A Movement Defaced: Queer Street Art Fights for Legitimacy
By Jonathan Curiel
published: June 15, 2011
Jonathan Curiel on A Movement Defaced: Queer Street Art Fights for Legitmacy

Cover photo by Michael Cuffe/Warholian.

Inside his art studio in San Francisco's Bayview District, Jeremy Novy surrounds himself with the stencilwork that has burnished his reputation as a street artist of note. Of course, the koi are there. Even people who don't know his name know his aquatic vertebrates — colorful creatures that can be found on sidewalks across San Francisco, most prominently at Market and Laguna streets, where scores of the fish swirl outside the Orbit Room. In Novy's studio, though, the animals are crowded out by representations of people. Men, mostly. Queer men like the drag queen with the yellow beehive and bright red panties, and the young wrestlers grabbing each other's flesh. Then there's the stencil of a big pink erect phallus.

"That's my cock," Novy says matter-of-factly.

Mural artist Joel Richardson was paid $2,000 by the city to do a mural on a city-owned wall on Dupont just west of Lansdowne. On Tuesday, somebody -- apparently the city -- painted over it, likely as part of Rob Ford's graffiti eradication campaign.

SUBMITTED PHOTO

Artist Joel Richardson says the city has painted over a popular Dupont St. mural that it paid him $2,000 to create, an apparent misfire in Mayor Rob Ford’s war on graffiti.

Hong Kong Graffiti Challenges Chinese Artist's Arrest

by Louisa Lim

May 4, 2011 (from NPR)

Tangerine

Hong Kong police are investigating criminal damage charges against artist Tangerine for graffiti of detained Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, which could carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in jail.

This graffiti, appearing all over Hong Kong, has become a political statement, more than a month after the world-famous artist was detained by the authorities at Beijing airport. The campaign could yet lead to a jail term for the young graffiti artist responsible. And that fact has led to fears about the erosion of Hong Kong's distinct freedoms, which are a legacy of its colonial past under the British.

"Art in the Streets" Brings Fire to MOCA

The show is an audacious multi-platform and colorful endeavor; part history lesson and part theme park bringing about 50 years of graffiti and street art history, it's influences and influencers, under one roof. Then there is the stuff outside. Engaging and educational, "Art in the Streets" makes sure visitors have the opportunity to learn how certain tributaries lead to this one river of swirling urban goo, mapping connections between cultural movements, communities and relationships
within it. When it does this, the museum system effectively differentiates its value apart from a mere gallery show.

If You Take Street Art Off the Street, Is It Still Art?

Fans Cut Mural Linked to Banksy From Wall; One Man's Rescue, Another's Heist

By MATTHEW DOLAN

 WSJ link

DETROIT—Secured inside a wooden crate and locked in a warehouse is a painting that could cement this city's reputation as a showcase for avant-garde art. Or as a wasteland waiting to be picked apart.

It's a stenciled image on a 7-foot-by-7-foot slab of cinder-block wall, showing a small boy holding a can and paintbrush.

Next to the boy are the words: "I remember when all this was trees."

The painting came from the grounds of the old Packard auto plant, one of the city's infamous industrial ruins. And it is believed to be the work of the mysterious street artist Banksy, whose graffiti-like renderings adorn the lanes of London and the walls of the West Bank. His ironic urban images, or "tags," have produced world-wide fame and led him to create an Oscar-nominated documentary.

The art of clearing taggers' work in San Francisco

Edward Guthmann, Special to The Chronicle

Monday, February 21, 2011

Nobody knows more about graffiti than Joe Padilla. The paint-shop supervisor for the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, Padilla oversees graffiti removal for all of the city's 220 parks.

A San Francisco native, Padilla, 50, was baptized at Mission Dolores and grew up at 15th and Noe streets. He lives in Richmond with his wife of 24 years, Silvana, and has three children and three granddaughters.

This shop spends $280,000 a year on graffiti abatement alone. People tag retaining walls, benches, sidewalks, pathways, curbs, signs, light poles, picnic tables, pump houses, irrigation boxes. Trees get tagged. Yes, we faux-finish a lot of trees.

We're damn good at graffiti removal. Mayor Newsom made an executive order about four, five years ago, saying all departments must deal with graffiti within 48 hours of it being reported. I have eight guys on my crew, and we average about 80 percent for removing graffiti within two days.

Jaime Rojo & Steven Harrington

S.F. artist Jeremy Novy thrives in outdoor gallery

Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, November 13, 2010

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Jeremy Novy is walking South of Market, deciphering his own hieroglyphics.

"That's two men kissing," he said, pointing to a stencil of two sets of boots facing each other on the sidewalk.

On the side of an abandoned ice machine business, a life-size, shirtless man in a cowboy hat leans seductively. "That's an iconic gay image," Novy said. "Like a two-step guy. Or a Marlboro man."

Scribbling in a language of doodles, stencils and graffiti, Novy uses underground street art to honor San Francisco's gay history. Much as Keith Haring's anonymous chalk drawings in the New York subways drew attention to gay culture in the 1980s, Novy is emerging as San Francisco's street whisperer.

Street Art Way Below the Street
By JASPER REES (NY Times)

A vast new exhibition space opened in New York City this summer, with a show 18 months in the making. On view are works by 103 street artists from around the world, mostly big murals painted directly onto the gallery’s walls.

It is one of the largest shows of such pieces ever mounted in one place, and many of the contributors are significant figures in both the street-art world and the commercial trade that now revolves around it. Its debut might have been expected to draw critics, art dealers and auction-house representatives, not to mention hordes of young fans. But none of them were invited.

In the weeks since, almost no one has seen the show. The gallery, whose existence has been a closely guarded secret, closed on the same night it opened.

link to the On Studio page (takes forever to download and has little info beyond a press kit): http://www.onstudio.co.uk/large.html