SMiLE, it’s good for you
Boulder’s incognito street artist on a life of rebellion

By Emma Murray -  April 19, 2018

Emma Murray | Boulder Weekly

Ten minutes before I turn onto Pearl Street, my phone vibrates. A message: “I forgot to ask… Will you keep my identity a secret?”

I’m en route to a cafe, meeting the person responsible for the impressionist cats, portraits and landscapes sprinkled around Boulder’s downtown electrical boxes, alleyways and forgotten doors — like the tri-color tabby’s face that stares at me from a brick wall on 17th Street.

“Of course,” I reply. Inside, I order a coffee and scan the crowd. What does an incognito graffiti artist look like? Painted or dirty nails? Long hair, makeup? Grunge or hipster? Another vibration. “Look for a pair of sunglasses resting on the table,” he (which he may or may not be) tells me.

I walk toward the back of the room and spot them: The glossy lenses staring up from a two-top, flanked by an elbow on each side. One hand loosely cups a mug, the other rests flat on the table. The person is leaning forward, shoulders slightly rounded, gazing down as though examining the creamy chai’s layered design.

As I approach, he looks up. “You must be Emma,” he says.

So this is what a graffiti artist looks like. Not what I expected.More babysitter, less hoodlum. “You must be SMiLE,” I whisper as I sit down.

He glances around the room with fugitive eyes, nods, and we begin.

Anti-Trump Mural Sparks ACLU Lawsuit and Public Art Dispute in New Orleans
Shortly after putting up a mural on his private property last year, Neal Morris received a letter from the city demanding its immediate removal and threatening jail time.
Benjamin Sutton for Hyperallergic

<< Cashy-D's anti-Trump mural in New Orleans (photo courtesy and © Neal Morris

Late last year, New Orleans developer Neal Morris commissioned the local artist Cashy-D to paint a mural on his private property. On November 4, the artist completed the piece, which features text from the 2005 Access Hollywood recording, in which President Trump boasts of sexually assaulting women. In the mural, select nouns have been replaced by images, like emojis in a text message.

Ten days later, Morris received a letter from the city’s Department of Safety and Permits faulting him for not following the proper permit process, demanding the mural’s removal, and threatening a “maximum fine or jail time for each and every day the violation continues plus court costs as prescribed by law.” Now, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Louisiana has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Morris against the City of New Orleans, alleging that it has violated his rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

“The ideal outcome is for the City to scrap its burdensome, confusing (and unconstitutional) permitting process for murals,” Bruce Hamilton, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Louisiana who is representing Morris, told Hyperallergic. “We don’t believe the government should get to decide what is art, which art is deserving of expression, and which art the public is allowed to see.”

Thanks for your submissions: Josiah, Esmeralda, Ann, and the SFMOMA
<<< Calen Blake in NoPa/Western Addition

East Bay, CA

Los Angeles (just one)

Nevada City area (just one)

Washington, DC

Wisconsin (just one, thanks Ann)

>NEW< Robert Indiana (thanks SFMOMA)

::: the Latest from San Francisco :::

fnnch

Kate DiCiccio (just one)

Michael Roman (RIP)

Sol (thanks Esmeralda)

the Financial District

Clarion Alley (just one)

The Mission (thanks Josiah)

The Tenderloin

The Western Addition

Valencia St. (thanks Josiah)

Lower Haight (just one)

North Beach (just one)

Thanks to: Amanda, BSA, and HAO (RIP)

<<< Banksy in Brooklyn, NY.

South Africa (just one)
China, by 0907 (just one, thanks BSA)
Mexico (thanks BSA)
Argentina (just one, thanks Amanda)
>NEW< Omid Asadi (UK)
>NEW< yarps (FR)
Hao (RIP)
Banksy (in NYC!)
Portugal (just one, thanks BSA)
Spain (just one, by ancient neanderthals)

H&M Lawsuit Against Street Artist Could Have Changed Copyright Law [UPDATED]
The clothing company claims it has dropped its lawsuit against the artist Revok after widespread outcry and calls for a boycott, though the artist’s lawyer claims that is not true.
Claire VoonMarch 15, 2018
Hyperallergic

Update, 3/15/2018, 4:30pm: According to the Daily Beast, H&M has withdrawn its lawsuit. It shared the following statement:

H&M respects the creativity and uniqueness of artists, no matter the medium. We should have acted differently in our approach to this matter. It was never our intention to set a precedent concerning public art or to influence the debate on the legality of street art.  As a result, we are withdrawing the complaint filed in court. We are currently reaching out directly to the artist in question to come up with a solution.

Update, 3/15/2018, 6:45pm: When reached by email, Revok’s lawyer said he was unaware of H&M’s decision to withdraw the lawsuit. “I don’t know what they are talking about and have not seen them make any public statement,” Gluck told Hyperallergic. “The lawsuit is not dismissed, and the artwork is even still being used on their website.”

We have reached out to H&M’s lawyers for clarification and will update when we hear back.

Update, 3/15/2018, 10:00pm: Revok’s attorney Jeff Gluck told Hyperallergic via email that he has spoken to the counsel for H&M, who told him that “that they are not in fact dismissing the lawsuit.” Hyperallergic has reached out to H&M’s attorneys and to the company’s PR department to confirm this but has received no response. Its statement noting that it is withdrawing the complaint has been shared as a story on its Instagram account.

Update, 3/16/2018, 11:20am: Court records indicate that the case was withdrawn this morning by “Voluntary Dismissal.”

Street artists are calling for a boycott of H&M after the Swedish clothing company took legal action against a graffiti artist to refute his rights over his own work. Across social media, artists including INSA, KAWS, and Lady Aiko are denouncing H&M for what they describe as an “assault on artists’ rights,” and calling for a boycott of the company.

Icy & Sot Interview: Iran's Street Art Siblings on Censorship, Activism & Advocacy
(designboom)
Icy & Sot's Archive

born in tabriz, iran in 1985 and 1991 respectively, street art siblings ICY and SOT began making work under less than hospitable conditions. initially influenced by the graffiti and stencils in skateboarding films and video games, the pair soon began making their own distinctive mark on the walls of their native city. speed and discretion often go hand in hand with creating unauthorised artworks, but this is especially true in tabriz where an unsympathetic and intolerant legal system often hands out charges much more severe than just ‘vandalism’.

at home with the realities of state wide censorship and more than used to their artworks surviving for less than a few hours, political dissent and social protest is a vein that has run through the duo’s work since the beginning. in 2012, ICY and SOT took a solo exhibition of their work in new york as an opportunity to emigrate, leaving iran and relocating to the thriving brooklyn arts scene. since then, the duo’s work has gone from strength to strength, expanding into an ever more diverse number of mediums while retaining its rousing and defiant spirit of resistance through art.

the issues with which ICY and SOT engage are far reaching, and include poverty, homelessness, women’s rights, gun control, and immigration. their most recent show, ‘human (nature)’, presented at thinkspace gallery in culver city, L.A., grapples with the all encompassing effects of climate change on the earth and human kind, and our collective responsibility to fight for the life of our planet. using sculpture, photography, stencil and more, the pair create gripping images rife with narrative that force the viewer to engage with both the inherent beauty and urgent message of the collection.

designboom: can you give us a bit of background as to how you got started? where did the first impulse to start creating work first come from, and how did you go about learning the craft of stencilling? do you remember the first stencil you made?

ICY & SOT: it all started with our career in skateboarding. we used to make small stencils and stickers and put them up around the city. at the time we didn’t know very much about the street art movement, but through internet (flickr) we got to know other international street artists and we became more interested.

we loved the simplicity and quickness of single layer stencils. since it was all illegal in iran we had to be really quick putting a piece up. we learned so many different ways of stencilling by just experiencing. we don’t specifically remember the first stencils, but the very first ones were stencils of punk bands and skateboarding logos, which we decorated our rooms with when were teenagers.

The artists edition of the TXMX 2018 uploads. Music by Hoopla, via the SF Public Library.
<<< Hamburg wheatpaste by Marshal Arts (TXMX photo)

>NEW< DHHG
>NEW< MTS
>NEW< Rude

btoy
F.P.T.
Holzweg (just one)
Liebsein (just one)
Marshal Arts
Mittenimwald
NOOB
robi the dog (just one)
rumo
stenc
tona
usp (just one)

By Deborah Netburn
Feb. 22, 2018
LA Times
<< Photo: A color-enhanced hand stencil from Spain’s Maltravieso cave, likely made by a Neanderthal. Photo courtesy of the University of Southampton.

A red hand stencil. A series of lines that look like a ladder. A collection of red dots.

These images, painted in ocher on the walls of three separate caves in Spain, are the oldest-known examples of cave art ever found. And new research suggests that all three were created not by humans, but by our ancient cousins the Neanderthals.

In a paper published Thursday in Science, an international team of archaeologists shows that each of the three paintings was executed at least 64,000 years ago — more than 20,000 years before the first modern humans arrived in Europe.

“This work confirms that Neanderthals were indeed using cave walls for depicting drawings that had meaning for them,” said Marie Soressi, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who was not involved in the study. “It also means that our own group, the one we call anatomically modern humans, is maybe not so special.”

For most of the last century, researchers have argued that our Neanderthal cousins were intellectually inferior to their modern human contemporaries — incapable of symbolic thought and possibly devoid of language. This, in turn, was used to explain why the Neanderthals disappeared from Eurasia about 40,000 years ago, not long after modern humans arrived there.

However, archaeological evidence revealed over the last two decades tells a different story. We now know that Neanderthals were sophisticated hunters who knew how to control fire, and that they adorned themselves with jewelry and took care to bury their dead.

Decrying Real Estate Developer’s ‘Insolence,’ Judge Awards Street Artists $6.7 Million in Landmark 5Pointz Case

The ruling is a decisive victory for street artists.

Eileen Kinsella, February 12, 2018 (Artnet)

In a dramatic conclusion to a landmark case, a judge has ruled that a New York developer must pay $6.7 million to a group of graffiti artists to compensate for painting over their work without warning in 2013. The decision represents a decisive victory for street artists in a case that pitted their rights against those of a real estate executive.

The artists sued the developer, Gerald Wolkoff, for violating their rights after he whitewashed their work at the famous 5Pointz art mecca in Long Island City to make way for condos. A jury ruled in favor of the artists in November, but it remained up to a judge to determine the extent of the damages.

In a 100-page decision handed down today, Judge Frederic Block awarded $150,000 for each of the 45 works for a total award of $6.75 million.

“5Pointz was its temple, though it can never be replaced, this judgement is a monumental step for our culture and our art form,” Jonathan Cohen (also known as Meres One), the former director of 5Pointz, said in an email to artnet News. “Judge Block’s decision will change the art form perception for generations to come.”

Judge Block had harsh words for Wolkoff and the 2013 whitewashing episode in particular. He wrote: “If not for Wolkoff’s insolence, these damages would not have been assessed. If he did not destroy 5Pointz until he received his permits and demolished it 10 months later, the Court would not have found that he had acted willfully.”