Thursday, August 26, 2010

Four months in the tumultuous short life of the Shepard Fairey mural



As I reported yesterday, workers removed what was left of the Shepard Fairey mural on Houston and the Bowery... (The mural was to remain up until Dec. 31.)

Last night, our friend Bryan Waterman did a little detective work and concluded that the build-out remains over what was here before — the Os Gêmeos art...



So let us go back to the middle of April...



And, sometime during the weekend of April 16, someone removed the Os Gêmeos art...



Then, on April 20, Shepard Fairey arrived to start work...





April 21!



And the next day, the first tag appeared, as reported by Animal New York... graffiti writer NAW tried to add a little something ... which didn't go over well with the security guard on duty...


[Photo: ANIMALNewYork]

Per the Graffiti Friend of EV Grieve (GFOEVG) on April 22: "I suspect this piece gets dissed and fixed many times."

The week of April 26, Jeremiah discussed some of the ongoing vandalism issues with on the mural... (You can read those here, here and here.)

Then the kicking began!



Paul Richard added his mark on May 7...




By the week of May 10, cleanup crews were busy removing the tags...



On May 15 — the epic bombing.





Soon, it became a game of tag, clean, tag, clean...




Workers placed a plaque on the scene in June...nearly six weeks after the mural went up...



The holes and tags continued through June...





By the end of June, the mural was falling to pieces... people continued to pick and rip...





July 7



As Jeremiah first reported, workers covered up half the mural on July 9....




On July 12, the dicks arrived.


[Photo credit: DNAinfo]

And so it went...



July 17...





July 18




July 20



July 24...



Aug. 8...



Yesterday, it all came to an end...



Many other people covered the ongoing saga here...including, but not limited to:

BoweryBoogie

Jeremiah's Vanishing New York

DNAinfo

NYC the Blog

Animal NY

Awkword World View

8 comments:

Jeremiah Moss said...

nice round-up Grieve! what a saga. in the end, they should have let it be, like all street art. if they had, today we would have a collective collage instead of a blank wall.

East Village Feed said...

Absolutely great coverage by everyone. This is a great recap.

"YO SHEP I WANT A BULK ORDER"

James and Karla Murray said...

great coverage

Unknown said...

What a great story. Nicely done! This will be a great chapter in the EV Grievebook.

esquared™ said...

this saga, the taggings, everyone's coverage, and your round-up, are THE art than the mural itself, i.e. you have accomplished what that mural ans shep have intended to do -- influence and stimulate thoughts emotions, senses, and intellect...

Unknown said...

Nothing is more NYC or, more specifically, Bowery and Houston than Keith Haring.

PLEASE remove the sheetrock and put up another Haring on the concrete wall behind it. Sadly, it's becoming East Village-"ish" to cover or remove historic imperfections with sterile replacements. Our neighborhood may be a lot of concrete with some dents but that's how we like it. Save the clean lines for Midtown and the Financial District.

Marty Wombacher said...

Great post! It was like an online mini-movie of stills. This whole event (including this post) is true performance art.

Melanie said...

EVG--your retrospective is spot on.