LA Gets More Street Art from Fairey

For months L.A. MoCA's "Art in the Streets" exhibition has been a source of hype and controversy, but it's not the only street-focused show worth seeing this month. Opening tomorrow night at Shepard Fairey's Subliminal Projects, "Art, Access & Decay: 1975–1985" features early works from some 40 artists including DAZE, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Joe Lewis and David Wojnarowicz, among many others. "I wanted to do something a little more roots," says gallery director Katherine Cone, who joined Subliminal last summer after serving as gallery director for Robert Berman's C2 Gallery for three years. "Street [art] really started at a time when these people were working in dilapidated suitcase shows where there were Sol LeWitt drawings for $15 and people were making their own T-shirts. That's what I wanted to highlight, this creative time of decay when artists used the city and whatever they had at their disposal."
 Read More

AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs, On Butt Plugs, Magic

Last night at Dashwood Books in New York, Canadian-born conceptual artists AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs launched their book Invocation of the Queer Spirits (Creative Time Books/Plug In Editions), which sums up recent years of performance. The two met at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, during an artist residency in 2000, and coincidentally ended up there for another residency in 2008. "We were very bored because it was a very straight kind of residency with extraordinarily boring people as our co-residents," Bronson told A.i.A. last night. Banff is located on an ancient sacred aboriginal site; Bronson and Hobbs held a midnight séance in which they invoked the "queer spirits" of that location.
 Read More

Bomb, Memory: Q+A With Jose Parla

You couldn't miss the opening of José Parla's solo show at Bryce Wolkowitz last week if you tried. The Miami-born, Brooklyn-based artist hired two street drummers he met on the subway to beat their paint buckets outside the former graffiti writer's exhibition, "Walls, Diaries, and Paintings." It is his first with this gallery.

"I'm interested in bringing the energy of the city inside the gallery," says Parla, who showed 10 paintings that combine Twombly-esque calligraphic language (rendered in acrylic and ink) with plaster, tags, scribbles, phone numbers, "paranoid schizophrenic sayings" from other writers, and posters he's torn off the streets over the years, "waiting for the right moment to put it in a piece."
 Read More

The Zabludowicz Clan Takes Times Square

In the summer of 1980, the Bronx-based collective CoLab and some 50 artists—including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith and filmmaker Jim Jarmusch—infiltrated a derelict massage parlor at 41st Street and 7th Avenue and put up the legendary Times Square Show. Today the neighborhood is nothing short of an amusement park—and many of those subversive young artists who partook in the establishment-skewering exhibition now comprise the establishment—but the impulse to take over a vacant space in the world's New Year's Eve capital with a scrappy group of emerging artists is still alive and well. Yet the terms of that infiltration have undoubtedly changed, as evidenced by the good fortunes of Anita and Poju Zabludowicz.
 Read More