A new mural by Chico at 10th and C

EV Grieve correspondent Bobby Williams caught up with Bobby Williams Chico yesterday afternoon working on a new mural on 10th Street just east of Avenue C...

A Royal corner of the East Village

During the weekend, Chico worked on a new Kate-William mural on Houston at Avenue B. (See our pictures from Saturday here.)

Chico was finishing up the mural yesterday afternoon...

[Top photo by Bobby Williams]

As BoweryBoogie noted in his coverage yesterday, Harlem-based liquor depot Branson B. Champagne is sponsoring the mural, which will only be up for three weeks.

The new murals replaces the Loisaidas album art...

...which at least one person took issue with...

Fourteen years earlier, Chico memorialized William's mother here on the same corner...



...art that was eventually vandalized...

Chico paints William and Kate

As I exclusively reported, a couple named Kate and William were married recently. And Chico was back in town to honor their union on Houston at Avenue B....

Photos by Bobby Williams.

A tweet from RCN

Yesterday, I sent out a tweet about the RCN-Chico post... and RCN responded ...



Previously on EV Grieve:
RCN Cable discovers 'illegal graffiti' two years later

RCN Cable discovers 'illegal graffiti' two years later

As Jeremiah reported on Monday, workers at the RCN Cable building on Avenue C and Sixth Street painted over the Obama-McCain election mural and others on the site last week....



Now...



Patrick Hedlund has a follow-up piece today at DNAinfo. He speaks with an anonymous RCN spokesperson who sounds a little huffy about Chico's mural, which graced the wall for two years.

"The bottom line is the building had illegal graffiti on it and we cleaned it up — period."

And!

But the RCN spokesman quickly dismissed the idea that Garcia might return to work on the wall.

"We're not interested in doing business with him again," he said.

Curious to see how long the building sits tag free.... this little doodle was quickly painted over....



Anyway, there were all sorts of Chico murals on this corner...



Are you telling me that RCN just figured out that there are murals here? (What about the illegal ads?) And it wasn't as if Chico just ran up here and tagged the wall in the middle of the night... this corner art took a long time to create... And this entire time RCN was unaware of the activity?

A side note, perhaps ... graffiti artist Jairo Pastoressa, accused of murdering Christopher Jusko, helped Chico create this mural ... His signature was in spray paint below Chico's name.


[Photo via DNAinfo]

Chico freshens up Doc Holliday's

To be honest, Chico's Doc Holliday's mural on Ninth Street at Avenue A was a little nicked up...



And so, as NYCETC captured on Saturday, Chico was back on hand to update his work...




And here's what it looked like yesterday...




PS
I really like the photos at NYCETC....

Chico's B Cup makeover

Chico was in action yesterday on 13th Street and Avenue B...





...creating a new sign for the B Cup...

Mikey's Pet Shop mural neutered

Given the closure of Mikey's Pet Shop on Seventh Street near Avenue A last fall... it was inevitable that the Chico mural would one day vanish....

Before:


... which happened yesterday....



It's the second Chico mural to be painted over this week....

A hidden Chico mural features an owl and backpacking beaver

Thanks to EV Grieve reader evilsugar25~ for sharing this photo on Facebook... A little hidden piece of the East Village...



This Chico mural, dated 2000, is enclosed inside the backyards shared by the tenement buildings on Sixth Street between Avenue B and Avenue C...

"The creeping vine on the left has actually covered up my favorite part of the mural in recent years — a blue/purple owl in the upper left. My second favorite guy is the backpacking beaver," evilsugar25~ writes writes. "I get to see it every day, but I realized there are other Chico fans who would have no idea this was back here... and I wonder how many other 'private' murals decorate enclosed spaces around here."

Why the Kobe Bryant video game mural was removed

As we reported last week, the Kobe Bryant video game ad on Avenue A near 12th Street was painted over by workers... The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP) has more on what happened here in its most recent update (second item):

GVSHP and the East Village Community Coalition had long called upon the city to take action against the billboard which violated zoning regulations and, which some argued, violated an agreement to maintain the community mural for 10 years. Following complaints about the billboard from GVSHP and many others, and a great deal of attention from blog EV Grieve, the City inspected the site, issued several violations, and scheduled hearings on the violations. The sign was finally removed in late March.

And thanks to Christine Champagne at MediaPost for digging into the background of this wall in a feature last December.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Kobe Bryant's slam chunk

Searching for the truth about the cats and dogs mural on Avenue A

Game over for Kobe Bryant video game ad on Avenue A

So, you know, back in the fall, we devoted a few hundred several posts to Chico's "spay/neuter" mural on Avenue A near 12th Street that was painted over for a Kobe Bryant video game ad.



Anyway, last week, workers painted over the Kobe ad...




So what will we see next on the wall? I'm going with a Vans ad.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Kobe Bryant's slam chunk

Searching for the truth about the cats and dogs mural on Avenue A

Chico's tribute to Mom on Avenue B and Houston

Yesterday morning, Chico and friends started their new mural on the liquor store on Avenue B at Houston...



They're also putting up new local ads on Houston...



Later yesterday, Chico had wrapped up his work...



This is a tribute to the owner of the great liquor store here. She passed away earlier this year.



No word yet on the fate of the store. Her nephew is weighing the options, I'm told. Scoopy had an item on this store. As he reported: "The nephew is currently trying to locate the paperwork for the old tenement, the upper floors of which have sat empty for some 20 years. 'Maybe there's some money in the building, a secret hideaway — could be, I didn't say there is,' Chico quipped. As for 'Mom,' he said, 'She used to give everybody credit. She was a hard-working woman. She would lock the gates. She was open till midnight.'"

As for Chico's new mural...

In his column this week, Scoopy had the following news about the new mural CHico is creating on Houston and Avenue B. To the Scoopster:

It turns out Chico, who is back in town from Tampa for some more commission work, is painting over the P.O.P. [Power of Peace] mural with a new one for a local band, Loisaida. He’ll then paint a new one for the Girls Club just to the west, covering over another of his murals, for the local band Aventura. Basically, it’s not what we thought — that someone might have dared diss Chico by painting over his work — but just some mural switching by the artist himself.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Chico has a new work in progress on Houston and Avenue B

Chico has a new work in progress on Houston and Avenue B

A tipster riding the M9 yesterday afternoon noted that Chico and company were at work on the corner of Houston and Avenue B... and here's the mural so far...




Not sure just yet what this is going to be a mural for...

This replaces the anti-violence mural that Chico and and the POP (Power of Peace) Youth Anti-Violence Coalition created last October.

Kobe Bryant's slam chunk

Our obsession interest in the former spay/neuter wall on Avenue A near 12th Street continues. As we pointed out the other day, the building's landlord, Desides Weinberg, was critical of the spay/neuter mural because it had not been properly maintained through the years... As Media magazine reported, chunks of the mural had fallen off the side of the building over the years.

Fine. As an EV Grieve reader pointed out...have you looked at the new mural here lately?

Searching for the truth about the cats and dogs mural on Avenue A

Back in the fall, we devoted several posts to Chico's "spay/neuter" mural on Avenue A near 12th Street that was painted over for a Kobe Bryant video game ad.

Interestingly enough, Media magazine reported on the story. (Thanks to the reporter, Christine Champagne, who reached out to me for the article.) Here are portions of the piece (you can find the whole thing right here):

For nine years, cats and dogs loomed large over a parking lot on Avenue A as part of an iconic Advocates for Animals mural on the side of a tenement building in Manhattan's East Village. Created by well-known local muralist Chico, the mural tugged at the heartstrings with an assortment of animals — including a sweet kitty with pleading eyes and a trusty German Shepherd — urging local residents to spay and neuter their pets, and providing a number to call for assistance.

But the mural, which can be seen in the opening moments of the 2005 film "Winter Passing," was whitewashed this fall and replaced with an ad for 2K Sports' NBA 2K10 basketball video game, and now NBA superstar Kobe Bryant looms large on the wall.

For her part, Irene Muschel, a social worker and animal activist who runs Advocates for Animals, and hired Chico to paint the mural back in April 2000, didn't even know it had been covered up until MEDIA contacted her.

Muschel claimed that the landlord of 189 Avenue A, Desides Weinberg, was contractually obligated — "We had a legal contract drawn up by an attorney and signed by me, Chico and the landlord" — to keep the Animals for Advocates mural up for 10 years. If that's the case, the mural should have stayed in place until April 2010. "About a year ago, the landlord that signed the contract called me about how he needed income, and he said there was an advertiser who wanted to put something up there, and would I go along with it," Muschel recalls. "I said no, actually, and I had contacted a lawyer. But then it just faded away."

For his part, Weinberg repeatedly insisted that the contract Muschel speaks of was a "phony contract." He also faulted Muschel for not properly maintaining the mural, pointing out that chunks of it had fallen off the side of the building over the years.

One has to wonder: Did New York-based KD&E Advertising, which did the media buy for the NBA 2K10 campaign, realize the ad would replace a mural that had special meaning to East Village residents? KD&E did not return calls or respond to efforts made to reach someone at the agency on MEDIA's behalf by a representative for 72andsunny, the creative agency on the campaign.

Muschel says she is not going to pursue the matter legally or otherwise, instead choosing to focus on the good the mural did. "The mural helped a great many animals get spayed and neutered and provided answers on a wide variety of animal issues to people who called," she muses. "It did its work."

Previously on EV Grieve:
NBA ad takes over

An appreciation of Chico's work

We noted some of Chico's new work last week... After the spay/neuter sign disappeared, figured that I may want to chronicle some of Chico's work... As he has said, Chico figures that he has done 7,000 murals around the city the past 30 years. Here are a few of those murals.