For more than two decades, Brighton, England’s graffiti scene has thrived.
At first, the art form was banned, confining it to the walls of deserted buildings and train tracks. Over time, the city council embraced this underground expression, sponsoring murals and offering free youth classes on graffiti techniques. Now, Brighton is considered a Mecca for graffiti artists.
Reyna Von Vett and Michelle Baldwin are heading up a new burlesque theater in Denver with the hopes to bring back the great tradition that was born in the late 1800s.
Postmasters Gallery in New York is hosting a multimedia avant-garde exhibit from February 28 to April 4 called The Future is Not What it Used to Be, featuring nine Internet-driven artists.
One of the greatest crowd-pleasing pieces of music in burlesque is “Night Train.” I’ve had people who’ve just attended their first burlesque show come up to me after a show and say, “I’ve always wanted to see someone dance to that song live! Thank you!”
Louis Armstrong was a: jazz legend, marijuana supporter (he smoked every day), slang inventor (he is cited as the first to use the terms cats, chops, daddy, jive, mellow, pops, scat, solid), actor (he appeared in over thirty films), writer, barrier-crosser, and, as author Steven Brower points out in the introduction to Satchmo: The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong (Abrams, 256 pages, $35), a talented and dedicated collagist.
Seattle multi-media artist Tyler Cufley returns to San Francisco’s Baer Ridgway Exhibitions this weekend for another solo display.
Titled Tell Everyone that You’re Smiling, the exhibit runs from February 21 to March 28 and will feature Cufley’s paintings, sculptures, photographs, and crossover pieces.
Prior to the closing reception at his group exhibit at Rivet Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, camera specialist Wayne Martin Belger will lecture at Columbus College of Art and Design.
Mark your calendars! Click onward for more info.
Overspray: Riding High with the Kings of California Airbrush Art
by Norman Hathaway
Hardcover, 226 Pages, Picturebox, $50
[currently available for $20 here]
Overspray is a another great visual resource from Picturebox, with many examples of ’70s airbrush art from four artists.
The 20-year anniversary of the movie Elvira: Mistress of the Dark was just celebrated in Los Angeles with host Peaches Christ, who also hosted at Tease-O-Rama last year.
Punk: No One Is Innocent
by Thomas Mießgang, Wolfgang Müller, Glenn O’Brien and Jon Savage
(Verlag fur moderne Kunst Nurnberg), Paperback, 250 pages, $60
Published in conjunction with last year’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien (read a review of the exhibition here), Punk: No One Is Innocent focuses on the 1970s punk scene in New York, London, and Berlin and its influence on the art scene.
This book joins the ranks of countless other art exhibitions / expensive catalogs organized in the last twenty years that discuss the exact same subject yet adds insult to injury by using a Sex Pistols song title as its name. Oh, you’re so fucking clever.
Enough already.
This week, see ALARM columnist Jo Weldon in Lisa Whitmer‘s playful look into the world of burlesque in her documentary No Strings Attached, featuring Weldon’s glove-and-stocking-peel class.