Retna completed his Houston Bowery wall today after a 3-day painting marathon. The finished wall, covered in Retna’s unique script, contains a universal message and also personal tributes to friends and writers in LA and New York. The main body of text reads:
“All the great ones are conscious of universal truths
Watch the heartbeat in your wrist- a precise pulsing beat of life’s drum with loss of timing if you are ill
The power of the world always works in circles.”

The Houston/Bowery wall is undergoing another transformation.  L.A. based Retna, painting freehand with brushes,  is covering the wall with his unique alphabet.  I haven’t learned to read Retna yet but plan to work on it. Meanwile he’s promised to de-code his universal message when the wall is finished in the next couple of days.

We’ve had a mild winter this year but if you want to be reminded of some serious past storms, come to the opening tonight of Snowblind. The group show   at Klughaus, a sweet new little gallery in Chinatown, was curated by Carnage and Making Deals. I was happy to get a chance to dig into my files for some non-graffiti related flicks. The black and whites are mostly from New York 1978 and the color ones shot nearly 30 years later during the Baltimore blizzard of 2009. Snow photos are pretty but tricky to take. It’s difficult to retain detail in the bright whites and nearly impossible to keep driving snow off the lens.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this great wall ever since Art Basel—sorry it took me so long. Few & Far is a women’s collective with members from across the USA and plans to go global soon. For Art Basel, Primary Flight hooked them up with a very long wall in Wynwood. With artists flying to Miami from East and West coasts to paint together, a lot of pre-planning of colors and concepts was necessary to pull off what turned into a superbly unified effort.

Here’s the scoop on how they did it from L.A.‘s Erin Yoshi, “The mural came about through a collective process. Since native Honey Bees are moving towards extinction in the United States, we understand that this will have a huge impact on our domestic food supply in the future.  We wanted to highlight this through our appreciation for Bees. Ksra suggested the honey comb theme, Meme evolved that into a Queen Bees wall for the women’s collective and Mags and Yoshi supported with the color scheme and background concept. 

We were excited to have Ironlak as our sponsor.  They support FnF with all the paint needed, came by multiple times to check on our progress and sent their media team to capture the moment. 

I flew out to Chicago on Friday for DB Burkeman’s art sticker show and book signing just in time for the first big snow of the year. DB has amassed an enormous collection of printed and hand-drawn stickers and thousands are on display at Maxwell Colette Gallery including super-rare ones from Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Banksy, Barry McGee and other legends.

If you can’t make it to the show be sure to check out DB’s book published by Rizzoli: “Stickers- from Punk Rock to Contemporary Art” AKA Stuck-Up Piece Of Crap featuring the over 4000 stickers by more than 1300 artists.

I received a wonderful surprise package in the mail last week—a Bobbleheaded Blade that looked exactly like the king himself. Since Blade recently relocated to Florida, the bobbling replica in my studio will insure that he will be remembered daily.

You can get one too at Toy Tokyo or Tuff City or order on line at   G.A.G. Golden Age of Graffiti. Blade is planning to make a few guest appearances at selected venues in NYC in March so get your bobble on!

Since 2006 I’ve been documenting a Southwest Baltimore neighborhood called SoWeBo known more for its portrayal in the TV program The Wire than for its art. But some of Baltimore’s earliest graffiti writers such as Shaken began their careers here and are still going strong.

Street art is a novelty here although there are plenty of very inviting walls. Recently Stefan Ways organized a major makeover of   Carroll Skate Park. Last weekend I watched Gaia wheat paste a pigeon drawing in an alley that, in fact, has a lot of pigeons. Hopefully other artists will make their way west into this relatively virgin territory. I’ll be keeping my camera ready.

For NYCentric folks, here’s an excellent Xmas gift idea. Darryl Jones is selling an indoor version of the street game Skelly. Skelly is a classic NYC game akin to marbles but with flat shooters designed not to roll on cement and asphalt. Kids used to make their own from bottle caps weighted with tar or wax. Skelly boards were mostly drawn with chalk although the Parks Department painted a few on playgrounds and even held official tournaments. I haven’t actually seen anyone playing this for years but in the pre-technology age it used to be popular. Attached are my vintage photos from Brooklyn, Bronx and Lower Eastside taken from 70’s to 90’s. For more info about Skelly (skully, skelsies) check out Street Play

Darryl has managed to patent the game (presumably only his indoor version) and have it manufactured in China. As a longtime fan of street games, I was super surprised to come across him in my hood a couple of days ago at Broadway and 104th.

This year during Art Basel Aurelio Roman Jr. and the Miami Graffiti 80’s Group decided to celebrate Miami’s unique graffiti history by bringing together crews from the 80’s to paint a mural on the Bakehouse Art Complex. The Bakehouse, a former bakery, was the first place to allow writers to paint legally. Back in the day, Miami crews were sometimes at war with each other but in 2011 they put their differences aside and worked together to create a spectacular tribute to early graffiti MIami graf.  Former Miami writers came from as far away as California, Texas and New York to paint in traditional 80’s Miami styles and colors. Classic old school characters representing elements of Hip Hop were reproduced from sketches made by the late Sevey Sev of Block Boys & Can Masters crews. The wall was also a memorial to writers who had died, with realistically painted R.I.P. portraits by G Whiz.

In 1970 I was living in Japan trying to get my photography career off the ground. I became fascinated with Japanese tattooing (irezumi) after seeing a traditional tattoo at a festival . With perseverance I was able to meet and photograph the artist Horibun I at work.  At the time I hoped to do a magazine article but no editors were interested as tattooing had an unsavory reputation. For over 40 years the photos were buried in my extensive archive of unpublished work. 

Like graffiti, tattooing was an underground art that, in 2011, has surfaced and proliferated throughout the world although the tools, techniques, and designs have evolved. I’ve been especially interested to observe the overlapping of graffiti and tattooing. Many tattoo artists began as graffiti writers.  I was excited when Dokument in Sweden, the publishers of many graff books including my book, Tag Town, offered to publish my tattoo photos. 

This year, Aiko Nakagawa created a magnificent stencil based on one of my photos for my Remix show at Carmichael in LA so we decided to team up for a tattoo show in NYC. Adam Suerte’s Urban Folk Art tattoo studio and gallery was the perfect place for an exhibit and book launch because he’s one of the many tattoo artists who started off as a writer. Please stop by Friday evening if you’re anywhere near Brooklyn.

Here are more walls painted in the past few months. They are just a few of the dozens of murals you will see around Wynwood. There are more being painted this minute.

IRAK spent a few days and nights bombing a Wynwood building located a little off the beaten track. Walk south on 2nd Avenue from NW26th Street and you can’t miss it. Only two sides of the building were finished when I left Miami a couple of weeks ago. One was tagged on black in gradations of white, silver, gray and black and the other on white in silver, gray and a bright orange which nicely coordinated with their T-shirts and shorts. Are there any other IRAK tags around Wynwood? Take a guess.