This weekend New York City was host to the East Side Polo Invite. Teams from the United States and Canada faced off in Sara D. Roosevelt park this Saturday and Sunday. Other events included an alleycat race and a bike prom. New York City bike polo received press in a recent Times article. More photos after the break.
A couple months ago, CW11/WPIX tapped some graffiti writers to put the final touches on billboards for Everybody Hates Chris, the Chris Rock sitcom based in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. Though Faust did a fine job painting this pair on Franklin Street and Clifton Street, the TV station wasn’t too stoked about the straight up bombing some other graffiti writers did. If you’ve got photos of those other billboards, let us know.
On Friday night, Sean Star Wars opens his show of woodcuts at Ad Hoc Art.
The woodcuts depict an incredible collection of images spanning everything from Devilish Ice cream Cones to Pigs having sex fantasies with Hot dogs and the ongoing saga of Jimmy the Pope all printed on billboard paper replete with found imagery of Coke cans, beer bottles, and hamburgers. “I like to tell funny stories using funny pictures” says StarWars “I make a lot of woodcuts and print them over and over on the billboard paper, so no two are the same. It beats the hell out of editioning, if you ask me.”
Friday, April 27, 6 PM
Ad Hoc Art (www.adhocart.org)
49 Bogart St., Brooklyn NY 11206
“I skate because it’s fun. I’m not making any money off skateboarding, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to quit skating and get a track bike and find myself. Just do you. That’s what Harold told me. Do you, kid.”
On May 2 at Max Fish, Swipple Art Collective opens its third annual art show. Recently we interviewed Steve MacDonald, one of the members who will be appearing in the show. If you enjoyed his work, here’s your chance to see it and other great art in person. The show runs through June 2.
Max Fish NYC
178 Ludlow Street, between E. Houston and Stanton
Zaq Landsberg
End Times, a group show by Jacob Cohen, Zaq Landsberg, Scooter Sebastian and Emily C. Thomas, is going up at the Barney Building (34 Stuyvesant Street) and will open Sunday, April 22 at 6 PM and run through April 30. Yes, that is an Apache helicopter being built in the gallery.
Jacob Cohen
REMO and FORE dissed the freshly finished OMNI mural on Houston and Bowery. That’s how it goes.
Sean Star Wars has a reputation for making badass woodcuts and drinking tons of Mountain Dew. With no plans to slow down on the work or the dew, he’s plastering every square foot of the Ad Hoc Gallery (49 Bogart St, Brooklyn) with hundreds or thousands of his southern style woodcuts for Wall to Wall Woodcut Chaos, which opens Friday, April 27 from 6 to 10.
Check out more of Sean’s woodcuts at www.seanstarwars.com.
You’re constantly referred to as an outlaw printmaker, and it seems appropriate. How does this title differ from a regular printmaker?
There is a core group of printmakers that coexist in the real art world as well as the virtual reality of academia. They are well known within that artificial world and largely looked upon with disgust, or disdain. The problem is that they make prints that people want to look at. Big prints of ugly faces with bug eyes buck teeth and drooling mouths for example, prints with impolite content like shit eating kids, cannibal pigs, war victim/soldiers, pirates, wolves, child molesting clowns. That group includes Tom Huck, Dennis Mcnett, Bill Fick, and a handful of others including myself. We make prints that are the archenemy of the kind of bullshit stuff that universities have been teaching kids to make for the last 25 years. No science diagrams, no cancer cell studies, no quiet whispering prints dressed up in frilly gowns. We make holes in teeth, as they say.
Since Rehab it’s all changed. Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black is blowing up all over the place. Now MeLo-X got inspired and got to work on an album full of remixed songs and instrumentals.
Listen to Back to Black Remix.
Don’t sleep on Pharoah Monch’s Rehab remix either.
In Neistat Brothers style, Yogurt Vs Gasoline documents a race through Manhattan from the Upper East Side to Lower Manhattan between the filmmakers, Van and Casey Neistat. Van rides a 1974 Schwinn roadster down the Hudson River Greenway, fueled by a dollar’s worth of yogurt, while Casey rides a Ducati motorcycle through Manhattan gridlock, fueled by gasoline and the coffee and cigarettes he had for breakfast. If you’ve spent any time biking or driving in NYC you already know who finishes first, but enjoy the film’s lighthearted reminder.
The Neistat Brothers have also proved riding a bike through the Holland tunnel can be faster than driving, though not legal nor encouraged. And 31,000 calories, the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline, will get you a whole lot further on a bicycle than in a car, the equivalent of 633 miles per gallon.
