Austin Street Art

MAY 17, AUSTIN–A few weeks ago David Ellis painted an improvisational mural on the side of Co-Labs warehouse building in Austin, Texas.

Ellis, out of Brooklyn, has been working in Austin for the several weeks during his residency at Visual Arts Center (a subsidiary of the University of Texas).  With titles like Paint on Trucks in a World in Need of Love (recently exhibited at MoMA), one would infer that these works are community-oriented.  A proponent of street art, Ellis likes having people surrounding his process, and is part of the notable group The Barnstormers of NYC.  Ellis representational, colorful diptych seems thus to belong at Co-Lab.  It unifies Co-Lab, under one brightly lit mural, to its mission.

After seeing the Ellis mural at Co-Lab, I began to notice other murals indicative of outsider art and very cool, around Austin.  Bombarded by a couple of 8 foot lions in SoCo, I stop to study the murals detail, and wonder, “did Ellis swiftly paint this mural, too?”  I would have assumed so, had it not been for its less than improvisational style.  Elliss murals are marked by looser strokes, open brushwork, and a jazz-like rhythm.  The two, blue lions were too perfect.  I soon discover that BrokenCrow out of Minneapolis/St. Paul is responsible for the SoCo lions.  Indeed, glancing over their website proves that the Broken Crow are interested in premeditated projects, calling their practice, “an ongoing stencil-based large-scale collaborative art experiment.”  The two blue lions could be symbolic of the two members of BrokenCrow, John Grider and Mike Fitzsimmons.

Soco Lions by BrokenCrow

Street art is taken inside gallery walls in Austin with exhibitions like “Ballads for Approaching Vultures” at Okay Mountain. Attending the opening is exciting, with a larger-than-life sculpture of “The Man,” which features music and a disco ball interior. Eastwoods sculpture allows viewers to enter the man, and experience his soul, perhaps.  Skinners paintings represent extremely detailed monsters, with landscapes like acid trips, and gnarly otherworldly/outer space environs.  My favorite vignette contains 14 rock monsters, each portrait presenting one rocker, and each rocker flaunts unique characteristics to him, or her.  Skinner lives and works in Sacramento, CA.  And, although his smaller illustrations are on display in Austin, he has completed several murals as well.

Austins acceptance of street art goes back to the 80s (with artists like Haring in NY  helping make rogue street actions cool).  Today, however, the style of street art emerges new; young artists are aware of the Mission School, artists like:  Barry McGee, and Margaret Kilgallen.  The graffiti art movement originating with a tag, then expanding to murals, arose to serve those marginalized by the system, and persists today.  (Even though there are hardly any tags in Austin.) A city isnt a city anymore without graffiti, and Austin would seem barren without these free artistic expressions throughout the eastside. Since capitalism co-opted cool, which included graffiti art, Ellis, Skinner, and BrokenCrow can metaphorically “bomb” with art supplies a street corner, or warehouse wall without running from the cops.
Ellis will be displaying the video work created during his in residency in Austin at VAC in September 2010.  Skinner has an exhibition upcoming at White Walls in San Francisco.

(top photo: Rowan Ogden observes graffiti in Austin, TX.)