So how’s this for an interesting byproduct of Hurricane Irene: The mural by French street artist (and $100,000 TED prize winner) JR that went up on Bowery earlier this summer was semi-washed away in the storm, allowing the Kenny Scharf artwork lurking underneath to peek through. While we like the resulting image a bit more than the original (finally, that face has some color!), we’re not sure JR would agree. Photo credit: ANIMALNewYork

Next month in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art will present Art in the Streets, the first major US museum show to examine street art and graffiti in the context of contemporary art history, and by all accounts, a bit of a coming out party for new museum director Jeffery Deitch. The exhibition will showcase installations by 50 artists, including Swoon, Shepard Fairey, Os Gemeos, and JR, and will reunite Steve Powers, Todd James, and Barry McGee for a new iteration of their legendary Street Market show. There will also be a custom skate ramp in the museum designed by pro-skater Lance Mountain and artist Geoff McFetridge, with live demonstrations by the Nike SB skate team. While the show doesn’t officially open until April 17th, in the meantime you can click through to preview a few images. And New Yorkers, take solace: Art in the Streets moves to the Brooklyn Museum next March.

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Even if you don’t realize it, you already know the work of Serge Gay, Jr., a third generation Haitian artist currently living in San Francisco. His crazy illustrations provided the backdrop for Cee-Lo Green’s “Fuck You,” and scored him and director Matt Stawski a Grammy nomination for Best Short Form Music Video. But that’s not this emerging artist’s only tie to pop culture; along with working on videos for Train and Snoop Dogg, he has also created work inspired by the films of Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, as well as a crazy portrait of Rihanna. Click through to check out some of his paintings, and if you like what you see head over to 1xrun.com for Flavorpill Fridays, where a signed, limited-edition print of Hair Dress — today’s Flavorpill cover art! — is currently up for grabs.

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Parisian street-art photographer JR has always worked on a large scale, but in his newest project, he’s standing on the shoulders of giants. For Unframed, he collaborated with the Musée de l’Elysée and Festival Images to decorate the facades of the Swiss city of Vevey with giant reproductions of famous images by such diverse photographers as Man Ray, Robert Capa, Lucia Moholy, and Sebastião Salgado. The result is a truly democratic (not to mention utterly breathtaking) project that thrusts established masterpieces into the world of 21st-century street art. See more images from Unframed after the jump.

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The GOOD 100 is a compendium of people, ideas, and programs changing our planet for the better.

Put together by GOOD magazine, the online version of the list has added five innovative subjects each day in October, hitting the full 100 today. With picks ranging from a small Australian town’s bottled-water boycott to a teacher-salary initiative started by the leaders of 826, the savvy editors have compiled dozens of sources of inspiration, culled from an array of entries and their own archive.
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