Photos By Gail
At first glance, it may appear as if this car has been vandalized, but when you really examine it from all sides, it’s pretty obvious that it’s a work of mobile street art from the artist known as Mad Steez.
This way, you can take the art wherever you go!
Photos By Gail
Anyone familiar with Sesame Street will recognize the likenesses of both Cookie Monster and The Count on the side of this well-tagged box truck, which I snapped a few photos of as it was stopped on Lafayette Street. The truck is the work of the COD Cru, a Bronx-based group of graffiti artists that’s been active since 1983! TC5 and KMS are two of the artists who left their tags on the truck. I wish I had been able to get a glimpse of the other side!
Photo By Gail
The title of Ed Ruscha’s The Old Tool & Die Building (2004) suggests that the industrial space pictured here — decorated with signage in a mix of altered, nonsensical Korean and archaic Mandarin characters, an unidentifiable corporate symbol, and graffiti — was once a place where machinists manufactured parts.
The Old Tool & Die Building is part of the Course of Empire series — a group of five paintings that revisit the subjects of Ruscha’s 1992 series Blue Collar. In those back and white canvases, the artist had pictured the industrial buildings once common to the American urban landscape. The newer paintings, rendered in color, capture old sites repurposed, abandoned, enlarged, or made obsolete
Ed Ruscha named the series after a group of paintings by the Hudson River School artist Thomas Cole (1801 – 1848). Cole’s The Course of Empire (1833 – 36) traces the transformation of an imagined civilization from an Edenic state close to nature, through the rise of culture, to a dominating Empire, and then on to decline and ruin. Although Ruscha’s coolly removed depictions do not editorialize on their subjects, like Cole’s works they chronicle the unrelenting developments and the inevitable cycles of human civilizations.
Photographed in The Whitney Museum in NYC.
All Photos By Gail
A couple of variable factors kept me from getting the best possible shot of this mural depicting two of my favorite cartoon characters — Ren and Stimpy — by graffiti artist Just Another Toy (@justanothertoy1). First, it was a very overcast day, and second, there were several vehicles parked at the curb, which obscured a full-on shot of the complete piece. That is for another day perhaps.
The pink tag placed between Ren and Stimpy is not vandalism covering anything, but rather the artist’s signature, which figures prominently on most (read: all) of his pieces. The two other tags — Gold Poo and Hudson — refer to other street artists.
This piece (circa 2019) is part of the Bushwick Collective and is located on Scott Avenue between Troutman and Jefferson Streets.
Photos By Gail
I don’t own any pets, but I sometimes look after a stout English Bull Dog named Mac, who belongs to a neighbor. Mac is an extremely loving and intelligent dog, and I am so fond of him that I miss dearly him whenever I see another Bull Dog on the Street. Of course, Mac came to mind immediately when I came upon this mural of a Blue Bull Dog lounging in the grass during a recent Graffiti Art Tour in Bushwick, Brooklyn.