Friday, September 30, 2016

[Updated] Checking in on the Shepard Fairey mural on 11th Street and 1st Avenue



Here's how it's looking this morning, via a photo by EVG reader JG... Fairey started work on it Wednesday... it appears as if there's a little more to go, delayed by the rainy/windy weather.

Updated 3:30 p.m.

DNAinfo has more details on the mural, which is an image of Fairey's daughter when she was 3 years old. (She is now 11.)

"The title of the piece is 'Rise Above,' and its meant to be an uplifting image, a positive image to make people smile or to make New Yorkers look up," said Wayne Rada of the Little Italy Street Art (L.I.S.A.) Project.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

His work is utter tripe. And I'm being kind.

Anonymous said...

Regardless is you like this painting or not I can imagine the next company to rent the former "Schnitz" space will have sign branding issues.

Anonymous said...

TIME TO HANG IT UP, SHEP

Anonymous said...

Very cool. He's the best.

Anonymous said...

Fairy pimping his kid out so distasteful, not shocked, though headline could read dishonest "artist" decorates building to increase landlords monthly income, hipster economics 101

Hey19 said...

does SF look like an aged baby to anyone else, he has a very strange look to me, like a baby got bigger and older, but didnt stop being a 2 year old...

I actually dont really mind his art though, seems he was a bit of a pioneer at one time, thats cool.

Anonymous said...

i suggest you watch an interview with SF. he's incredibly articulate and insightful. i was pretty surprised. not a big fan of his art, though.

JQ LLC said...

His claim to fame was co-opting, I mean stealing Andre the Giant's image and a repeated subliminal slogan from a great cult movie about a bland dystopian society run by aliens from a cult classic movie (Obey from the movie "They Live", starring the late lamented Roddy Piper, Shepard might have been a wrestling fan). It's like if The Knack continued having success with hundreds of versions of My Sharona, But a better analogy would be Chubby Checker and the Twist, but I digress.

So now he wants to make people smile and look up, I guess it's better than living in Aleppo. Just by his inclination by wanting people to look and feel good at his piece (don't worry be happy) shows that this was made for tourists and made for the predatory developers, who by commissioning this will spend anything to overvalue and drive up speculation in this lunatic real estate market. Surely, they will charge an extra grand for these stupid fucks to live inside a genuine work of street art. Sure it's a beautifully crafted mural, it's hard to criticize someone who would put his kid up like that and his talent for painting it, but like a previous poster here said and especially the way these things have been popping up in the past few years and the rapid makeovers of towns from EV to LIC to bushwick, it just comes off as a cynical big money grab for Shep.


I wonder if he has to give a royalty check to Greedy Greg Ginn for the title, (which for a cuddly rendition of his kid, I just do not get), who has turned his legendary punk band into a luxury brand item that stupid fucking idiots are willing to pay 100 bucks for a t-shirt at Barneys or Varvatos.




afbp said...

so much hate--so little time--grow old.....

Anonymous said...

What's crazy is that he gets credit as a pioneer when he came years after Robbie Conal. The Andre the Giant stuff was like a (unintentional) Mad Magazine parody of the stuff Conal was doing.

Giovanni said...

It's beyond ironic that corporate-sponsored Shepard Fairey uses Socialist realism, developed as a propaganda tool by the Soviet Union, to make the East Village look like it has cool "street art" again, and the most likely result is that tourists and real estate investors will be more attracted to this oversaturated neighborhood, driving real estate prices even higher and keep the real artists out.

Anonymous said...

Rise above the need to just criticize. It's not that bad

Anonymous said...

12:42 PM. If you're going to create public art than you should be willing to put up with public criticism. Pro or con, I don't feel the need to stop anyone from expressing their opinion.