Aesthetics for Birds

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art for Everyone

Live Blogging Street Art Conference: Day One

| 0 comments

Shitty Winter Weather,
Awesome Artist Panel

Thursday, March 5th 5:45pm

The conference kicked off today with the Arists Panel featuring ELBOW-TOE, HOTTEA, Leon Reid IV, and Tatyana Fazlalizadeh with the discussion lead by fellow organizer Nick Riggle.


Reid’s work takes a clever, playful, and a touch fantastical perspective on the otherwise unremarkable ordinary objects one expects to encounter while walking on the street (street signs, lamp posts, newspaper dispensers, bus benches, etc.). Reid also discusses his transition from Street Artist to studio-based Commissioned Public Artist.
ELBOW-TOE’s work is more traditionally oriented (large wheatpasted linocuts and layered murals affixed to brick walls, text graffiti on industrial doors). 
HOTTEA works with geometric forms of block text suggestive of depth, most strikingly when placed onto a chain link fence. His text work is not restricted to tagging (the word often carries political weight) nor is his work with geometric forms and depth confined to texts (he has employed yarn-bombing to great effect in both his textual and non-textual work). 

Most importantly, HOTTEA totally rocked out with Grover from Sesame Street.
Tatyana Fazlalizadeh transitioned from the traditional visual arts (portraiture) into more publicly oriented work and eventually street art (she used kickstarter to help “kickstart” her street art career). Her work employs large mural portraiture of women that focuses on street harassment both in terms of content but also site placement as well, as the murals are deliberately placed along the very streets where women would likely experience such harassment. 
After the introductions, a super stylish Nick Riggle begins leading the discussion with the panelists (seen below hamming it up with fellow organizer Gregg Horowitz).

Nick directs the discussion to the issue of the destructive nature of works of street art. 

Reid & ELBOW-TOE talk about the role played by the internet in the rapid rise and awareness of street art (Reid also discusses proto-Flickr pre-internet Black Boxes).

HOTTEA discusses structure of graffiti culture…its rules, hierarchies, illegality conditions, location scouting, reactionary attitudes about perceived violations to these, etc.

Tatyana and HOTTEA talk about being stopped by police.

Discussion about community expectations and obligations to community. Tatyana mentions how much of her work is supposed to be hated by certain members of the community (street harassers).

Leon Reid IV talks about site specificity and the evolution of graffiti in New York. 

Graffiti vs. Street Art vs. Public Art vs. Fine Art (naturally, someone immediately provided a clear distinction that captured everyone’s intuitions and carved up the relevant areas in precisely the most productive and informative way).


**Audience Spotlight: Special Guest Artist The Sucklord**





Leave a Reply

Required fields are marked *.