Shepard Fairey: May Day at Deitch; mural on Houston
Shepard Fairey is definitely having a New York City moment. For years (and years!) Fairey went out night after night making a name for himself in the street art world with his ubiquitous "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" and "Obey Giant" posters and stickers, racking up well over a million hits worldwide ( Even if you don't know what we're talking about, you'd definitely recognize them). Then in 2008 he became mainstream, cover-of-Time-magazine famous for his iconic blue-and-red Obama "Hope" poster.
This month Fairey is all over downtown Manhattan, thanks in large part to Jeffrey Deitch, the art-gallery superstar who's leaving town on June 1 to run , Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art (or, MOCA). As his farewell gift to New York, Deitch gives us two big Fairey shows, one going on until the end of May at Deitch Projects in Soho--which will be the final exhibition at this hugely influential gallery--the other until the end of the year on the legendary "Keith Haring wall" at Houston Street and Bowery. Taken together (and throwing in the various new Obey pieces that seem to be popping up all over the place... like on the Pentagram building at Madison Square Park, for example), no matter what you feel about Fairey, or street art, or street art selling for tens of thousands of dollars, this definitely feels like a pivotal moment in the downtown NYC art scene.
First, the mural on Houston, "These Parties Disgust Me", which Fairey spent a couple of nights and days wheatpasting into semi-permanence on Houston, often in front of dozens of spectators. We were fortunate to be able to see him work a couple of weeks ago, pasting and painting, and coincidentally enough right after seeing the excellent Exit Through the Gift Shop, "the world's first Street Art disaster movie," three blocks away at the Sunshine, a (maybe) documentary which stars Banksy, Mr. Brainwash, and... Shepard Fairey! It was really cool to witness the piece's creation, and Fairey was unbelievably patient and friendly with the crowd that had gathered to watch, joking and chatting and signing autographs and submitting himself to countless pictures with fans. He even brought along a box a swag, for onlookers to help themselves to stickers and such.
Like most of Fairey's work, "These Parties Disgust Me"--which expresses in a self-explanatory way the artist's feelings about present-day politics--uses repetition and sampling, and lots of red. And even though Fairey has maybe never been one of our favorites, the mural's size--the wall is around 17 feet high and over 50 feet long--and location, with all those great sightlines, make this both an aesthetically and politically appropriate addition to the neighborhood. So: welcome.
And then there's the Deitch gallery show, Shepard Fairey May Day, which is attracting crowds like we've never seen before to the big space on lower Wooster Street. The focus here is on Fairey's portraits, of some of the artists, musicians, and political activists he most admires, including Woody Guthrie, Deborah Harry, Basquiat, Iggy Pop, John and Yoko, the Dalai Lama, Biggie, Joe Strummer, Keith Haring, Jimi Hendrix. These are fine--again, Fairey has an excellent sense of color, and we like the collage-y backgrounds made of subject-appropriate headlines and such--but they seem a little uneventful.
Our favorite Faireys here at Deitch were the more representational pieces. The wall of flags, for example, have weight and punch, as, to a lesser degree, do the landscapes. The "These Parties" Houston Street mural is replayed in its entirety here, in case it's raining out and you want to spend some quality with it. No question, this ids a good piece. But we really love the way the smaller works were hung, all bunched and almost architectural in look.
Posted at 08:55PM May 11, 2010 by Scott in Events |