Baltimore got a dose of vintage street art over Memorial Day as John Ahearn cast two people as part of OWB’s finale. John and I have been friends since the 80’s when he lived, worked and installed pieces on walls in the South Bronx so it was a special treat for me to see him in action in my home town. He and his wife Juanita and little son Carlos drove down from NYC in a van filled with supplies to make sculpture on the street. He also brought five finished casts to hang on the wall so that people could get an idea of what the finished works would look like.

As you can see from the photos below, making a plaster cast of a living person is no easy feat—for the artist or the subject.  John chose to cast Bill Maughlin and Kevin Brown who own and operate SNAC, the   Station North Arts Cafe, on Charles Street. The cafe is at the epicenter of the designated Station North Arts and Entertainment District and the casts will be hung on its walls when finished so be sure to stop by for a look and a bite when you’re in the area.

I love happening upon art in out of the way places and Stikman is not only a master of the unexpected. but has been at it longer than just about anybody. His recent show at Pandemic Gallery in Brooklyn celebrated “20 years of playing with sticks” but I have it on good authority that he began his illustrious, stealthy, street career a couple of decades earlier.

While checking out the big, official OWB walls in Baltimore, be sure to keep a sharp eye out for the small, incredibly varied unofficial pieces that Stikman carefully placed around town to blend with their surroundings.  Who says size matters?

  OWB is winding down and I’m way behind in editing and posting photos. So here are flix of finished walls. The project will officially finish this weekend. For the Grand Finale, my good friend John Ahearn will be doing a public body casting on Friday of Kevin and Bill who own and operate the cozy Station North Arts Cafe. Stop by Station North if you’re in town. Even if you can’t make it this weekend, Baltimore could be your next street art destination. They got walls!

Chip Thomas, aka Jetsonorama is a physician/photographer who has lived and worked on the Navajo Nation in Arizona for 25 years. Since 2009,he’s wheatpasted his portraits, vintage and recent, of his Native American neighbors.  I’d known of Chip’s work for a while and we’d emailed back and forth so I was especially excited to finally meet him in my home town of Baltimore for Open Walls.

In Baltimore Chip had several projects big and small going at once. First he had to go out and shoot the photos he wanted to paste, get them printed and meticulously cut them out.  Most challenging was a huge portrait of pigeon flyer, Tony Divers to be installed on a wall near his home. The paste failed to stick to wall #1 so Chip had to reprint the photo and extend his stay a week. Meanwhile he and Baltimore artist Nanook pasted up versions of a photo I had taken as part of my ongoing SoWeBo documentation . For more about Jetsonorama and his Navajo Nation check out his blog, Speaking Loud and Saying Nothing.

Argentinean artist Ever’s specialty is large scale portraits. In Baltimore he singlehandedly painted an enormous wall using a combination of spray and house paint. His image of a sleeping, or perhaps just reclining, man with a mask led to many questions from passersby about the intended meaning.  However Ever refused to explain, preferring that everyone interpret the painting for themselves.

Sten & Lex are a pair of Italian street artists who have worked together for over 10 years. Together they developed a complicated, labor intensive black and white stencil technique to render images in a way similar to halftone printing in newspapers.

In Baltimore the pair tackled a huge wall that presented a lot of challenges. First they prepared the wall by grinding the surface and painting it white. Then they papered the entire wall. Unfortunately they made a mistake in their centimeters to inches conversion so had to reprint the image in the correct size losing precious time in the process.

After pasting, they carefully sliced and peeled away the paper from the black lines leaving white space which they sprayed black. Finally they partially stripped away the leftover paper to reveal a spectacled face, positioned horizontally on the wall. They purposely left dangling strips of paper blowing in the wind to gradually wear away. The final image must be seen from a distance to get the full effect.

Cameras, phones and iPads got a work out over the past few days as JR & Crew pasted a humongous portrait of Brandon Many Ribs on a wall adjacent to the High Line at 29th Street. The photo, taken on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, is part of JR’s on going global Inside Out project. You can hear him speak about it   here.

An international roster of street artists has descended on Richmond, Virginia. The G40 event, organized by Shane Pomajambo, is giving a face lift to an emerging arts district. For me spray paint is synonymous with street art so I was surprised to see that the medium of choice was ordinary house paint applied with rollers attached to poles, some as long as 26 feet. Although this appeared cumbersome and tiring, requiring strength and patience, the artists were able to cover huge spaces, paint delicate lines and fill in with subtle color blends.  Montana watch out!

JR and Liu Bolin pulled off a complex collaboration today at 11 Spring Street. This same building, just before a total renovation, was the site of a massive street art extravaganza organized by Marc and Sara Schiller of Wooster Collective in 2006.

Liu Bolin aka The Invisible Man usually has himself painted head to toe to blend in with his surroundings. Today, however, Bolin directed his assistants to paint JR into a background of a wheat pasted photo. The photo was one JR had taken earlier of Bolin. The disappearing act took place in full view of hundreds of fans, photographers and passersby amidst the sunny, springlike streets of Soho.

For more of Liu Bolin’s work, check out   Eli Klein Fine Art at 462 West Broadway.

The Brooklyn Museum celebrated their big, new Keith Haring show with a gala opening on Wednesday. Many fellow artists, friends, celebrities and art world peeps were in attendance. The exhibit focuses on Keith’s early career 1978-1982 and includes all kinds of large and small works seldom seen before. There’s an entire room of chalk drawings peeled from subway signboards and charming, early videos of Keith at work. Personally I felt that LA2 deserved more recognition than just a mention on one panel and, I admit, I was disappointed not to see Subway Art among all the graffiti and street art books in the museum shop. But the show, which will be up until July 8, is a must-see.

A serious street art project is happening in my hometown of Baltimore and I’m excited to be part of it. Open Walls Baltimore, aka OWB, kicked off last week with a standing-room only press conference in the WindUp Space, an appropriately funky venue. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was in the house and delivered an enthusiastic speech opening with the line, “I love art.”

The lucky neighborhood designated to receive the murals is the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. It’s adjacent to the train station and the Bolt bus stop if you’re traveling from NYC. Gaia helped write the grant for the project, select the walls and curate the lineup of international and local artists.

Baltimore is an old and beautiful city that, sadly, has fallen on hard times. Architecturally significant buildings and ordinary rowhouses, abandoned and boarded up, line the streets.  The underlying agenda for murals of course, is to stimulate real estate investment and this can be a double edged sword.  However responsible plans are in place to continue to provide reasonably priced housing in the area. PNC Bank, the primary funding source for OWB has a community development program focusing on investments to low and moderate income people.

I personally would love to see Baltimore become an international arts destination. This venerable city deserves some love.

A fabulous installation of Ramellzee’s Letter Racer sculptures, each representing a letter of the alphabet mounted on a skateboard, opened at The   Suzanne Geiss Company gallery on 76 Grand Street last night. The opening turned into a nostalgic 80’s reunion with many of Ramellzee’s contemporaries, some of whom flew in for the occasion including Patti Astor from LA and Kool Koor from Brussels. Henry Chalfant, Fab 5 Freddy, Lee, Jane Dixon & Charlie Ahearn, Mare139, Jason, Riff, Revolt, Sharp and Bill Blast and many more were in the house as well as Ram’s lovely wife Carmela.

From the   Coolhunting website: Created over the course of 14 years, “The Letter Racers” sculptures are on view in NYC for the first time. They represent the artist’s manifestos “Iconoclast Panzerism” and “Gothic Futurism,” two works written in Rammellzee’s idiosyncratic language. The written and visual works explore the slavery and corruption of language and its liberation through the artist’s own work.
The complex theory behind “The Letter Racers” has to do with the freedom of language from its historical fetters. As Rammellzee writes, “In the 14th century the monks ornamented and illustrated the manuscripts of letters. In the 21st and 22nd century the letters of the alphabet through competition are now armamented for letter racing and galactic battles. This was made possible by a secret equation know as THE RAMMELLZEE.”

This is the first time these sculptures have been shown in NYC . The exhibit will be up until April 21.