Larry Lorca, Stuffy's, HOPEful, Guernica

Richmond has the best graffiti and outdoor art... how come? Something about the vibe in Richmond, the South, the urban/nature mix - river, bricks, cinderblocks, and trees... it's all so vibrant and compelling. I like this photo above because YOU CAN SEE STUFFY's in the reflection!

Are artists like Judith Supine and Deuce7 starting in Richmond, with some moving to NYC, or is Richmond a draw for the NYC artists? Both, probably. I wish the raft shop hadn't closed... not spending so much time in the James, it isn't feeling like summer...

Larry Lorca is taking pictures of EVERYTHING. I'm so glad he got the classic...


HOPEful... Guernica boards. These are glued to the wall...

Judith Supine! Woah, Amazing BEFORE and AFTER photos, PLUS... RVA Gallery Results Are IN! and a BONUS REWARD!!!

Somebody left a comment on the old in-between alley post... with a link to somebody's flickr page showing the work when it was NEW. Wow! I had no idea they were so bright, these are acidic... looks great on the bricks.


Here is the photo I took when first seeing this piece. The artist is called Judith Supine.... it looks like s/he's moved to NYC and is doing a lot of stuff up there. Here is an EXCELLENT youtube video showing how they make the posters and collages.

Here are a couple more of my AFTER photos, and the BEFOREs:




Yay to RATS! Rats is the word!




Never posted this photo before... and it was taken well after Christmas was over.

PLUS! RVA Gallery Results Are IN!!

Heart as Arena posted on Scope, mentioning ADA Gallery, saying he was excited to see them after reading about them on my blog... so now that I have started adding labels to old posts I can easily go back and see what RVA galleries have been "featured" the most.

ClicK on a gallery link below to see all of the feature posts on that gallery... newest posts will be on top, scroll down for older posts. It only shows twenty posts, so if a gallery has had more than twenty features they won't all show up.

1708 Gallery - 6 times
ADA Gallery - 24 times
Anderson Gallery - 13 times
Chop Suey - 7 times
Gallery 5 - 4 times
Nonesuch - 10 times
Reynolds Gallery - 10 times

BONUS REWARD!!!

Okay, if you have made it this far your Bonus Reward is a link to a new-ish artblog called Artworld Salon. This is Marc Spiegler , Ian Charles Stewart , and András Szántó's new blog...

It's informative, and a little different in that commenting is by invitation only, or something... I guess that is what the "Salon" part implies.

ummm, I'm a little put off (I'M JEALOU$!) by the sense of privilege, and exclusionism - it appears Szanto is hoping to make happen the sort of thing he talks about here - and I'm not getting the sense that their definition of "artworld" includes artists... but, it's still interesting and they aren't really talking about art anyway.

UPDATE 3/5/07: aaack, this Artworld Salon blog is fascinating... it is a good thing... a lot more insight into the money side of it all...

you can get your boards back

Street Board Makers, you may have noticed a bunch of your boards have come down, but DON'T DESPAIR.

I have it on good authority that - "Britt Drews, the spokesperson for the Department of Public Works, says they’re keeping the signs they’ve taken down in case those who did the artwork want them back. No fine, no arrest." I think there will be a feature on local TV about the street boards soon, on the CBS channel.

Thanks, Street Board Makers, for making such nice things and getting people talking about art.

Richmond Street Boards

Some Richmond street boards... I've learned more since my last post on these, and been talking to one of the artists. S/he has also seen anaba, and told me s/he appreciated the comments of Curious very much.

Curious, are you out there? Thanks!






The artists have different names, like "Hope" and "Lost". I'm not sure who did what here, and some of the artists may be the same person using different names. Larry Lorca, another pseudonymous artist, has an EXCELLENT flickr set of many of the Richmond boards (from which I took these photos).

Frank on Cary Street

Scratched into the metal door-frame of an empty building on Cary. I'm pretty sure it was scratched... that was my impression, but I never touched it and now I'm wondering.


Frank is.

Grateful Dead Rock, Belle Isle, Da James, Richmond.

Grateful Dead Rock, on Belle Isle. This is the only graffiti on Belle Isle that doen't get painted over by the city.. it's become a landmark. That said, on our first raft trip of 2006 we saw that it had been painted over... it was GONE. That felt like a bad omen. Fortunately, it was quickly painted back early in the season and left alone.

This new one is a little different than the previous one... a little smaller, no red.


Da Roaring James. I went down to the river on Saturday.


Another view...

street bee

Street Bee.


Back of Street Bee, with someone else's smaller piece. Is this kind of thing done elsewhere? I've only seen them in Richmond.





RELATED: Street Heart.

Richmond Bible Car

I saw this car parked on the street, in front of a church.


side of car.


the window is patched with a bible.


roof of car, with prayer.


it's like the Batmobile.

PREVIOUS COOL CARS:


The Richmond MULLET POLICE. Here is the Richmond Police God.


The Hoosick Falls PAMPERS-MOBILE. This photo was taken on my last visit to my hometown, Hoosick Falls, NY! This is a good post.


window of the pampers-mobile, advertising goods for sale.

i did it!

I did it!

UPDATE - Jerry Saltz came!
UPDATE - installation photos

Tonight is First Friday, Stuffy's is open until 9pm, on Harrison right around the corner from Nonesuch, on Grace. Nonesuch is having an opening for Shawn Creeden. GO!

Also tonite.... Daniel Davidson will be drawing five-dollar portraits in the ADA PICTURE BOOTH, Cory Arcangel at Solvent Space, Terry Brown at Art6, Sally Mann at Reynolds Gallery.... MUCH MUCH MORE.

on the street

ZOMBIES!!!

Zombies are coming! This was kind of scary, standing here until the last second.


There was a girl zombie in an orange shirt around here who was a super good zombie, all my pictures of her are blurry or lost because when I would stand still to focus on her she would start to shuffle toward me and I had to escape before I could press "store".


The one on the right almost got me.


A few more zombie photos on my flickr. Whooooaaah!!!! I am only just now noticing that zombie hand in the bottom left corner! Holy fuck, that was close!!!

Nice zombie shadow.

i knocked on his door

I knocked on his door.

Well... first I called two phone numbers on the signs and got prayer lines that didn't know who he was or what I was talking about... then I called the number looking for the sign stealer and let it ring about twenty times and nobody answered... THEN I went up and banged on his door for a while, but nobody came... then I wrote a note and put it in his mailbox... then finally as I was leaving he answered the door.

I was hoping to put one or two of his signs in a show I am organizing, but he isn't interested. He's a little bit interested, or maybe curious, but not enough to take any of them down, and says he doesn't have anything extra inside. His main concern is catching the sign stealer, and making sure I am not the sign stealer. The current sign stealer... as people have been taking them, intermittently, for forty years.

Once he was convinced that I am not the sign stealer, he went back inside to get a warmer shirt on and came out on the porch to hang out and talk. He said he has a hobby... he can guess anybody's age, height, and weight, within three years, an inch and a half, and five pounds. He was off by eight years and two inches, but claimed he got two out of three right because he backtracked and said height within two inches.

He also said "I'm a poet. I can make a rhyme, anytime, on a dime"... long pause... "that's a fact, Jack"... followed by "I know you're name's not Jack, I just said that for the sake of the rhyme".

After that it was all about Jesus and The End of the World. It was funny because he would be preaching and then segue into something real-world, like sports or catching the sign stealer... "He is an angry and jealous God, and I'm gonna get that sign stealer". It really bothers him that someone would take them.




Sign stealer, you are bad!!

Hypertemporality

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The University of Richmond has an online exhibit, Hypertemporality, featuring work by five artists "addressing the issue of rapid obsolescence caused by technological change". Go to the exhibit here.

My favorite is Joel Holmberg's Friendster project A Brief History of My Friends. Joel printed out the pages of Richmond Friendsters, stuck them in plastic bags, and strung them from telephone lines. He got a lot of complaints from people upset that information they had made available about themselves in the cyber-world had been dragged into the real-world and strung over telephone wires like an old pair of sneakers, and there was a poignancy to walking down the street and suddenly noticing one of Joel's packets of lonely(?) people hanging mostly unnoticed above. I took a couple photos. The Hypertemporality site tells all this much better than I do and also includes the hilarious video he made. The soundtrack is the theme from Cheers.

The exhibit was co-curated by Nathan Altice and Elizabeth Schlatter.