Cross Street Magazine

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CROSS CROSS STREET

STREET MAGAZINE

VOL. 1

ISSUE 1

URBAN ARTS & CULTURE

FAIRLY FAIR USE FAIREY TED Prize Winner JR

FAME Fest 2010 Recap

MOCA WHITEWASHES BLU Slinchachi-Small Streets THE WORK OF BARRY MCGEE

“I’d like to thank the Academe,” - love Banksy The Collectors of Wooseter Collective

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Who Owns Banksy? POWER HOUSE PROJECT OF DETROIT

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Hello and Welcome to the first issue of Cross Street, a magazine dedicated to street art and urban culture.

CROSS STREET MAGAZINE

VOL. 1

ISSUE 1

We are excited to offer you news and art from the growing street and urban art movement in contemporary art. Over the past decade, street art has been growing as a legitimized art form that has moved from the streets into galleries, museums, and the homes of established art collectors. Artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sheppard Fairey, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen and Banksy are just a few who have gotten their start by using the street as a enduring inspiration and laboratory for new concepts and to reach a massive audience.

Loaded with a rawness that is uniquely urban, Street Art is appealing because it reflects a larger notion of public consciousness and opinion in an open forum. Stemming from the simplest forms of graffiti, artists are establishing the underlying principles of street art to a craft that elevates dilapidated or mundane spaces in the urban landscape to objects of creative and artistic fodder.

This being our first issue we would also like to layout the structure of our magazine which is divided into two sections: Piece and Tag. Each issue , Piece will offer articles about the latest in news from the street art scene and interviews with your favorite artists and figures. Tag will feature overall eye candy with minimal text in the form of a photo essay about particular artist or festival. The sections are aptly named to reference street art vocabulary, pairing more detailed features of the articles and images found in Piece with quick visual tidbits found in Tag. For our inaugural issue we are excited to congratulate French Photographer and street artist JR, who is the winner of this year’s TED Prize. Known for his compassionate portraits in projects spanning from Paris to Kenya to the Israeli and Palestinian Border we are pleased to honor his impressive and thought provoking body of work with a curated retrospective of his most memorable projects. We also sit down with artist Barry McGee to hear more about his rise to one of the most prominent street artists crossing into the commercial art scene. His cheeky interview goes to show that you can take the artist out of the street, but you can’t street out of the artist. Finally, we interview members of Detroit’s Power House Project (powered by our friends at Juxtapoz) and some of the biggest champions of street art, Marc and Sara Schiller of the Wooster Collective.

This month’s Tag is a recap of the 2010 edition of FAME Festival held in Grottaglie, Italy, which hosted an all-star roster of artists from all over the world. We have gathered the best works from the Festival lasting the whole year until late September. FAME Festival organizers are setting an inspiring example of how urban art can be used to enhance “aesthetically depressed” areas of the urban landscape. We are already looking forward to next year’s Festival, but hope you will enjoy going back over the amazing work created last year.

We hope you enjoy this first issue of Cross Street and continue to check us out every month for rich photographs and dialogs from the most preeminent figures in street art. We encourage your feedback and responses to this issue.

Thank you!

-Brittany Truex

PUBLISHER, EDITOR IN CHIEF.

CROSS STREET STAFF

ASSOCIATE WEB EDITORS Nick Myette James Davidson

PUBLISHER, EDITOR IN CHIEF

ART DIRECTION & DESIGN

Brittany Truex

Brenna Marketello

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Abbey Carlstrom

SENIOR EDITOR Kelsey Cole

MANAGING EDITOR Ruth Arellano

GENERAL MANAGER, DIGITAL MEDIA & MARKETING Andrea Drake

MANAGING DIRECTORS, CIRCULATION Tony Tran Sara Sheridan

Ryan Diaz Rachel Wan

WEB CONSULTANTS Lola Migas Carolyn Schuetz Sophie Milton

EDITORS AT LARGE Derek Chan & Jessica Katona

INTERNS JaKeith L. Hairston Erin Hawkins Kait Howard Samuel Jablon Katharine Loselle

WEB EDITOR

Cameron Milne

Jeremy Juel

Cary Potter

ARCHIVE EDITOR Erica Coombs

DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT & EDUCATION Nicole Ramirez

Forrest Muelrath Anna Rigby

PROOFREADERS Annabelle Gould Carol Truex

PIECE|VOL. 1 ISSUE 1

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A curated photographic

retrospective

Shepard Fairey takes on the AP

An interview with one of street art’s hottest artists

and Gina about the past year of Power House

talk about their personal collection and what they look or in their favorite works

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Fairly Fair Use Fairey

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Barry McGee aka Twist

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SLINKACHU 2010

JR Wins TED PRIZE 2011

Detroit Power House Productions An interview with Matt

Marc & Sara Schiller of Wooster Collective Collectors Marc and Sara

JR

PIECE | JR

WINS

TED PRIZE

2011 It’s not common for important philanthropic prizes to go to people whose work involves criminal trespass and who make statements like the following:“You never know who’s part of the police and who’s not.”

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by Randy Kennedy

But the TED conference, the California lecture series named for its roots in technology, entertainment and design, said on Tuesday that it planned to give its annual $100,000 prize for 2011—awarded in the past to figures like Bill Clinton, Bono and the biologist E. O. Wilson—to the Parisian street artist known as JR, a shadowy figure who has made a name for himself by plastering colossal photographs in downtrodden neighborhoods around the world. The images usually extol local residents, to whom he has become a Robin Hood-like hero.

For most recipients, the value of the six-yearold award has less to do with the money than with the opportunity it grants the winner to make a “wish”: to devote the funds to a humanitarian project that will almost inevitably draw donations and other help from the organization’s corporate partners and influential supporters. The chef Jamie Oliver, the 2010 prize winner, recently proposed setting up an international effort to further his campaign against obesity; Mr. Clinton’s wish has channeled significant resources toward the creation of a rural health system in Rwanda.

Reached by telephone on Wednesday morning on a bus in Shanghai, where he was headed to work on a largely unauthorized photo-pasting project to draw attention to the city’s demolition of historic neighborhoods, JR said that he had learned of the prize only two weeks ago and that he had not yet had time to think of a wish.

But he said that it would undoubtedly involve his kind of guerrilla art, which he has been creating with the help of volunteers in slums in Brazil, Cambodia and Kenya—where the outsize photographs, printed on waterproof vinyl, doubled as new roofs for ramshackle houses. “I’m kind of stunned,” he said of the prize. “I’ve never applied for an award in my life and didn’t know that somebody had nominated me for this.”

At a time when street art is being embraced not only by the art world but also by branding interests, JR, who dislikes being called a street artist, preferring the term “photograffeur” (graffeur is French for graffiti artist) has become known for rejecting corporate sponsorship offers and other

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outside help. He said that he reinvested most of the money he makes by selling his art in galleries and at auction—one piece went for more than $35,000 at Sotheby’s in 2009—into creating more ambitious projects, and that he would use the TED prize money for the same purpose.

“If there’s one thing I’ve always taken care of with my work, it’s that it’s never an advertisement for anything other than the work itself and for the people it’s about—no ‘Coca-Cola presents,’ ” he said, speaking in English. “I think the TED people knew that that was one of my main concerns, and I feel pretty sure that we can come up with a project that works that way.”

Amy Novogratz, the director of the prize, said that picking an artist like JR—he is 27 and fiercely protective of his anonymity, identifying himself only by his initials—was an unusual choice but that the prize committee felt that his work could “catalyze the whole TED community” to support an artcentered philanthropic project, which will be announced at the organization’s next conference in March.

“One of my concerns at first was that he wasn’t going to be accessible or available, which could be off-putting when you’re trying to get partners to get excited about a project,” she added. And, in fact, the first time prize officials had a Skype conversation with the artist, he appeared in sunglasses with a hat pulled low over his forehead.

“But then he said, ‘You know, I trust you guys,’ and he took them off,” Ms. Novogratz said, “and we just had a regular old conversation.”

During the interview on Wednesday morning, J R said that he had not been nearly as trusting of Chinese officials, as he and a crew of helpers erect towering pictures of elderly Shanghai residents on the walls of a neighborhood that is now more than three-quarters demolished.

“I keep thinking we are going to get into trouble,” he said, adding that anyone he talks to might be an undercover police officer. But then he described an illegal act: pasting a 20-foottall wrinkled face around the facade of an old water tower he spotted from the highway.

“We went into the building next door, and it was empty, and we went up to the tower, and nobody stopped us, so we just started working,” he said. “It’s crazy. This city is so huge and overgrown, the more you’re in the middle of things, the more you feel transparent.”

PIECE | SECTION

JR: A self-annotated retrospective 2006–2010

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“The real heroes are sometimes not where you think they are. They are right there in the street everywhere around you.”

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PIECE | JR

“…I chose the women as subjects, because I think that the women reveal the whole condition of the society. I started to look for anonymous women who are daily heroes. I photographed them and pasted their photos in their own city. Pasted on trains, I was able to make their story travel. In Kenya, we used vinyl so that was placed over the roofs of their houses so that it would protect them from the rain.”

WOMEN ARE HEROS

2008

NAIROBI ,KENYA

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“ I came back into the neighborhood [Clichy Montfermeil] in 2006, to take their photographs with my trust. And I started pasting them in the East of Paris, and in the bourgeois areas.

And you go from someone in the media that you can’t recognize to someone who’s door you can go and knock at, because on the photo there’s his name, his age and even his building number.” ­

FACES OF A GENERATION

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2006

PARIS, FRANCE

PIECE | JR

“In the same media that I saw the suburbs, I saw, everyday the Middle East conflict. So with my friend Marco we decided to go there, and we realized, that we were the ones who had to photograph them, and face them face to face on both sides of the wall. So not an Israeli or a Palestinian, could have done that project. We asked them to portray their caricatures, and we pasted them without any authorizations on both sides. We thought we would be kidnapped, that we would be arrested, and we just came back with sunburns!�

FACES2FACE PROJECT

2007

ISRAELI / PALESTINIAN BORDER

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“It’s crazy. This city is so huge and overgrown, the more you’re in the middle of things, the more you feel transparent.”

WRINKLES OF THE CITY

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2010

SHANGHAI,CHINA

PIECE | SHEPPARD FAIREY

fairly

fair-use

fairey

A longtime rebel with a history of breaking rules, Fairey has said he found the photograph using Google Images. He released the image on his website shortly after he created it, in early 2008, and made thousands of posters for the street.

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by HILLEL ITALIE with contributor Phillip Elliott, writer for the AP

On buttons, posters and Web sites, the image was everywhere during last year’s presidential campaign: a pensive Barack Obama looking upward, as if to the future, splashed in a Warholesque red, white and blue and underlined with the caption HOPE. Designed by Shepard Fairey, a Los-Angeles based street artist, the image has led to sales of hundreds of thousands of posters and stickers, and has become so much in demand that copies signed by Fairey have been purchased for thousands of dollars on eBay 2011.

The image, Fairey has acknowledged, is based on an Associated Press photograph, taken in April 2006 by Mannie Garcia on assignment for the AP at the National Press Club in Washington.

The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation. Fairey disagrees.

“The Associated Press has determined that the photograph used in the poster is an AP photo and that its use required permission,” the AP’s director of media relations, Paul Colford, said in a statement. “AP safeguards its assets and looks at these events on a case-by-case basis. We have reached out to Mr. Fairey’s attorney and are in discussions. We hope for an amicable solution.”

“We believe fair use protects Shepard’s right to do what he did here,” says Fairey’s lawyer, Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University and a lecturer at the Stanford Law School. “It wouldn’t be appropriate to comment beyond that at this time because we are in discussions about this with the AP.” Fair use is a legal concept that allows exceptions to copyright law, based on, among other factors, how much of the original is used, what the new work is used for and how the original is affected by the new work.

Legal experts offered differing views on the Obama image.

Jane Ginsburg, a Columbia University law professor who specializes in copyright cases, questioned whether Fairey has a valid fair-use claim and says that he should have at least credited the AP.

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“What makes me uneasy is that it kind of suggests that anybody’s photograph is fair game, even if it uses the entire image, and it remains recognizable, and it’s not just used in a collage,” Ginsburg said. “I think that’s pretty radical.”

Robin Gross, an intellectual property attorney who heads IP Justice, an international civil liberties organization, believes that Fairey had the right to use the photo, saying that he intended it for a political cause, not commercial use.

“Fairey’s purpose of the use for the photo was political or civic, and this will certainly count in favor of the poster being a fair use,” said Gross, based in San Francisco. “Nor will the poster diminish the value of the photo, if anything, it has increased the original photo’s value beyond measure, another factor counting heavily in favor of fair use.”

A longtime rebel with a history of breaking rules, Fairey has said he found the photograph using Google Images. He released the image on his Web site shortly after he created it, in early 2008, and made thousands of posters for the street.

As it caught on, supporters began downloading the image and distributing it at campaign events, while blogs and other Internet sites picked it up. Fairey has said that he did not receive any of the money raised.

A former Obama campaign official said they were well aware of the image based on the picture taken by Garcia, a temporary hire no longer with the AP, but never licensed it or used it officially. The Obama official asked not to be identified because no one was authorized anymore to speak on behalf of the campaign.

The image’s fame did not end with the election. It will be included this month at a Fairey exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and a mixed-media stenciled collage version has been added to the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

“The continued use of the poster, regardless of whether it is for galleries or other distribution, is part of the discussion AP is having with Mr. Fairey’s representative,” Colford said.

A New York Times book on the election, just published by Penguin Group (USA), includes the image. A Vermont-based publisher, Chelsea Green, also used it—credited solely to Fairey­­—as the cover for Robert Kuttner’s “Obama’s Challenge,” an economic manifesto released in September. Chelsea Green President Margo Baldwin said that Fairey did not ask for money, only that the publisher make a donation to the National Endowment for the Arts.

“It’s a wonderful piece of art, but I wish he had been more

PIECE | SHEPPARD FAIREY

careful about the licensing of it,” said Baldwin, who added that Chelsea Green gave $2,500 to the NEA. Fairey also used the AP photograph for an image designed specially for the Obama inaugural committee, which charged anywhere from $100 for a poster to $500 for a poster signed by the artist.

Fairey has said that he first designed the image a year ago after he was encouraged by the Obama campaign to come up with some kind of artwork.

Last spring, he showed a letter to The Washington Post that came from the candidate.

“Dear Shepard,” the letter reads. “I would like to thank you for using your talent in support of my campaign. The political messages involved in your work have encouraged Americans to believe they can help change the status quo. Your images have a profound effect on people, whether seen in a gallery or on a stop sign.”

At first, Obama’s team just encouraged him to make an image, Fairey has said. But soon after he created it, a worker involved in the campaign asked if Fairey could make an image from a photo to which the campaign had rights.

“I donated an image to them, which they used.

It was the one that said “Change” underneath it.

And then later on I did another one that said “Vote” underneath it, that had Obama smiling,” he said in a December 2008 interview with an underground photography Web site.

Fair use is a legal concept that allows exceptions to copyright law, based on, among other factors, how much of the original is used, what the new work is used for and how the original is affected by the new work.

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Barry McGee aka

twist

by ANDREW JEFFREY WRIGHT

Other artists blazed the trail that brought graffiti from the urban landscape into galleries. But no street or graffiti artist who came before Barry “Twist” McGee had executed the transition with such finesse. Born in San Francisco in 1966, a city he continues to make his home, Twist began painting graffiti in 1984 at the age of 18. He began showing his work in local galleries, slowly building a following, and, in 1991, he received a Bachelor of Fine Art in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. This was quickly followed by grants and fellowships—one notably sent him to Brazil, where he observed clustered framed artworks displayed in churches. McGee incorporated this presentation style into his art shows, which brought a kinetic, urban immediacy to the staid gallery space.

As he earned an increasingly prolific presence in the “established” art scene, Twist continued to remain relevant to the street art movement. He was featured in the prestigious Venice Biennal in 2001, and now, his work often sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars. His immense popularity has helped legitimatize the street art genre, pavfrom: MIND THE GAP, WITH PHIL FROST 2009

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ing the way for superstars like Banksy and SWINDLE’s own Shepard Fairey. And still, he hits the streets with his illegal graffiti, where his pieces rarely get painted over by other artists—though city cleaning crews frequently buff over his work.

As his work in galleries rises in value, his work on the street is considered an eyesore by the general public. This is an irony that seems to fascinate Twist. As he told PBS’s Art 21, “There could be a rooftop that is just sitting dormant for a while, and someone goes up there and does an amazing piece of graffiti…

And that is removed and two months later there’s a huge billboard over the whole spot anyway.” In 2006, Twist fell into some controversy. He worked with Adidas to create a limitededition shoe, emblazoning it with a “Ray Fong” caricature of a buck-toothed, bowl-cut Asian boy. Asian- American groups accused Twist and Adidas of being “racist.” It was picked up in the international news. Finally, in defense, Erik Nakamura, one of the founders of Giant Robot sent a mass email pointing out that Twist is half-Chinese American, and the Ray Fong image was a depiction of the artist as a young boy. Twist was silent through all this. He hardly ever grants interviews—and lets his work speak for itself.

In a 2002 article on the “Mission School” of Bay Area artists in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, artist Amy Franceschini said of Twist and his wife, fellow street artist Margaret Kilgal-

PIECE | BARRY McGEE

len—who sadly passed away weeks after giving birth to their daughter in 2001—“They are very perceptive, noticing every curve in the road, every inch of a street.” A hallmark of Twist’s artwork is his zen-like understanding of composition and context.

Philadelphia-based artist Andrew Jeffrey Wright has collaborated with Twist on ‘zine projects and gallery shows. Here, exclusively for SWINDLE, the notoriously private Barry McGee opens up to a fellow artist.

Jeffrey Wright: You have a remarkable surfing abil-

ity. When I surf with you I see you catch wave after wave, only paddling two or three times to catch a wave. How long have you been surfing?

Barry McGee: I started my senior year of high school in 1984. I was really into riding BMX at the time, but had an accident messing around on my Cooks Brothers. I broke a femur bone. I was loosely interested in skateboarding and I had a subscription to Skateboarding, but mid stride the magazine turned into a hybrid of sorts: Action Now. It had BMX, skateboarding, surfing, sandboarding—all those things combined with music of the time. I remember I was in the hospital, in a cast, reading this magazine, and thinking surfing might be a good thing to get involved in. As soon as I was out of that cast a friend and I were cutting out skimboards in woodshop class.

Did you go right to long boarding or did you do short boards first? I had a friend that I started with, Manny Miranda. We were both in high school together. I bought a used 8-foot Local Motion surfboard, and he bought a 7-foot-6 Seatrend, and we just learned surfing that way. We went to Rockaway Beach, it was the first place we tried. It was the closest beach to our high school that our car could make it to. We tried for a long time. It’s a fairly hard sport to learn in crappy conditions and cold water.

You had no one teaching you, you just went out here? We just kept on going… and a few weeks later we started standing up. I remember getting up and riding waves pretty OK and as soon as that happened we decided it was time to get the latest short boards of the time, after about two months.

We traded in the used boards and got a 6-foot-2 Bessell Quad and 5-foot-2 Stussy Quad.

So you were out there every day for two months? Yes, but our learning curve went downhill really fast after that.

We went from catching waves to sitting around a lot in the ocean trying to catch waves.

Eventually you took a big road trip down to South America in a van or something like that? Yes, in 1988 we drove to Central and South America in a ‘71 Volkswagen bus. It started off as just a surf trip, driving as far as we could. We brought $1,000 each and that lasted a year. We had 500 of it in travelers checks, and somewhere around the eighth month

we “lost” our travelers checks. It was the first real trip I took. I was 21.

Tell me more about what the 1980’s were like for you. I heard you were in a scooter crew or something like that? I was into scooters for a little bit. It was a good scene—skinheads, punks and transgender artist types.

Ronald Reagan was our president at the time.

Did your scooter crew have a name? No, there were some guys I hung out with that did graffiti and rode scooters—this guy Ken Bowen and Zotz.

That’s how I got into graffiti; Zotz was the one who handed me the spray can. He’s the first person that said, “Barry, lets go… it’s time to catch tags.”

What was your first graffiti alias? I wrote Twist.

There was this scooter magazine at the time called Twist, so I took that name.

This was in 1982? No, ’85.

1985? That means I was doing graffiti before you.

You did graffiti pre ’85? Were you breakdancing too?

Yeah. OK, you win. You must have did [sic] it when we were really young. You need to be secure with the dates, though. Like when you do graffiti, you put the date after it. You should have wrote, “Comic Kid 1980.

Before Zotz handed you the can, did you even think about graffiti? Well, growing up I remember seeing the classics, such as “W.P.O.D.” and “smoke weed.” As a youth my grandmother lived in San Francisco, and we would always go to her house on the weekends. There was this tunnel, the Broadway tunnel, and there was a pig somebody spray painted at the end of the tunnel.

And that put the seed in you? I don’t know, I remember seeing it and couldn’t figure out why somebody didn’t like pigs. The word “fuck” was painted above it. I knew what the word fuck meant but I didn’t know cops were pigs. It probably took like a year or two to figure it out. I knew it was weird. I often wonder what my life would be like if this piece of graffiti history wasn’t in my childhood.

When you did start, did you look to anybody for stylistic inspiration? Oh certainly, there was a guy who used to write “Plato” from Oakland.

And you liked what he was writing? No, it wasn’t so much what he was writing, he had this character next to his tags. Plato had all kinds of tags up, and next to his tag he had this Don Martin style character with a big hairdo. Zotz had a cowboy fellow inside his “o.” So I just assumed that you were supposed to put a character with your tag or integrate it with it. Shit, this was the ‘80s anything was possible…

Like the drawing of the dude with the hat and the beard and a nose…Uh—yes—it was supposed to be a skeleton, but you just look at the walls and know that that’s Zotz, that’s Plato. They stood out from the plain ol’ tags on walls of that time.

I don’t know, I remember seeing it and couldn’t figure out why somebody didn’t like pigs.

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UNTITLED (GEOMETRIC)

2008

WATER WALL

2004

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NVG MELBOURNE/ AU

PIECE | BARRY McGEE

I can only assume it’s just going to get bigger.

Entire skyscrapers covered with gigantic tags.

At least that’s what I hope for.

Where’d your character come from? I’m not sure…

Some parts came from the Rat Bones logo.

It’s like a wiener dog with a lot of legs and a sweater. Is that the first thing you did with absolutely no words, just an image? No, I used to write something with it—like “Kingpin” or something.

I was spray painting all kinds of weird stuff then…

I think I wrote “Disarm,” “MDMA” and “Slam” around that period.

Is that a drug you would take? It was an early form of ecstasy I think.

You took ecstasy in the ‘80s? I think so…

But right now you’re pretty much straightedge?

I am?

Yeah, you don’t do stuff. I tried to drink a beer last night.

Tried to? What happened? Did it disintegrate before it touched your lips? No, I drank one sip out of it. I don’t know what happened to it afterwards. I think it got poured into the sink.

Are you half straightedge still? Oh goddamn. I hate that stupid movement or word or whatever. I mean, I don’t ever try to preach anything to anybody—except total anarchy and chaos—but no, I don’t smoke or drink except one sip of beer every three years to prove I’m American.

So you were born and raised in San Francisco? Yes, born in S.F. I was raised in South San Francisco, a suburb. I really enjoy the San Francisco lifestyle.

It has graffiti that is specific to San Francisco— like the bus hopper style, it’s been around forever.

There are all types of freaks here, which keeps it interesting all the time. It’s a small city, and you

can get around on a bicycle. There’s a good energy here, like no other place that I have been.

Graffiti is no longer just spray paint on a wall. I’m just curious what you think the next innovation will be? I can only assume it’s just going to get bigger. Entire skyscrapers covered with gigantic tags.

At least that’s what I hope for.

I noticed, not because I was looking, but because I have peripheral vision, you don’t wear underwear.

Do you own underwear? I do. I wore underwear maybe three times this year, once in prison.

I wear underwear all the time, feels great. So you had a scooter ‘zine in the ‘80s? I did. It was called Bump Start or Jump Start. It had a lot of pictures of scooters, messed up ones, choppers and strippeddown racers. I remember an article with the Morlocks, an advice column with Walter Alter and a guide to which pills to dance all night long on.

Did the graffiti element get involved in these?

Yes, it was starting to. BBS was a great scooter gang that bombed the muni yards hard—Boast, Beast, Up, Jarski.

Have you ever been caught for graffiti? Yes, I got caught spray painting a derogatory statement about our commander in chief.

How long of a run did you have before you got caught? I had a pretty good run—it wasn’t until 2004. You start to get sloppy when you get older.

I did my eight hours of community time, cleaning up some New York parks. Very rewarding and enlightening experience.

In past conversations, I’ve heard you say how you’re done with a certain artistic element in your

BARRY AND DAUGHTER , ASHA

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INSTALLATION

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2009 SFMOMA

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gallery shows, and how you’re going to make this drastic change. But all the changes within your gallery exhibitions and art are really incremental. How come occasionally you want to do this drastic change but it never happens? Dammit, Andrew, I’m a doctor not a miracle worker. I think change will come some time. It takes me a long time to change.

So you went to art school. Did you ever have any shows that were within the school? Like your senior thesis show? You had to give a proposal for a show, and I did a few shows. It was just like junk all over the floor, drawings, paper, stuff I found on the street. It looked like a squat.

Did your installation resemble what Jonathan Borofsky was doing? Well yes, somewhat, papers all over the floor. I had seen his work in slides or a lecture in art school. I like his work, it’s accessible.

It doesn’t hurt my head looking at it. I met him a few years ago. He was really nice and engaging. I told him we used to have discussions about him in art school.

So then after you get out of college, how do you segue into doing commissions for people outside?

I was just doing graffiti, and working as a printer.

I was in art school trying to figure out what that was about. I didn’t know what that was about. I still don’t know what it’s about. But I was trying to figure out how these people can magically make something and then earn [a living]. It seemed like more of the art than the actual art.

PIECE | BARRY McGEE

Did you ever go through a period where you’re sending in slides to people and trying to get them to look at stuff ? Oh sure. I only sent my stuff to people who asked. I never felt desperate enough to send slides to every silly gallery in town, working the system. For grants, I would do the dance for sure, but only if I was approached by them first.

That sounds like dating So then which came first? I know you did outside pieces legally that were paid for by cities and stuff, right? Art commissions. Were you showing in galleries at that time? Is that how they knew about you? The Luggage Store, a non-profit, was the first gallery that asked me to do something indoors, Laurie and Darryl. I think they saw some of my work on the street, and they invited me to show some work [there]. And I was like “That sounds great.” Through them, a lot of other shows happened at other non-profit and alternative galleries.

You’re working on a publication now, right? Yes, it’s just getting started. It’s called Jesse’s Day. It’s about three straight white males and then Clare and I. It’s gonna have Jesse Gellar, who is from Philadelphia, you and Dan Murphy. It’s going to be 11 x 17 folded, and the covers are going to be 120color silkscreen. It’s going be highly political, yet provocative, with a feminine touch.

So I read in a past interview of yours, this was a while ago, that the next thing you wanted to do was huge tags on the front of museums. Then I

HOUSTON STREET 2010 NYC/NY

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saw a photograph where you did a huge tag on the front of a museum, just like you said you were going to do. Yeah, that was in Detroit at The Museum of Contemporary Art. They said, “What would you like to do with the museum?” and I asked them if I could do a huge throw up on the front. They said, “That sounds great.” I then asked Josh if he would do a huge fill in on the building, and he agreed. It took 178 cans of silver to fill it in. I think it’s still there. To remove it, it will cost $1500.

That’s it? Yeah, a bargain in today’s rapid economy.

Then what are these people complaining about, this whole property damage thing? I have no idea.

It’s not them that’s complaining, it’s the advertisers worried about graffiti infringing on their space.

Would you do art for an alcohol company?

I think I’d do it. Yeah, just not cigarettes and porn.

Would you do it for the army or recruiting? ‘Cause I’m sure they want hip ads. That would be a serious dilemma. I wouldn’t do it for less than $50,000.

I don’t even know if I would do it for that much. I don’t like guns, and I guess I’m a pacifist. I feel like one. But, yeah, I don’t know if I would do that. So the army, cigarettes and porn—I wouldn’t do any drawings for ads for them.

How about Pfizer? I would. Erectile dysfunction— I would do art for any drug dealing with that because the commercials are really funny. I guess when it comes down to it, it’s not as cut and dry as I would like to think it is.

Do you have to turn down a lot of commercial work? It depends on how much I need money that month. Sometimes it works; sometimes it’s embarrassing.

So you don’t watch television. Was there a point in your life where you just said, I’m going to cut the TV off or did you just grow up thinking this isn’t that interesting? After high school, I went to junior college. I took some art classes. I had a teacher there, he was a bit of a hippie, he had his synopsis of what was going to happen throughout the semester, one part was reducing your television intake. A lot of the things he said made a lot of sense. He was just this kind of normal hippie guy, teaching a class at a junior college. I started thinking this teacher is encouraging students to try things that are as radical as anything in the United States. These are all things that Americans do, they sit at home and watch television, they go into work the next day and everyone talks about what happened on Taxi—that’s one of the last shows I watched on television, sorry.

When you started taking art [classes] and realized that’s the direction you were going in, did you ever have a backup plan in case it didn’t work out? Yes, I learned to be a printer. I worked at a print shop, a letterpress shop. They did gold foiling, embossing and die cutting. That was my back-up plan. I used old antiquated machines for high-end architecture firms, letterhead and such. It was really popular for a while. I had a really good boss who

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was a touch new age and a vegetarian. He taught meditation, staring at your eyelids. He was great, Norman Hicks.

You never worked on any screenprinting or anything like that? I did some screenprinting in college, but I’ve always been more into machines. I’m fascinated that it could just take your finger off in a split second.

I got my art school scar here on my pinky. Do you have an art school scar? Well, yes, mental scars.

This one too, look. Someone had a dog in the printmaking department, I went to pet it and it bit me.

I noticed you don’t have a website. Is there reasoning behind that? I don’t know, I don’t even know what I’m doing. I don’t know if this is right or not, but I’m getting the same feeling about computers as I did with television. It’s just so wildly popular, and all of America is just taken by it. I think it’s necessary for what I do a lot of times. I’ve done a lot of communicating and stuff like that, but I don’t like it. It doesn’t feel natural.

Do you have anything in mind that you are going to do differently? What’s the next step?

I’m going to get all my stuff framed, like normal frames, and I’m going to hang them all up in a commercial gallery in a perfect line, 53 inches high with proper spacing. I think I can do it.

Are there any artist or artist friends of yours that you’re excited about that no one really knows much about? Jesse Geller. He’s living his life the way he likes to. Jesse—I like his stuff. His mind works in a good way. He lives in San Francisco. He moved here from Philadelphia. There’s this homeless transvestite, an Inuit Indian, that hangs out at Walgreens by the studio, and he brought him/ her a nice jean jacket, and painted the back really nice, and just laid it by the bush where the person sits, not even thinking about it, and a matching hat with it. Alicia McCarthy is a really good artist, Adek, Chris Lux, Aaron Curry, you, Bill Daniel.

I think this is the end of the interview. Do I have a last question? You don’t have any questions. You ran out of questions a long time ago.

DETrOiT POWEr HOUSE PRODUCTIONs In 2008, initiated by the purchase of a former foreclosed drug house later dubbed as “The Power House,” Power House Productions was born in an attempt to integrate the surrounding structures and home of a neighborhood that are in disrepair or deserted.

by Jason Jaworski

So much has already been written about this city, its abandonment, the blight, the $100 houses for sale, and the mass exodus of its citizens. And while there are fragments of truth to those statements, they are not what define the city. There are more hyperbole, that in effect unfairly dismiss a place that, in reality, has a citizenry that has not surrendered, but instead is expansive and entirely free.

In 2008, initiated by the purchase of a former foreclosed drug house later dubbed as “The Power House,” Power House Productions was born in an attempt to integrate the surrounding structures and home of a neighborhood that are in disrepair or deserted. The plan was to take the forgotten or simply rotting homes, repurpose and restructure them as viable living spaces, all the while employing art as architect and inspiration.

The project is something novel in that it is a hybrid of both the common public installation work normally commissioned by a city, and street art as a while. The fabrication is the installation, and simultaneously what is housed within. Displayed and presented much as any other home, and as

with street art, the environment is the canvas and the city and its denizens the audience.

Funded primarily through the 2009 Juxtapoz 15th Anniversary Benefit and Auction, Mitch Cope and Gina Reichart manage the project, unique in that it is sustained and supplemented by artists and as funded by artists who generously donated their work. The foundation and base of the artist project was built upon the artworks of over 100 national and internationally renowned contemporary artists’ donations.

Currently, there are our houses whose entire interiors and exteriors have been repaired and transformed by the six artists involved in the project: Swoon, Ben Wolf, RETNA, Richard Coleman, Monica Canilao, and Saelee Oh. The houses on which they are collaborating from a sort of square formation if seen from an aerial view.

While driving down the street, one can see segments and fractions of the house Monica Canilao worked on: large sculptures of found objects culled together from all the forsaken spaces and places taken either in the late hours of the day or during those early embers of a Detroit morning. Sections of the front façade, carved out in proportions resembling a plume of smoke or the body of a snake, make up the majority of the second floor amongst the planned arrangement of clutter from or-

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top: RETNA, RICHARD COLEMAN bottom: BEN WOLF , MONICA CANILAO

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nate word-carved table legs to fragments of glass and mirror organized in coruscate shapes. Inside, on the second floor, a chandelier is made entirely of the accrued and repurposed artifacts found in empty homes, warehouses and cathedrals.

Next door is the house that Richard Coleman and RETNA are working on together, their first partnership. Once a forlorn, ailing site, with white paint crumbling in lattice-like patterns and sections, the house now sits in blinding grayscale contortion, an outside wall written obsessively and elegantly in RETNA’s familiar font and style.

Inside the home discloses a labyrinth of rooms with sections of RETNA’s written words and painted prayers, as well as Coleman’s familiar and brilliant geometric patterns taking up the house’s surfaces from walls to ceiling to floor.

Across the street, a wheat-paste figure from Swoon appears: a woman’s face in angelic proportion with a small city making up the majority of her person. Thighs, claves, and torso emerge from the shapes of houses, homes, and apartment buildings, with small figures and strangers walking throughout the image. Inside the house, a section of the floor is cut out in a prism, and encased beneath in the basement are numerous and many pieces from Swoon as if the house were a geode, a rough, broken-down exterior with an inner sanctum and interior of jewels and remnants. Swoon’s pieces line the walls and floor in intricately cut portions of paper pasted together along with images of children in profile or dead center stares eyes staring agape with hunger while light from the glass nearby filters in through the small slits which make up the basements windows.

In back, numerous dormers and sections of houses are sawed off, pieced and placed together elegantly in a pattern that distantly resembles the forms of futurism. “An architectural mutation,” as described by artist Ben Wolf, shapes from the dormers repeat a pattern getting gradually larger and smaller with each piece placed on top of the other.

Wheat-pasted around the house are fragments of bed sheets, with a patter of colors and shapes spray-painted at the base resembling the natural formations of a feather.

Next to this house a painted façade of blue water frames the base. Up the stairs and into the home are numerous installations from previous artists interacting, merging, and moving to the spaces and sculpture of Saellee Oh, her ideas filling up the expanse completely, engulfing the insides as if inundating by a flood. Small sculptures of houses sit on the floor of the main room filled with papermache animals, and sheets in different gradations of blue spill out onto the floor, with roofs made up of books found at random sections of street surrounding the city on a night run. Venturing further,

a previous installations and stair structure are repurposed into the spaces of a forest, with fallen limbs from nearby trees spreading out, upward, reaching toward the ceiling.

Each house encapsulates its own personality and stamp from each artist and becomes a new neighbor. As people living nearby emerge and congregate, there is percolating talk of “What are they doing in the building?”, “Did you see that?”, and “I don’t get it” becomes “I love it.” There are numerous and many more conversations started and running through the air, talk that would not exist had it not been for the project.

“Previously,” Mitch explains, “one of the only ways we had of meeting our neighbors was through crime. If someone had a burglary or something happened to them, they would come over, knock on the door, and asks for help and the neighborhood would sort of band together to find and solve the problem. With this project we wanted to engage the neighborhood in a positive way. When people come over and talk now, it’s not of their problems, but about the project and the art that is here in the neighborhood.”

Talking with the neighbors seems to confirm Mitch’s observations. One remarks and distills the project down to a simple summation: “It makes us want to do better, not just for the neighborhood, but overall. It shows the effort, real effort, being put in here. And more than effort, art. And art, more than anything, is forever. It’s infinite.”

“It shows the effort, real effort, being put in here. And more than effort, art. And art, more than anything, is forever. It’s infinite.”

Jason Jaworski: Let’s begin at the beginning—how

did this all start, the Power House Project and all?

Mitch Cope: Well, before we moved into the neighborhood, we always wanted to buy some sort of property and play with it and we started getting interested in doing something socially interactive that was more artistic. Then, when we bought this house four, almost five years ago, the first thing we did after we moved in was have a talent show out in the studio and invited our neighbors to show up. A couple of them did, most of them didn’t, but that was our first initiation into the neighborhood. From then on we kind of did different things within the neighborhood and tried to talk to the kids about having art shows. The whole idea of infusing art or artists into the neighborhood was always a goal because there wasn’t much here and we always thought that everybody needs art, not just the galleries and museums of the world, but that it really benefits your everyday life.

JJ: And the community and the neighborhoodMC: Yeah, it’s culture and enlivens and it also brings out the humanity in the neighborhood, especially in this neighborhood where it’s so diverse and there is a lot of culture already. It becomes an expression of the culture, an out-worldly expres-

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top: BEN WOLF

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bottom: MONICA CANILAO

PIECE | POWERHOUSE PRODUCTIONS

RETNA & RICHARD COLEMAN 2010

DETROIT, MI

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SAELEE OH

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sion that you can really see, so we’re trying to figure out how to do that.

Gina Reichert: We’re also sort of drawn to having some sort of public space. We used to have a storefront space attached to our house which I kind of miss because it was a chance to have a conversation with people that aren’t the same people that go to museums and galleries in general, and it’s also a different conversation than what you would have at a museum or gallery, because it’s more an everyday retail experience and a conversation that’s not strictly looking at art as something separate and exclusive from everyday life. Presenting art doesn’t have to be a big fancy exclusive thing, it can happen on a totally different level.

JJ: How has the neighborhood changed? Has it been progressing in any way?

MC: When we first moved into the neighborhood, all these houses here were occupied, every single house that we’re working on was occupied and even houses that are now gone were occupied.

GR: I’d say in the past 3 years there have been a lot of new vacancies in the neighborhood. For example, the family that was living in the blue house that Monica Canilao is now working on had just put up the blue vinyl and the roof and then the downturn started happeningJJ: It’s hard to believe so much has happened in such a short amount of time.

MC: When the foreclosure thing first started to happen, we started to see the cycle of when the houses go empty. First, things get scrapped or stolen and then drug issues pop up and this whole cycle starts and we knew that, from being in Detroit so long, if you don’t hit something right away, then it just gets really bad, really quick. So when the house that is now the Power House came up for sale, we kind of watched the price drop every month and when it came down to $1,900 dollars, we asked Mr. Cope to help us out and he loaned us the money to buy the house. That was the first property that we started working on. In the beginning, kids in the neighborhood helped us paint the side and it was sort of like this moment of engaging in the community and then people start asking, “What are you doing?” or “Are you renting this?” and we would tell them, “well, no, it’s an artistresidence house and it’s going to be off the grid,” and then you start talking about all these other issues of renewable energy and what art is and it becomes a conversation piece. A lot of what we do is a conversation piece with the artists here. Before that, a lot of times, we would meet our neighbors through crime, and we would form a coalition of neighbors through that, which is good in that you get to know your neighbors, but it’s bad in that you get to know your neighbors through crime. So we’re trying to have another element to meet our neighbors, a positive element which is the art, and that’s what’s happening now more so than ever on Moran Street, because it is such a concentrated

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effort with four houses being worked on by six different artists.

GR: That block has been vacant for so long and there’s been all this negative activity in and out of the houses that, for the families that are still there or the ones that have sort of interspersed in between, they feel cut off from that vacancy and have been trying to figure out how to leave, they just wanted to get their families out of there, and now, with so much activity on the street [with the project], they’re saying that maybe they won’t leave.

MC: Or at least maybe they wont abandon their house, maybe they will stick it out a little longer, because the problem was that you couldn’t leave if you had a $50,000 mortgage on your house- you can’t sell it for nearly that much anymore. So people were just abandoning houses and the foreclosure thing just got worse and worse exponentially.

It became this big problem and so, if we could sort of make certain neighborhoods or certain streets more livable, more safe and more exciting, that’s really why I think, at the end of the day, we invite artists to come and work here.

JJ: What’s the condition of the houses out here, the abandoned ones?

MC: A lot of the houses are still structurally fine, but to bring them back onto a livable standard would take a lot of money and a lot of work, but to turn them into an art project is a step in the right direction in a sense that you’re not going all the way, but you’re going to a certain point where the artist can clean it up, turn it into an installation of some sort and the house can become energized into a positive element. Maybe later down the road it becomes a livable house again or it just becomes an art project- but it’s still active instead of something that detracts from the neighborhood.

GR: Yeah, it’s not something that kids walk by on the way to school and feel bad about. There’s a couple of burned out houses on Klinger Street that kids play on as if it’s a stage and you can only tell the kids that that’s not a good idea for so long.

But then you’re like, “well, it kind of is a good idea and it’s totally like a stage and what fun!” The kids want a recreation space, they’re already using it as a recreation space- let’s make it a recreation space! Instead of, you know, waiting to find an investor and two years later maybe something will start to happen.

PIECE | WOOSTER COLLECTIVE

COLLECTORS MARC & SARA SCHILLER

Marc and Sara each began collecting art long before they met in the early ’90s. In 2000, driven by a love and curiosity for the ephemeral art on the streets of New York.

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By Jiae Kim and John H Lee

Marc and Sara each began collecting art long before they met in the early ’90s. In 2000, driven by a love and curiosity for the ephemeral art on the streets of New York, they started the website woostercollective.com so that they could have a place to archive pictures of art that sometimes lasted just hours before being taken down or destroyed.

The website has been central to the emerging street art scene and it has become the definitive source of documentation for contemporary art on the streets of not just New York, but the world over.

It’s also a labor of love, with postings often updated in the wee hours before heading off to their demanding jobs as media executives or late at night after their daughter Sam has been put to bed.

In the 10 years since the site went live, they’ve created a genuine community of art lovers and art makers online, and on special occasions, the community convenes offline to collaborate and partake of art events, the most famous being the project simply known as 11 Spring Street. Over a period of two months, Marc & Sara curated artworks in the space by 45 of the most well known street and contemporary artists from around the world. The five day art experiment/exhibition saw hundreds of art lovers lining up and down the block to view the temporary art installations in the 5 floors of the building that stands at 11 Spring Street in New York’s NoLita neighborhood. The event garnered a writeup in the front page of the New York Times Art Section, and soon cemented Marc and Sara Schiller’s reputation as the leading advocates of the emerging art scene popularly known as street art.

Jiae Kim: When did you start collecting?

Marc Schiller: Before we even met each other, I was fortunate to be part of the team that put together the House of Blues concept, the largest and probably greatest collection of contemporary American folk art in the world. I became very good friends with the curator of the House of Blues who introduced me to artists like Howard Finster and Jimmy Lee Sudduth and the culture of “outsider art,” which comes out of this overwhelming passion to express yourself. Not out of art school, not out of technique.

Sara Schiller: I grew up with art, although my par-

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ents wouldn’t say they had a collection. Our walls were covered floor to ceiling with prints from Maine printmakers, and I realize now that watching my father amass this collection really infiltrated my being. When I got my first job and I got my first bonus, my parents said to take 10% of my bonus—which at the time was $100 —and buy a piece of art. And, that I should do that every year, for as long as I can.

MS: My father was a still photographer when I was a kid and his peers were these amazing photographers from Life magazine and he had an incredible collection of photography, so I grew up around art as well.

John Lee: Woostercollective.com came out of your passion for documenting art in your neighborhood. How has New York City influenced your art collection?

MS: New York has so much to do with our passion for collecting art. It’s not just that the art market is here, but we lived in Soho, on Wooster Street, a couple of blocks from where artists would set up stands and sell their art.

SS: We’ve bought a lot of art from those artists over the years; little $50, $100 pieces.

MS: Sara and I have bought some amazing art on the streets of New York. People think this art is for tourists—yes, 99% of it is, but: 1) all of that art is made by hand and 2) every once in awhile you’d find an artist who was not there every week who would come in to show their portfolio to galleries in Chelsea and needed to make enough money to pay for their trip back.

SS: In retrospect it makes sense that we moved from outsider art into street art. Outsider artists paint because they have to.

You know, they paint their whole yards, they paint everything in their house. They just have to paint and create. Our street artist friends have to put work up on the street, they’re just driven to. In most cases, there’s no reward for doing it. Either it’s taken down really quickly or no one ever sees it. It’s the same motivation in both cases.

JL: Why do you think street artists are compelled to put up their work in public spaces?

SS: They want to beautify ugly spaces.

MS: Yes. I think that the motivation of a street artist is to add creativity into the city, to do things that surprise and delight people. It’s very personal and intimate because you discover it as you’re walking down the street. The best street art is sitespecific, right? So it’s the context of that piece in the city landscape that makes it work.

JL: Would you say your art collection is predominantly street art?

MS: I don’t know if we really think about it in that way. I’d rather

PIECE | WOOSTER COLLECTIVE

talk about it terms of what we’re trying to do. We try to buy art from only artists that we know—but that’s not 100% the case. We have a Yoshitomo Nara piece and we’ve never met Nara. I think our theme has been to know the story behind the artist and the piece. I think too many people that start collecting think it’s about the value or the hype of the artist at the moment. I think Sara and I want to make sure that we have a personal connection to every piece that we have, and we can literally tell you the stories of almost every single piece in our apartment—who the artist is, where we bought it, why they made it. We also commission a lot of art from artists that are transitioning from their day job to being a full time artist. If Sara and I see that, we go out of our way to buy enough art from that artist to pay their rent, so that they can make that transition. So both parties benefit—we get a beautiful body of work and they grow their body of work. If you’re thinking about buying art based on value, it’s risky because you don’t know where that artist is going to go. Collecting for us is not about going into a gallery in Chelsea and writing a check for an expensive piece. That’s investing. That’s not collecting—and I think there’s a big difference.

We’re not interested in investing, we’ve never sold a piece of artwork.

JL: I can see that! You guys are definitely not minimalists in what you collect or how you hang it.

MS: Every piece that we acquire, we want on our walls. We rotate things out.

SS: When people walk in, I think they either love it or have told us they could never live with this. This, by the way, is our minimum. We have purposefully controlled ourselves in this apartment.

JK: Where do you keep everything else? Do you have it in storage?

MS: We have a lot of the larger pieces in my office, which is a loft. We’ve got pieces by Ryan McGinley and Jill Greenberg there. At Meet at the Apartment, our other business on Crosby Street, we have art by Ian Francis, Swoon, Banksy and a selection of other favorites.

JL: How do you guys go about buying pieces, do you always agree?

SS: We have gone into shows, separated and then reconnected, where I’ll say, “Marc, there’s one piece that I really loved.” And he’ll say, “Is it this one?” And I’ll go, “Yes!” JK: So, you see eye-to-eye on things?

SS: We see eye-to-eye. We both go by our gut reaction because we respond emotionally. We don’t know how much it costs. We don’t know anything —just that of all the pieces in this place, this is the one I love.

MS: You have to build a confidence too, right? Because if you’re doubting your eye you start to be very nervous and reactionary and you take cues off of other people and you’re not buying for you.

And we do it ourselves. I think that a lot of people create collections and actually use outside people to tell them what they should be buying. That doesn’t really work for us.

SS: Well, it’s a very personal collection as a result and I think we don’t like pieces that are boring.

JK Define boring.

SS: Like not all of our pieces are harmonious. So, there can be disharmony in the piece. There could be— MS: Imperfections.

SS: I think that we love street art so much because nothing on the street is really perfectly put out there— we’re not looking for pristine-ness. We embrace things like Faile using coffee grinds as their shellac because it kind of fits how the piece goes, you know?

HALLWAY OF THE COUPLE’S NY HOME

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JL: Have you looked at other great collections out there? Like the Rubell’s for example, and does your collection share some themes with other great collections?

MS: Yes, one of the themes that emerged was that you collect art of your generation. So, we’re not interested in collecting Rembrandt and Van Gogh.

We can’t—but we wouldn’t even if we could. I don’t even think we’re interested in collecting Warhol or Keith Haring—they’re the forefathers of this.

That’s not our generation. Our generation is David Choe, Phil Frost, Ryan McGinness. I think that collecting the art of your generation is much more rewarding later on as a body of work because if you’re not discovering talent or if you’re not ahead of what everybody else has said is collectible then it’s too safe. Again, it’s investment, not collecting.

JK: What are you looking out for now?

MS: We’re really starting to look at artists that are mixing media—using spray paint but also using charcoal and acrylic—and artists like Ian Francis and Conor Harrington who are adapting their graffiti experience into their fine art. They pull in elements of traditional painting, portraiture and illustration and mix it all together so there’s drips and spray but then there’s also fine brushstrokes— and that’s kind of where we’re headed. That piece

by Kinsey in our apartment is a bit like that: You can see elements of spray, elements of brush, elements of line work.

SS: And I think our collection, in a sense, has grown with the artists; because the artists started out on the street. They weren’t all fine artists at first. Now a lot of them are fine artists and as they’ve evolved they’ve learned how to transform their techniques.

JL: You said to us once that you buy from the gallery rather than going to the artist, though you know many of the artists directly. Why? MS: We buy a lot of art and I think people are surprised by that. They think because we have Wooster Collective, because we’re so friendly with the artists, that the pieces in our collection are all gifts, that they’re all things that artists have given us. And yes, we have some amazing pieces that have been fantastic, beautiful gifts. But actually, when you are a part of the scene, you realize that artists rely on their gallery exhibits. Gallerists rely on sales of the art that they’re supporting. So Sara and I are fortunate to be able to enjoy being the

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first to buy a piece in a gallery show. We enjoy the red dot going up on the wall because it’s how we can actively support the artist’s career. We want to be part of what helps make an artist build their career long term.

JL: Do you collect other things?

SS: We collect wine, we collect books —I mean our book collection is, in my opinion, just as good as our art collection, but lesser known. Is collecting about the experience or the object?

MS: Collecting is not about possessions or trophies.

There’s energy in something that’s created by hand and I think that once you start buying handmade items, you become a collector. It’s about the craft, the hand, the brushstroke, the needlepoint.

SS: I think it stems a little from the fact that the two of us aren’t artists, we don’t create things with our hands, but love the energy of being around handmade things.

MS: It’s also about being around creativity. At the end of the day, collecting is about immersing yourself with culture and there’s nothing more exciting for us than being around creative culture. It’s about the people. What I want to try to convey is, what motivates us is that the piece on the wall came from a dinner, a night out, a trip. It’s about the stories and it’s about meeting people.