised by New York authorities. Oh, and she's been banished from Boston!

Take a gander at this new Specter piece that went up on Park Avenue in Bed-Stuy yesterday. Specter tells us that "its basically about the under appreciated workforce that runs the city anyone from some guy collecting bottles and cans to someone who works in a warehouse moving boxes. This series and my latest piece also touch on the idea of disappearing industrial spaces when you see the piece it will drive the concept home."

How did Brooklyn Heights ring in the Jewish New Year? With swastikas painted inside the First Unitarian Universalist Church on Monroe Street. Sigh. Police said there were also “very inappropriate statements," but did not get more specific. [BHB]

      

Eric Felisbret may be better known to some people as DEAL CIA, his tag from his graffiti writing days. For the past ten years, he's been running the old school graffiti site at 149St and now, after thirty years of documenting New York City's graffiti scene, he's put together Graffiti New York, which features over 1,000 images. We spoke to Felisbret about his start in graffiti writing, the recent street art movement, and whether graffiti is art.

In honor of Fashion Week, KnittaPlease installed some of their crafty graffiti outside of the Standard Hotel. The knit pieces will remain there until the 17th, but when we first heard about this project we were sort of hoping Magda Sayeg would be knitting coverups for the hotel's naked guests. Perhaps the Standard should make good with the Bears and adorn the entrance with leather and whips for their upcoming (and possibly canceled) street fair.

Earlier this year Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara was busted for doodling on the wall of an East Village subway station. Well, as of yesterday, the charges against the multimillionaire have been dropped. The NY Post explains that he "was given an adjournment in contemplation after being charged with making graffiti and criminal mischief and spending the night in jail. That meant if he kept his nose clean for six months, the charges would be dropped." His lawyer says the case is officially over (and "he can get back to wowing the art world with his great art"), but the paper points out the MTA missed out on some easy money by wiping away the doodle that could have easily been sold for $10,000 (the bar Niagara was smarter). Perhaps Nara should donate a sketch to them for letting him off the hook.

           

Four months after the stairway collapse at 5 Pointz, artists in the Jackson Avenue Studios are in the final stages of vacating. Owners closed the building in July after they were told by the Department of Buildings that a new certificate of occupancy would have to be issued. In a letter to his tenants, Jerry Wolkoff said, "by reason of the requirements of the New York City building code it is both physically and financially impossible for us to obtain a new certificate of occupancy for these buildings."

       

There's a new outdoor exhibition sitting pretty atop the Gawker HQ rooftop called MOM & POPism that you can go check out today. (In fact, it's only open today through 4 p.m., but if you miss out on this public viewing you can make an appointment throughout the month.) We headed to 210 Elizabeth Street yesterday to see the installation for ourselves; it's like a colorful old New York up there! The show was curated by Billi Kid and reinterprets James and Karla Murray's latest book, Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York ("a breathtaking visual guide to New York City’s cultural heritage, with special emphasis on the historic streets and ethnic shops that have defined its many neighborhoods").

The graffiti mecca of Queens is getting... buffed! liQcity has images of 5Pointz in LIC getting a fresh coat of yellow paint. The site says they are "merely getting a free canvas reset, as the owners of the building were required to repaint as part of the necessary renovations after the recent stairwell collapse." It was recently divulged that the artist studios housed inside will be vacated, following the stairway collapse earlier this year that injured one renter. But "5pointz will still exist on the exterior walls" and new pieces go up every night as artists try "to keep up with the yellow paint machines." An image of the very yellow front of the building is after the jump.

On June 17th the legendary graffiti artist Iz the Wiz died, but just five days prior to that he was back in the Bronx tagging up a mock subway car. The work is at the Tuff City graffiti and tattoo studio and was meant to be endlessly repainted over by different artists, but it will now remain as Iz, if you will. Back in the day he would tag his name in bubble-letters all down a train, and he said: “You would have these pieces running like this 10 cars straight. When that hit the train station, bam! Impact. No doubt about it.” Tuff City employees aren't sure how they'll preserve Iz's last piece just yet, but they told CityRoom they are considering "donating them to a museum, making them part of a traveling exhibit or disassemble them for galleries." Check out some images from Iz's show, and from his memorial at Tuff City, here.

The war on graffiti continues, and The Man is winning. According to the Daily News, police and Transit surveillance teams have cut in half the number of subway graffiti "attacks." Just last year graffiti was on the rise, and that's when the NYC Transit folks launched The Eagle Team (really), who have allegedly seen a 46% drop so far this year, with just 53 graffiti raids. Reportedly the team focuses on the railyards while NYPD squads keep their eyes peeled on tracks between stations. NYC Transit VP Vincent DeMarino declared, "The word is getting out. It's not so easy in New York anymore. You have a good chance of getting caught." Especially now that they've increased manpower; clearly the best way to utilize money and the NYPD labor pool. An interesting addendum: that subway window ad idea used to deter scratchiti was actually deemed unsafe, since officers couldn't see into cars from the platform.

Anyone have a spare block of extra firm tofu, a nail file, and a soft spot for graffiti gal UTAH? She's currently doing time on Riker's Island, and allegedly she can't get her hands on any vegan grub. Animal reports that after a friend visited her there, he reported back via Twitter, saying: “She said it’s not so bad, like a ghetto sleepaway camp. Suave shamps. She is starving b/c she is vegan. No tempeh on the island apparently.” The Department of Corrections directs inmates with special dietary needs to a nutritionist, who can issue an ID card for vegan meal procurement. Of course, it's actually easier to send a lawsuit-threatening letter than to go through this process successfully. And that is exactly what UTAH had to do in order to get soy milk and peanut butter.

Following the strange graffiti mystery from this past weekend, where Miss Heather spotted some hard-to-translate tags in Greenpoint, the NY Post steps in with some Rosetta Stone-esque knowledge. Some interpreted the writing as Elvish, and others as neo-Nazi, but the paper says it seems to be written in an obscure alphabet by someone interested in occult ideas that were known to inspire some of Adolf Hitler's followers. The alphabet is believed to be based on pre-Roman runes that some associate with magical powers, and this is sort of all starting to sound like a Dan Brown novel. One tag reads: "The Secret of the Runes," also the name of an occult book by Guido von List, while others are phrases from Lists' other works. By the by, List wanted Austrians and Germans to replace their religious beliefs with that of paganism! A spokesman for the Anti-Defamation League told the paper that the tags were not likely left by any neo-Nazis (though apparently some do reside in the area), because the references to the writer would have been over their head.

A New York Shitty reader sent photographs of some spray painted words/symbols on Greenpoint storefronts to Miss Heather, writing, "i think we’re about to be thrust in the middle of some kind of ancient battle of monsters and magic folk… or just an itchy case of dork-rash. some uh- person- is tagging in what looks like elvish. i found the first set on leonard and norman and the second on eckford and nassau. i would have translated these myself with the power of the internet but im a 31 year old man."

With the opening of the first section of the High Line park oh so achingly close (June, the say!), there's been an increasing flurry of activity up on the section between Gansevoort Street and 20th Street. We last checked in on the progress in December, and today comes word that workers have been "cleaning" the High Line of graffiti, or "destroying" long-lived street art, depending on your point of view.

Graffiti haters rejoice: justice has been served. The Daily News reports that the tag happy globetrotter Danielle Bremner (aka Utah) will be doing some time behind bars for charges she faced in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. The damages in those boroughs caused by her tags is estimated to be around $35,000 (of a $100,000 bill of damages she's racked up worldwide), and she will be paying back just $10,000 of that as part of a plea deal. Her boyfriend and partner in crime, Jim Clay Harper, still has charges pending against him. And perhaps one day, upon their release, they'll have a nice, civilized chat in a book store with the vandal squad.

Following the fall that Nicole Gagne took when the outdoor staircase at 5Pointz collapsed over the weekend, the graffiti artists who are responsible for painting the murals covering the Long Island City building have added a new one in tribute to her.

Yesterday afternoon around 5:15 p.m., a woman was walking down an external stairway at the artists' warehouse workspace Five Pointz when the stairway collapsed, trapping her under the rubble.

Looks like Ellis Gallagher, aka Ellis G, has made a giant leap from the fairly safe medium of chalk art, to the highly dangerous looking medium of fire art! Nylon Mag received a photo of the flammable tagging in progress, and their tipster noted that it's "a new obsession" of the artist's. Allegedly "the idea is to paint a tag and light it quickly before it dries," and we'd imagine a goal is to not set oneself or one's surroundings on fire. And people, let's keep a close eye on Natalie Shea, this chalk art thing could be a gateway to arson.

New Yorker Danielle Bremner (aka Utah, Dani, Erin) has been called one half of the tag-happy, globetrotting Bonnie & Clyde, and following her arrest last year she's been on a less glamorous tour of regional courtrooms. Earlier this week she was charged in Queens—all in all the daughter of a retired police officer faces charges in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Boston and France. But does this look like the face of an international criminal?

Last summer the Bonnie and Clyde of the graffiti world, Danielle Bremner (tags: Utah, Dani, Erin) and her boyfriend Jim Clay Harper (tag: Ether) were both taken down by the man after causing $100,000 in damages to city transit facilities. The Daily News now reports that the 27-year-old FIT student and Queens resident, Bremner, turned herself in Wednesday. Following a tagging trip abroad with her boyfriend last summer, the police found 450 cans of spray paint and, amongst other things, a photograph of her tagging a train. She faces up to 7 years behind bars if convicted of her "criminal mischief, making graffiti and possessing graffiti tools" charges. And that's just for tagging trains in Queens, she faces similar charges in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Boston and France. DA Richard Brown released a statement saying, "According to the charges, the defendant is reportedly well known in the international graffiti community—and to New Yorkers who have had to put up with her ego-driven vandalism of public property, which has cost taxpayers thousands of dollars to clean up."

Last night the former Vandal Squad cops met up at powerHouse Arena to face off with some of the former graffiti artists they busted back in the day. Did sparks and spraypaint cans fly? Not really. One attendee reports back, "As would be expected the cops stuck to their script (literally in the case of the author who clearly had the questions in advance and read his answers each time). According to the cops there, there have never been any incidents of police brutality against the graf artists, ever." Hmm, well that sounds...inaccurate.

This Thursday powerHouse Arena in DUMBO will play host to an event that is bringing together some former graffiti artists with the NYPD officers who busted them back in the day. In one corner, Joseph Rivera, author of Vandal Squad: Inside the New York City Transit Police Department, 1984-2004, which documents his time with the NYPD Vandal Squad. In the other corner, street artists who have a bone to pick with the former cop for "using their names and art to put money in his bank account."

An inebriated 49-year-old artist was recently busted for drawing a smiley face at an L train stop. Well that certainly isn't the way you want to go down the night before your big gallery opening! The NY Post reports that the Japanese pop artist Yoshitomo Nara was caught red handed at 3:30 a.m. on Feb. 27th, putting Sharpie to brick (which has since been cleaned, but some say would have been worth around $10K).