Nuart Journal #5 Lockdown
144 pages
Edited by Martyn Reed and Susan Hansen
29.7 x 21 cm
Language: English
Softcover
Publisher: Nuart Journal
2021
Following last year’s FREEDOM issue, this edition explores the theme of LOCKDOWN, and the ways in which researchers and artists have responded to the challenges we’ve encountered over the last year.
Nuart Journal’s bubblegum pink LOCKDOWN edition contains 13 original articles, including John Fekner’s ‘Revisiting The Detective Show’. This piece links us right back to Gorman Park in Queens, New York, 1978 – a quiet intervention compared to contemporary street art festivals, and one which connects us with the productive restrictions COVID-19 has placed on organised urban creativity in 2020–2021.
In her extended review article, Minna Valjakka discusses the disCONNECT hybrid multi-site urban art exhibition recently held in London and Hong Kong - and online. This review highlights how, over the past year, collaborative installations have disrupted conventional art world paradigms and stimulated new questions on ‘how and where graffiti and street art – and/or manifestations based on these practices – can be exhibited and documented’.
Heather Shirey and David Todd Lawrence describe their collaborative database of street art across the globe produced in response to the pandemic, while Julia Tulke's ‘#StayAtHome Protest’ addresses the use of handmade protest banners in the windows and on the balconies of private buildings throughout Berlin.
Aida Wilde and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski have contributed an evocative account of their collaborative response to the pandemic, and to the Black Lives MaQer movement. Their collecFon of narraFves/poems and calls to acFon are grounded in transatlanFc conversaFons between the duo during the first UK lockdown in 2020.
Taking as a starFng point the Black Lives MaQer ‘statue storm’ which has seen confederate statues in the United States and imperialist statues in Europe toppled, defaced, or slated for removal, KrisFna Borhes tells the story of various forms of iconoclasm in different places over Fme, while Laura Burocco raises criFcal and provocaFve quesFons regarding the
fraught relaFonship between street art and Indigenous knowledges – arguing that gentrificaFon can be considered as a new form of urban colonialism.
ArFst Jan Vormann tells us what happened when he invited local residents to come over and paint a wall of his own home in the city of Valdivia, Chile, and Kehinde Christopher Adewumi and Joy Iorvihi report on their ‘Boxed In Project’ in Abuja, Nigeria – which was designed to sensiFse the community to the existence of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Going back in Fme, Ulrich Blanché explores Keith Haring's illegal street-based interacFons with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Hambleton and others on the streets of New York City in the 1980s, while Enrico Bonadio and Olivia Jean-BapFste contribute a legal analysis of Banksy's recent trade mark case revolving around his image of the ‘Flower Thrower’
This issue also features Nuart Journal’s first dual language arFcle - María Fernanda López Jaramillo's close examinaFon of the history of chapeteo, a style of graffiF wriFng from Guayaquil, Ecuador.
The LOCKDOWN issue closes with an extended interview with Bill Posters on his recent book, The Street Art Manual: A Step-by-Step Guide to Hacking the Streets.