Now that your student ID gives you free admission to a number of NYC museums, you should really be looking at art and enriching yourself as a cultural person. Except museums are, like, so far away.
Never fear! NYU is surrounded by beautiful and bizarre street art, much of which you may unknowingly pass on your way to class. Here’s the best of what you might have missed in East and Greenwich Villages:
Black light graffiti:
Last night ABC Home hosted a “Love In Action” conversation with street artist JR and Deepak Chopra. JR is a contemporary artist who won the 2011 TED Prize—a $100,000 award—and Deepak Chopra is an Indian alternative-medicine doctor and writer on subjects of spirituality and mind-body medicine.
The conversation centered around JR’s new project, Inside Out—a large-scale participatory piece that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of public artwork.
Deepak Chopra began the conversation by asking about JR‘s background. The artist explained that as a French teenager, only thirteen when he started making street art, he wrote his name in graffiti around Paris as “a way of saying, ‘I am here, I exist.’”
New York and its inhabitants are known for a lot of things, but being sweet and polite is not one of them. Thankfully, some subway artist has taken it upon himself to remind New Yorkers that politeness is a quality worth valuing. Jason Shelowitz creates fake MTA subway signs urging things like, “Keep your fingers out of your nose. Please.” Shelowitz told NY Mag, “I decided to focus on some sociological issues that many people have within the NYC subway system.” This is the best example of art for public good that I have seen in a long time, but I have to wonder if these signs will actually stop creepy dudes from standing really close to me on a completely empty subway car.
I’m kind of old fashioned when it comes to manners, in that I think manners are something people should proudly possess and wield accordingly. This puts me at odds with the majority of New Yorkers and with almost all subway riders. In that sense, I’m happy we have Jason to remind people not to clip their fingernails on the subway. I dream to one day live in an Utopian society inhabited mostly by robots who are programmed to act no way but properly in public. Also, they won’t even have fingernails to clip.
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Wait, does that mean I can see some Banksy?
Most people know very little about graffiti – what it means, how it’s created, who makes it. And in New York, it can be hard to find anything worth taking a 2nd glance at if you don’t know where to look.
Gabe Schoenberg (Gallatin ’11) [disclosure: he is a personal friend] wants to change that. After discovering that New York City didn’t have anyone offering a tour of notable graffiti, he decided to fill that void. Later this month, he will guide his 1st graffiti and street art tour. Read more…
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David Byrne, best known for founding the New York band Talking Heads, contributes these days to the art scene through a notably different medium; in collaboration with the city’s Department of Transportation and the art gallery PaceWildenstein, he’s designed nine unique bike racks spread throughout the city.
