F

Flavorwire

Kenny Scharf

New York

10 Offbeat Artists Who Are Keeping the Old, Weird New York Alive

By Lori Zimmer on

You moved to New York City for a reason — the culture, the 24-hour bodegas, the street meat, the crazies, the art — and the weirdness that makes New York, New York. Despite the influx of luxury towers and khaki-pantsed nerds, these artists keep on keeping weird, helping to make New York one of the most awesome places on Earth. … Read More

Art

Preview a Bunch of Colorful New Canvases from Kenny Scharf

By Caroline Stanley on

As longtime fans of street-art pioneer and pop art icon Kenny Scharf, we were excited to learn that he has an exhibition of new work opening today at Honor Fraser in LA. Hodepodge, his second solo show with the gallery, features the downtown legend working across all mediums; among the pieces on display you’ll find colorful paintings imbued with Scharf’s signature optimism, hanging sculptures created from trash he found on Brazilian beaches, one of his famed “Cosmic Cavern” black light installations, and a customized magnetic sea and powder blue Cadillac that nods at The Jetsons.

“I grew up in LA in the ’50s and the ’60s and that whole promise of the future was very much ingrained in my aesthetic,” Scharf explained to us in 2009. “Back then, everything had a futuristic tinge — the cars and the fast food and the supermarkets. That kind of Googie architecture not only shapes things visually, it shapes your mind too because it’s pounding in, ‘the future’s going to be great!’ As a little kid, I believed it. I thought I was going to buy a ticket and go to space. As I got older, as the ’70s set-in, and cars turned boxy, and everything got beige, I was like, ‘I don’t like this design aesthetic so I’m just going to continue this fantasy which I love.’ I didn’t want to give up on it so I’m doing it in my work.”

If you were a fan of the brightly-colored blob characters that populated his recent Bowery mural, you’ll want to click through now to preview a few of the paintings that will be up through May 19th. … Read More

News

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. “I think there are some ages, like the one we’re living in, when the game is kind of rigged towards products that contain music – sort of like those cheap drinks you get in a bad supermarket where it says, ‘Contains 10% juice.’” – Record Store Day 2012 ambassador Iggy Pop reflects… Read More

Television

A Bunch of Famous Street Artists Will Cameo on ‘The Simpsons’

By Caroline Stanley on

Think about the last time that The Simpsons made headlines for something other than ugly salary negotiations — it was that Banksy-helmed opening credit sequence back in 2010. Perhaps in an effort to recapture some of that art world relevancy, the Fox animated series plans to bring on Shepard Fairey, Ron English, Kenny Scharf and… Read More

Art

Pic of the Day: Kenny Scharf and JR Unwittingly Collaborate

By Caroline Stanley on

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… Read More

Art

Take a Cross-Country Public Art Road Trip

By Rozalia Jovanovic on

With Rob Pruitt’s sleek monument to Andy Warhol recently unveiled in Union Square and Sol Lewitt’s modular structures being installed in City Hall Park (both installations are presented by New York’s Public Art Fund), we’ve been contemplating innovative art that’s accessible outside the traditional context of museums and galleries. In the coming weeks as you take to city streets, benches, park lawns, (and garages!) keep an eye out for what’s going up around you. That skeletal advertising billboard may not be an actual advertising billboard but one of three works by artist Kim Beck. In celebration of Beck, Lewitt, Pruitt and other artists whose work is on public display this spring, take a virtual road trip with us from New York to Seattle to explore some of the most exciting works, both recently unveiled or well-renowned, in some Flavorpill cities. … Read More

Art

Gallery: Street Artists Reinterpret Martha Cooper’s Iconic Photos

By Tanja M. Laden on

Photographer Martha Cooper is best known for documenting the New York City graffiti scene during its heyday in the 1970s. After graduating from college at 19 with an art degree, the Baltimore native served in the Peace Corps, studied ethnology at Oxford, and worked as a staff photographer for the New York Post. A new exhibit at LA’s Carmichael Gallery, Martha Cooper: Remix features images by the legendary photographer, as well as tributes by the likes of Kenny Scharf, Shepard Fairey, Lady Pink, and dozens of others. Click through below to see works by contemporary street artists alongside Cooper’s inspiring original photographs. … Read More

Art

Kenny Scharf’s Delectable Donut Paintings

By Paul Laster on

Kenny Scharf is on a roll — again. The old-school street artist and new-school pop artist is making some of his best work ever and getting high visibility for it. His 2009 Wynwood Walls mural is one of the Miami project’s liveliest paintings, and his Cosmic Cavern installation in an Air Stream trailer there in December was a showstopper that had skate-kids lining up to get a peek. Scharf’s mural at Houston and Bowery in New York — a site made famous for graffiti art by his bud Keith Haring — has garnered lots of media attention for its mutating heads, and continuous maintenance and his upcoming Gatescapes project, which features 100 spray-paintings on storefront shutters, is already getting a buzz. … Read More

Art

Kenny Scharf’s New Bowery Mural

By Caroline Stanley on

Over the weekend graffiti artist Kenny Scharf put the finishing touches on a new large-scale painting, the fifth installment in the Bowery mural series. A joint project from The Hole gallery and Tony Goldman, the real-estate developer who owns the concrete space at the corner of Bowery and Houston, the series began with a re-creation of a Keith Haring painting from 1982, and continued with murals by Os Gemeos, Shepard Fairey, and Barry McGee. Click through for a closer look at Scharf’s mural, as well as images of the previous murals that have occupied the space. … Read More

Art

Kenny Scharf and Dearraindrop’s Hot Glue Hullabaloo

By Paul Laster on

Taking a lesson from the Deitch Projects playbook of mixing multi-generational artists, Deitch disciples Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman, who run The Hole in Soho, have combined NYC’s ’80s downtown art legend Kenny Scharf with the ’00s energetic Virginia Beach art collective Dearraindrop to make a phantasmagorical mashup for our otherwise staid modern times. Although Scharf’s involvement is kind of Kenny-lite, the inspiration he provides for Dearraindrop, particularly lead member Joe Grillo, is gigantic. Scharf shows some signature graffiti wall murals, a work on paper of one of his Cosmic Donuts, and collaborates with the Dearraindrop team of Grillo and the brother/sister members Billy and Laura Grant on a painting, promotional sticker, and a mini-blacklight disco, which apes Scharf’s infamous Cosmic Cavern installations. … Read More