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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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There is life after Deitch. Now that the dynamic art dealer has assumed his new position as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, his former staff members are carving out places of their own in the New York art world.

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported on the opening of the Hole — a collaborative art space run by former Deitch Projects directors Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman in SoHo — and on Friday the gallery sent out news of its first show, Not Quite Open for Business, which features unfinished art, unfinished poems, and unfinished symphonies by 20 renegade artists in an installation designed by Taylor McKimens. Seeking an inside look at the project and the related personalities, we surfed Grayson’s blog, Art From Behind, and grabbed some images that provide a playful view of the situation in flux.

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It was still hot and humid on Friday so we began the day with the Nada Art Fair at the Deauville, a sprawling, shabby-chic hotel that hosted the fair in the lobby and two ballrooms. The Richelieu room featured galleries with solo exhibitions, which were far better than what was on view in the group show hangings in the Napoleon room. Highlights included Brendan Fowler’s canceled concert posters in fractured frames at Rental; Patrick Jackson’s stacked sculptures of kitsch objects at Francois Ghebally Gallery; and Scott Hug’s pie chart pieces at John Connelly Presents. We ran into Kavi Gupta in the lobby and he invited us to an impromptu celebration at the hotel’s Tiki Bar so we stopped looking at art long enough to enjoy a mojito by the pool.

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Click here to view a slideshow of photos from Miami>>

Art Basel Miami Beach week started this year with yesterday’s Design Miami opening. Swiss Messe, ABMB’s parent company, is part owner of DM and decided to let the little sister bow first. It made for a lively day at the fair, however some of the celebrities that fly into town just in time for the ABMB opening seemed to be missing. The only star spotting at DM — other than the band OK Go, which was performing at the fair — was Naomi Campbell, although we later crossed paths with Pharrell Williams at the opening for Friends With You’s new shop in the Miami Design District.

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Partners & Spade is the latest venture from New York’s unlikeliest fashion-lifestyle-design impresario: married to a handbag institution, brother to Dickie Roberts, Former Child Star, Andy Spade has put some of the proceeds from the sale of wife Kate’s eponymous line of apparel towards opening his new brand-consultancy studio and storefront on Great Jones Street in NoHo with partner Anthony Sperduti. Open weekends only (weekdays by appointment), Partners & Spade is a rumpus room for Spade’s select band of merry consumerist pranksters; last month, artist Mike Mills stuffed the place with an entire collection devoted to the year 1971, while Maira Kalman assembled a saleable shrine of items made by her late husband, graphic designer Tibor Kalman. Now the circle of fun has widened, with the opening last week of a show curated by Paper editrix and cultural switchboard Kim Hastreiter. Read More »