Meme on the wall

One of my favorite memes from the last 10 years was one called Bad Luck Brian, which was a photo from someone’s awkward teen years accompanied by text detailing some type of instance of incredible misfortune. While it’s long past its peak, it still makes me smile (perhaps because of my name). So imagine my surprise when walking the dog one night here in my neighborhood and seeing a shutter painted with a portrait of the gawky, redhead.

Interestingly enough, I uploaded the image onto reddit, and received a message from the real bad luck Brian, asking for the name of the artist. Unfortunately, there is no signature on the painting, so I had to leave the real “Brian” disappointed.

 

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First street green, an art park in the East Village

For this month’s second entry, I’ve decided to once again cross the pond, and highlight one of my favourite stops when in NYC. These photos are from the First Street Green Art Park, which as the name suggests is on East first street, near Houston (pronounced HOWS-ton), just on the border with the Lower East Side. It’s a community effort, and features new art nearly every time I visit. I enjoy this space, because many of the murals, in addition to being quite beautiful, also convey positive, optimistic messages. Something in short supply these days. There aren’t too many concentrated spots for street art in this part of the city; it is plentiful, but scattered. Here is the space’s twitter account, so you can keep up with any goings-on.

La Modelo: The transition from prison to cultural center

La Modelo was a prison located in the central Eixample neighborhood of Barcelona, and was home to many political prisoners during the Franco dictatorship, and also the site of many executions, among them the killing of anarchist Salvador Puig Antich in 1974.

I used to live just across the street and it was always an imposing structure, though usually strangely quiet, except for the occasional karaoke nights that would echo out from over the walls, which occupied an entire city block.

The prison shut down definitively in 2017, after 113 years in operation. It is now an open space, and is used for tours, civic events, and most notably its walls now serve as canvases for urban art. Below you’ll find a selection from a recent trip I made to the area, which is located here.

 

Across the river: Jersey City street art

This past May, I made my now-annual mid-year trip to the US, I decided to take a short train trip under the Hudson to Jersey City, a place I called home from 1999-early 2001. This was then, a trip back to the past, along with a street art safari. And I wasn’t disappointed. A long walk on Newark Avenue yielded some fantastic results, as you’ll see. The murals are part of the Jersey City Mural Arts project, which is an initiative of the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs. It’s a good idea to check the website or do a bit of Google research to find out where some of the interesting pieces are located. I was happy to see a mural by one of my favorites, Italian artist Alice Pasquini.

Jersey City has gentrified quite a bit over the last 20 years, and there is a decent offering of restaurants and cafes in case you get hungry or thirsty on your way from the Newport PATH station to the Journal Square station. Especially interesting is the row of Indian restaurants just off the Journal Square station.

Spring shots from 3 Chimneys

Here are a few shots from the latest visit to the 3 Chimneys park near just off Paral·lel Avenue. While the work I find is sometimes hit or miss, I like the way the park itself has evolved into a sort of street art oasis in the middle of the city. It also seems to be attracting more and more tourists with increasingly professional photography gear, though much of it is being used to make skate videos.

The other shots come from the interior of the old city centre, where new work continues to become increasingly rare. I can only hope the summer will bring some surprises.

Arnau Gallery, an open air museum

Just off the Avenue Paral·lel, and very close to the free wall project Tres Xemeneies, a new project has been launched with the blog Street Art Barcelona, called Arnau Gallery. The project consists of a 15×2 metre mural space, which will be decorated by various artists. The project is named after the Arnau theatre which went through various incarnations from its opening in 1894 to its closing in 2004. Here you can find a video detailing the mural which you’ll find in the photos below, and an article from Street Art Barcelona. Here is a map link to the location.

Famous faces, in real life and fiction

I had to dig back in the archives as far as May to get a few of these shots–a difficult task as my dropbox photo cloud approaches 6,00 photos. It was worth the effort though, as I was able to find th photo I was looking for, as well as a few extras that hadn’t made it to the blog. All of this post’s images are of famous people, some of them real celebrities, while two others are famous characters from the small screen. The two fictional faces come from two of the most popular series on TV, The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. They come to us from artist Axe Colours, who was previously featured for his portrait of Walter White from another popular TV show, Breaking Bad. In the third image you can see the artist at work. The other three are pop culture icons in real life, Annie Lennox, Anthony Perkins, and Amy Winehouse–with who I think might be Rihanna in the lower right corner. Another image shows a curious mashup of Mickey Mouse and a scowling Madonna.