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full circle

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MONDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2011

eu amo o brasil!

big shout out to raul zito, photographer and wheat paste artist in sao paulo, brasil.  i’ve been following his work on various street art blogs and learned through flickr he’s been following mine as well.  here’s an example of his work in sao paulo.

 

he and i got in touch with one another late 2010 and he offered to get a piece of mine up in sao paulo.  the piece isn’t finished yet but here’s what he’s done so far.  i absolutely love it.  he put me beside magrela mag who did the piece on the second apartment in the first photo (up top).  sweet!  i love the way jamaal is flying into the mama bird’s mouth, through the basketball hoop while the beautiful, nude woman checks it all out.  wicked piece!

stay tuned.  he’ll be getting files of his to me soon to paste here.  how cool is that?!

 

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2011

rain dance…

it never fails.  whenever i do a big installation, it rains.  such was the case last week and this weekend in phoenix.  so after a week, stephanie’s photo on the billboard, the collab with breeze, is already starting to come down.  one week later.  that hurts.  steve, julia’s husband and partner in managing the hive, said he’d try to paste her back up.  i left some wheat paste with him that had started to turn sour.  yum.

meanwhile, i met niba yesterday.  he’s a photographer who is based in tucson, i think.  it was one of those moments when virtual reality becomes real and you meet someone from your social networking sites.  in truth, i thought niba, also known as “dead now” on twitter was a woman.  o well.  instead, he’s a great guy with 2 beautiful children.  here are some of his images from yesterday’s installation.  thanks niba!

i mentioned above that raul zito of sao paulo pasted one of my pieces in sao paulo.  i returned the favor + pasted one of his images in phoenix.  what comes around…

shout out to the british two tone movement

with miguel

 

kicking it with breeze + erin gramzinski

 

July 9, 2017

I don’t often read posts from back in the day when I started pasting especially posts found on my Blogspot site. (I miss that url – http://www.speakingloudandsayingnothing.blogspot.com, aka “yo mama.”) It’s fun seeing my enthusiasm for everything about the art form.  In this case it’s especially exciting to read through these posts from early 2011 to reflect on how long I’ve been aware of Zito’s work and to remember that dreams can come true.  He’ll be coming to the rez in just under a month.  Full circle.  Yay!

 

 

off the rez, Uncategorized

American Domain

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Humanist and documentary photographer Dan Budnik is best known for his black and white photography from the civil rights era.  It was Dan’s photo of Dr. King that appeared on the cover of Time magazine when Dr. King was assassinated.  After covering the civil rights movement from 1964 – 66 Dan gradually made his way to northern Arizona where he’d heard of a longstanding land dispute between Navajo + Hopi tribes.  In 1984 the dispute resulted in approximately 9000 of 180,000 Navajo tribal members being  forcibly relocated from ancestral land where they were primarily sheep and cattle herders in exchange for life in prefabricated homes.  Sadly, many of the people relocated didn’t have the income to cover utilities as they’d formerly made their livelihood from their animals.  Many found themselves homeless.  However, a group of elders refused to leave their ancestral homeland and to this day continue to protest forced relocation.
Dan’s images of the land dispute generated interest in a documentary film on the subject titled “Broken Rainbow” which won an Academy Award in 1985 for best documentary.  As noted on the promo poster for the film “There is no word for relocation in the Navajo language; to relocate is to disappear and never been seen again.”
I was asked recently by curator Erin Elder to consider submitting work for a pop up show critically evaluating land use in a capitalist economy (for the Museum of Capitalism in Oakland).  She says of her portion of the show titled American Domain “…Under capitalism, land is measured, marked, bounded, guarded, and owned; it is a commodity, a site of production, and oftentimes, capitalism’s dumping ground. Though land ownership is not an inherently American phenomenon, the United States was founded on a land grab and its identity has been consistently wrapped up with the economics of territory. Through artists’ work about fences and walls, boundaries and their trespass, American Domain examines notions of property and ownership.”
Dan’s images from his time at Big Mountain immediately came to mind.  I approached him about using one of his images for an installation and found him to be excited by the idea.  Next I sought out a part time resident of Big Mountain whose mother was active in the relocation resistance.  We agreed that in light of the ongoing struggles of First Nations people to maintain sovereignty over their land this image is as timely now as it was when it was taken circa 1984 and he consented to its use.
The United States Flag Code
Title 4, Chapter 1
The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.
Installing the image over a week in Oakland led to several insightful moments such as the police officer who pointed out the flag was upside down as he passed in his cruiser or the fireman who stopped his firetruck, got out and engaged me in conversation about the photo.  The most compelling interaction was with a vet who vehemently proclaimed one evening while I was on the lift that he fought for that flag and didn’t appreciate seeing it upside down.  He concluded by saying “Trump 2017!”  Two days later he returned and shared that after 8 years of combat in Afghanistan seeing things no one should ever see he now suffers from PTSD, sleeps poorly and can’t hold a job.  Things set him off easily and he has trouble controlling his emotions.  He said he’d gone into service believing in this country and it’s promise of democracy both here and abroad only to realize he’d wasted 8 years of his life and is a changed man.  He apologized for his aggressive tone 2 days earlier and cried as he recounted some of his life experiences.  I thanked him for returning and providing an opportunity for discussion.  We shook hands and embraced before he headed on his way.
man carrying items to recycling center at dawn
shaking hands with the vet                      photo by claudia escobar

photo by claudia escobar
Brooklyn Street Art article is here.
For more information on this ongoing struggle, check www.supportblackmesa.org.
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hózhó

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Dan Budnik is a Flagstaff based photographer who first came to this region in the 70s to photodocument forced relocation of Navajos living on “Hopi Partition Land” on Black Mesa.  It was his documentation of the conflict that led to the 1985 Academy Award winning documentary “Broken Rainbow” which examines coal exploitation and the origins of the Navajo – Hopi tribal government conflict.  His images from that period are compelling.  It’s the type of up close + personal, black + white photography that I grew up seeing in Life Magazine.  The imagery reflects Dan’s time commitment to telling a story truthfully and the trust the people he was photographing had in him.

mlk,-stink,-budnik

 

stink-+-me

Stinkfish poster with MLK criminal justice reform posters.

thea-x-jetsonorama

Collaboration with fellow Justseeds printmaker + activist, Thea Ghar.

I first met Dan maybe 3 years ago; however, it wasn’t until he had a show of black + white, silver gelatin prints and color photos at a small restaurant in Flagstaff in May of 2015 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery that Dan got my attention.  I wanted to know what a photographer of his caliber was doing in northern Arizona.  He told the story of going to the Navajo nation in the 70s and falling in love with the people and the land.  I stopped him at this point and told him he didn’t need to elaborate.  I got it.  The show was worthy of being held in any gallery in any city in the world.  I’m not exaggerating.  Though Dan is a humble, gentle spirit, his talent as a photographer is exceptional.  It was his image of  Dr. King that appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in April 1968 when Dr. King was killed.

King by Dan Budnik

I’m proud as hell to be able to say Dan Budnik is my friend.  Last year we’d hoped to collaborate on a project in Selma where I’d install some of his images from the Selma to Montgomery march on abandoned store-fronts in downtown Selma.  However, the bureaucracy to realize this dream was insurmountable.  Instead, Dan let me use an image of marcher Frederick Moss for an installation in Brooklyn.  (Yeah, Brooklyn.  I like the unintentional symbolism of a black man on his back in the street holding an American flag. This time last year there were several black men on their backs in the street.)  When Dan shot the image of Frederick Moss, Mr. Moss was simply exhausted after a grueling 5 day, 54 mile demonstration and laid down in a vacant spot to rest.

I wanted to pay tribute to my friend by getting the Frederick Moss image up in his adopted home of Flagstaff, AZ.

mlk,-stink,-budnik-(far)

 

toren

Toren at Moenkopi Wash

Hózhó – a word that defines the essence of Navajo (Diné) philosophy. It encompasses beauty, order, harmony + expresses the idea of striving for balance.

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gamma goat to the rescue

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jc-installaton-day

jc-far

jc-close-2

The Navajo nation has an unemployment rate at about 50%.  While the tribe is pursuing investment and job opportunities much of the land under consideration for development is contaminated with uranium from over 500 uncapped mines which deters businesses from investing.  The companies who abandoned the mines in the 60s + 70s when the price and demand for uranium dropped aren’t legally bound to clean up their sites per mining laws from the 1800s when prospectors were mining for precious minerals.

Concerned with the possibility of accidental contamination by wandering into abandoned mine sites the EPA created a coloring book for grade school kids on the rez.  The star is “Gamma Goat” who introduces himself saying “That’s right.  I’m named after the most powerful form of radiation given off by uranium, gamma rays.  I know how to stay away from areas where radiation may harm me and I’m here to teach you, your friends and family how to be safe too.”  Meanwhile, contamination continues to affect the land, water, animals and humans.

IMG_1882

jc at the white house

 

“spirit line“

jc at coconino center for the arts

my-shot-of-the-installation

me-+-travis

thanks to travis iurato for arranging the wall.

me-inspecting-the-piece

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Colibri Center for Human Rights

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colibri

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Security is the denial of life. Love is what enables us to cross borders.” – Robin Reineke, founder of Colibri Center for Human Rights – whose work this collaborative #mural is based off of. Colibri Center for Human Rights does the fierce forensic and beautiful work of reuniting with families the remnants of the resilient migrants who die in their journey across the border. When the wheat paste bones peel off, it will reveal a human carrying her child driven by an undefeatable love that drives her to transcend borders. Here I’m wheatpasting the last wing bone for Chip Thomas who sized and put together the whole skeleton and whom I learned to #wheatpaste from. This mural could not have been possible without the love and creativity from the local Phoenix arts community who wanted to bring the illumination of migrants to the forefront and honor the dead. This is only 1/5 of a massive Mural collaboration with artists including Karlito Miller Espinosa Thea Gahr, @theallelectrickitchen, Julius Badoni, Lucinda Yrene and Lalo Cota and so many more people. The full reveal will be tomorrow. thank you Phoenix, you have been brighter than I could’ve ever imagined.

— with Jess Chen.

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