Wynwood Walls 2016

Kenny Scharf.  "Comic Creatures."  New York

Each year the Wynwood area / Art and Design Center just north of downtown Miami

sponsors a great international festival of graffiti art / urban murals. In an area filled

with warehouses and factories, there is a lot of wall space.  Fifty international graffiti

artists were invited to participate and assigned wall space, and another hundred "street

artists / urban artists / graffiti artists" applied for and were given wall space.

Eduardo Kobra.  "Yoko and John."  Brazil

All the walls are whitewashed in October each year, and then in November the artists come

and prepare their works for the opening of Art Basel and Art Miami the first week of

December.  The murals remain up for a year.  Above is part of a mural by "Kobra," which

runs for 150 feet and is 16 fee high.  That's a big painting.

Kobra.  "The Sword."  Continuation of 150 foot mural.

Kobra.  Continuation of 150 foot mural.  Brazilian
All of these artists have web pages with photos of many of their other works, if
you are interested.  They are prodigious in their productivity.

Kobra.  Continuation of the  150 foot mural.

Kobra.  "Stop Wars."  Brazil

This is a part of the 150 foot mural by Kobra.  Graffiti artists paint for a variety of

reasons - to entertain and delight, for the sheer fun of it, to send a message.

They are often opposed to war, pollution, destruction of the environment.  But they don' t
make a living painting murals; so they also paint on canvases and sell them or create
prints or sculpture.  They are all very versatile.

Crash.  "Girl and Tags."  New York

Crash is one of the most famous of the graffiti artists.  He is from New York and began

spray painting on walls and subway cars when he was 13.  These paintings are meant to

be seen, free, by anyone.  This is public art / community art, not private art.  The 50 invited 

artists have their expenses paid, but that is all.  This not about making money,

but about making art and making people happy.

Rubem Robierb.  "Butterfly."  Brazil

Robierb is both an internationally famous graffiti artist, but also a "fine arts" artists whose

works are highly sought after.  Like many of the graffiti artists, he has been invited to

countries all over the world, by national governments and municipal governments, and

private corporations, to paint large murals on public spaces.  He is famous for his butterflies.

   Lady Pink.   "Reclining Figure." New York

"Lady Pink" is one of the many female graffiti artists.  She and others work sometimes 

with sprays cans of paintg, but also with brushes and other materials.  These works

are carefully planned long in advance.

Logan Hicks.  "Cityscape."  New York
Logan is from Brooklyn and specializes in urban scenes.  He creates stencils to get
the crisp lines he needs, and then spray paints over them.  Some scenes take five layers
of stencils.  This scene is based on a view of New York which he saw one night
between 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m.

Ron English.  "Stag and Green Hulk."  Decatur, Illinois
This one of the most popular murals, and lots of people pose for pictures standing on the rock
This man is trying to take a selfie with the picture.

Alexis Diaz.  "Mastodon."  Puerto Rico.

Alexis Diaz is one of the most popular painters and most well known.  He has five murals

at the Wynwood Walls Exhibit.  A couple of his works, like this one, are so popular,  that

he repaints them each year, and people look forward to seeing them.  Others are new.

The triangle imposed in the center is a motif he frequently uses.  Many of the murals

are also indebted to science fiction for inspiration.

Marka 27.  "Woman Praying."  Mexican-American
Born in Juarez, Mexico, with a BFA from Boston, Victor now works in New York
both as graffiti artist and easel artist.  He is recognized as a leader in the Hispanic / Latino
art world.

Dasic Fernandez.  "Girl with Paint Drops."  Chile

Fernandez is widely known throughout Latin America and often uses multicolor

splashes as in this image.

JVH Design.  "The Wynwood Building."  New Zealand / Miami
JVH (John von Houten) is from New Zealand but is now in Miami and heads his own
design firm working with interior design as well as advertising.  The building was formerly
a mall, but the space is now used for a variety of creative purposes and has become
a symbol for Wynwood Walls.

Maya Hayuk.  "Pastel Cross-Hatching."  Brooklyn.

The mural is very popular and she has repainted it several years.  People love
to pose with this as the background.

Lakwena.  "I Remember Paradise."  London

Lakwena is a Black female artist in London and one of the most famous of the

graffiti artists; she almost always uses words in her works.  They offer both
visual pleasures as well as meanings.

Michael Ortiz / ILLSON.  "Sleeping Figure."  Cuba
Ortiz frequently creates large, horizontal figures 60-80 feet long.  He often signs
his name as a Japanese chop ILLSON.

Caratops.  " Vodka" and "Masques."

Caratops has painted "Masques" before, but with a different image to the left.

I don't know whether this wall was painted by one person or several.  Skulls and palm

trees are both popular images for street art in Florida.

Bryan Deese.  "Thanks, Mr. Mixx."  Miami

This was a tribute to a Miami music legend.

Zed 1.  "Charge My Heart."  Italian

Zed / Marco is a very popular Italian graffiti artist.  He had six murals in various

locations around Wynwood and Miami.  They combine fantasy and whimsy.

This is a wall 50 feet by 8 feet high.

Alexis Diaz of Puerto Rico and Faith 47 from South Africa.  "Nude with Serpent."

Graffiti artists will often work together on a project and share ideas and combine

techniques and specialties.  This is a huge figure.

Elizabetta Fantone.  "Basquiat and Warhol."  Canadian - Italian.

Elizabetta was born in Canada but raised in Italy.  Her murals are often polemical

and make comments about art. 

Elizabetta Fontane.  "Andy Warhol."  Canadian / Italian

Andy Warhol is here dressed in prison-orange uniform for committing

"crimes against art."

Haas and Hahn.  "Striped Deli."  Netherlands

Haas and Hahn are two of the most famous graffiti artists from Holland.  They have created

large murals all over the world.

Davel, Claudia LaBianca, Others.  "The Wynwood Coloring Book."  Miami
They have actually created a coloring book for adults based on the mural art of
Wynwood; it is available in several gift shops in Wynwood.

Interesni Kaski.  "Exotic DFlowers."  Ukrainian

"Interesi Kaski" actually means "fairy tales" and is made up of two men from Kiev in

Ukraine.  They are known throughout the world for their fanciful and playful murals.

For Wynwood they painted an entire building, all four sides, in a verdant green color, and

then added exotic flowers and small people inhabiting the flowers.

Interesni Kaski.  Close-up.  Ukrainian

Tatiana Suarez.  "Eve with Lizard."   New York

Tatiana Suarez is one of the most famous graffiti artists from New York.  She seems

to use several different names and often female themes.

Zosen and Mina Hamada.  "Tropical."  Japan
This is a husband and wife team that create murals around the world.

Mac Stewart.  "Three Masks."  Atlanta, Georgia

Mac is a 21 year old self-taught artist, the youngest of the Wynwood artists.

In the foreground is a Sea Serpent undulating through the lawn by Alexis Diaz.

In the back right is "Stag and Green Hulk" by Ron English, and in the center and left

at back is a 100 foot long mural by "The English Police," who live in Amsterdam.

This little house just off 29th Street is decorated with /crawling with giant insects.

Jennifer Becker.  "The Brick Bar"  Jacksonville, FL.
This is a mural painted about six feet behind a fence but visible from the sidewalk
 along 2nd Avenue N.W. which is the center of the mural district.  The car and man
 are painted.  The actual bar, with beer garden, is right behind the wall.
On her webpage, Jennifer explain how she applied for wall space and won it.  The
bar agreed to pay for her materials, and she went on-line GOFUNDME to ask
for donations to help pay her expenses.  She spent 127 hours over 2 weeks
completing the mural.

"Blue Bird and Pink Wall" were just two parts of many murals painted around a small
courtyard between several small houses.

"The Blue Bird and Graffiti."

"My Grandparents" stood alone on a wall beside an auto repair shop.

Zer 1.  "Zed 1's Theater."  Italian
This is a second of the popular Zed 1's / Marco murals.  It is pure fantasy, a huge goose
riding a sort of vehicle.  But the details, hyper-realism are amazing.

Jenna Morello.  "Blue Roses."  Brooklyn
Jenna has created similar roses in red and pink and orange and other colors
in other cities.  She has her studio in New York.

Cleon Peterson and Shepard Fairey.  "Running Man."  Los Angeles

These two men are two of the leading graffiti artists from the West Coast, with

international reputations and doing commissions all over the world.  This small

building was completely surrounded by parking lots and painted on all four sides

with these running men doing various things; all four walls are different.

"Deep Eddy Vodka" was a mural along 29th Street.

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Art Basel Miami Beach

Alexander Calder. U.S. "Mobile with Five White Dots and One Red Dot"

and print  "Red, Yellow, Blue Circles" by Alexander Calder.

Art / Basel / Miami is the greatest art fair in the world.  Almost 300 of the best international

art galleries from all over the world come to Miami with their very best artwork to sell.

All of these pieces come from private collections, so they have never been seen in public

before and may never appear again.  It is an incredible opportunity to view a vast

variety of the best art from 1900-2016 all in one place.  I enjoyed it very much.

Alexei Jawlensky.  Russian/German.  "Portrait of Woman."

German Expressionism.  1912

Jeff Koons.  U.S.  "Blue Diamond Ring"  $15 M.

Koons has made five each of these rings, of mirror-polished stainless steel, in blue,

pink, yellow, white, and purple.  Larry Gagosian bought this ring at Christie's auction

in London last December for $11.8 M.  It is shown by Gagosian Gallery.

It is seven feet high.

Jeff Koons.  "Blue Diamond."

Andy Warhol.   U.S.  "Dolly Parton" silk screen prints.  Warhol took a photo with a

polaroid camera, then made the print into an enlarged silk screen stencil.  He could then

print as many colors as he wanted.  Normally he required a client to purchase four prints 

for a total of $10,000.  These two now are priced at $100,000.

Georgia O'Keeffe.  "Abstracton."  bronze

Georgia O'Keeffe came from a small town in Wisconsin and moved to

New York and then New Mexico.  She is most noted for her paintings.

This piece in bronze, although similar to some of her sinuous plant

forms, is a unique sculptural form. 

One corner of this gallery had "Rio Grande" by Helen Frankenthaler in Color Field Style.

In the center is English artist Anthony Caro's "Catalan Spur" and on the right side

is a small "Target" by Kenneth Noland of the Washington School of Ab. Expressionism.

Robert Henri.  U.S.  "Reclining Figure."  1919

Henri was leader of the School of Ashcan Painters in the U.S., artists who wanted to

portray the gritty city and real life with rough brush strokes, and not perfectly

 polished surfaces.  He influenced many young artists.

Marino Marini was an Italian artist who used the image of "Horse and Rider" in both

paintings and sculpture to represent the human spirit and soul.  The Second World War

wreaked havoc in Europe, and Marini's Horsemen frequently show the horror of the day.

Jean Dubuffet was a French artist who worked in abstraction and developed a style

from doodling with different colored ball point pens in drawing.  His paintings have the

strong outlines and crosshatching that you may see on your own phone pad as you wait.

He then translated those forms into 3d sculpture.  They were displayed superbly in a

rather dark space with strong spotlights at Landau Gallery.

"Reality" in art takes many forms.  Richard Estes, in his "Store with Pineapples," employs

super-realism or photo-realism to create a work that looks like a high definition photograph.

But it is really an oil on canvas painting.

"Reality" in sculpture could be seen in this piece by Duane Hanson entitled

"Cowboy and Bale of Hay."  The cowboy is made of polyester resin, but his clothes

are real and so is the bale of hay.   Sculpture no longer must be carved out of wood or
stone or cast in bronze.

Roy Lichtenstein's "Head of a Woman" is "real" = you can recognize it immediately and

it is definitely not a tree or a house.  But his "realism" was based on his love of comic

books and the type of reality comic artists created to make their stories work - strong

outlines, broad areas of flat color, hatching to represent shading.

David Bates.  "Bouquet of Flowers."  U.S.

Bates is a Black artist working in New Orleans.  He uses strong outlines, often

in black, and patterns of lines.

Ai Wei Wei is the most famous artist in China and a political dissident also.

In the center is his "Column,"  an example of Conceptual Art.

"Butterfly Heart" by Damien Hirst of Englad.  7 feet high.  Those are real butterflies

attached to a background, then covered with acrylic.  Hirst uses real butterflies in many of

his works. There are "butterfly farms" in several places around the world, and they raise

and sell exotic, beautifully colored butterflies to people for many reasons.

Fernand Leger of France painted "Still Life" using the new techniques of

Cubism and Abstraction to break down his subjects into geometric forms and

then rearrange them and flatten them out.

Another type of "realism" is seen in Colombian artist Fernando Botero's

"Seated Woman with Cat."  His swelling figures, whether of people, or fruit,

or animals, seem ready to burst.

Robert Motherwell.  U.S.  "Balkan Lute."  Collage.

Motherwell was interested in the relationship of art and music and created

many paintings about the juncture of the two.  This work is partially painted

and partially created by gluing pieces of construction paper to the canvas.

The "strings" of the lute have been painted on the paper.

Joel Shapiro.  U.S.  "Walking Figure"  wood

Joel Shapiro works in sizes from a few inches high to pieces 10 or 12 feet high;

they may be made of wood or bronze and placed outdoors.  They reduce a figure

to its simplest elements. 

Enrico Castellani. "Yellow."  Italian.  Shaped canvas.

Castellani places objects on his wooden frames, then stretches the canvas tightly

across them, making a work which is both painting and sculpture and making use of

light and shadow to create forms.

"El Gato" by the Oaxaca Cooperative.  Wool tapestry.  Mexico.

A lady in Oaxaca, Mexico, has organized a cooperative and taught the men

and women of Oaxaca how to weave tapestries in techniques similar to what 

their indigenous ancestors had done for centuries.  These tapestries

are now sold by a gallery in Los Angeles. 

Alma Thomas.  "Arrival of Spring."  U.S.

Ms Thomas was a Black school teacher in Washington, D.C. who developed

a style combining Pointillism and Byzantine mosaics to create paintings,

often based on nature, which expressed her feelings and often related to music.

Acrylic paint on canvas.

Fabian Marcaccio.  "Green Piece."  Argentina.

Marcaccio works with computers to create an image, and then uses

a 3D copier to actually produce the works.  This object was made by a

copier and then partially overpainted.

Bridget Riley.  "Two Tone Piece."  English.  Op Art

Some artists in the 20th century became interested in how our eyes react to lines and

colors. They created works based solely on lines and color and often meant to

convey movement.  This large piece, perhaps 12 feet long, undulates like

branches on a tree in a strong wind.

Gunther Gerszo.  "Ancient Walls."  Hungarian/Mexican.

We are fortunate in South Florida to have a strong Hispanic flavor to our

artistic life.  We have wonderful galleries specializing in Latin American art.

Mary-Anne Martin Gallery from New York is one of the very best

galleries to see Latin American art.

Leonora Carrington.  "Temple of the Word."  1937

Leonora Carrington was an Englsh born woman who took up residence in Mexico

and developed a style based on Surrealism, exploring the subconscious

and dreams.

Kenneth Noland.  "Pink Target." U.S.  6 ft x 6 ft.

Noland was one of the artists in Washington, D.C. who came to

soak and stain his canvases, rather than simply paint them,

and to create large simple figures that did not "mean" anything.

"What you see is what you see" was their famous motto.

no symbolism or deep meaning or subjective content.

Andy Warhol.  "Dollar Sign." U.S. silkscreen.

While other people were out "Making a buck," Andy took the advice

literally and made a dollar sign.  And he could make lots, because this was 

a silkscreen, where the stencil cold be used over and over.

The Fair provides a number of "green spaces" where visitors with tired feet can sit down and

rest.  The "hill" is made of plywood and astroturf, but provides a good place to sit and rest.

A visitor before Joan Mitchell's "La Grande Vallee XVIII."

Joan was from Chicago, moved to New York and then France, where she lived for many years.
She worked in Abstract Expressionism, often inspired by nature.  The price for this
diptych was $6.5 M.