down on the corner, out in the street

 Blu (Spain)

Read Jeffrey Deitch on The Brooklyn Rail talk about his involvement with street-based artists.

An excerpt:

I’ve spent so many years in friendship and conversations with Basquiat, Rammellzee, Keith Haring, and more recently Barry McGee, Shepard Fairey, and Swoon. These are people who have every bit as much intellectual interest and cultural sophistication as artists who are academically pretentious. In fact, part of the reason to organize and curate Art in the Streets at MOCA in L.A. was to focus on a more serious context and demonstrate that these are artists, not uneducated outsiders. Swoon went to Pratt, Shepard Fairey went to RISD, Barry McGee went to the San Francisco Art Institute. They are very aware of the current dialogue and they chose this direction as something they thought was the most artistically viable, and they chose this medium because it was a way to communicate very directly with a much wider audience. I have always been very inspired by artists who address an audience beyond a small sphere of a few prestigious galleries, and museums, and one or two art publications. 

You don't necessarily need to go out under cover of night with spray paint to interrupt the present status quo. For other urban art and design interventions, see The New Museum's StreetFest page, which was a festival held in May of 2013.

Blu in Madrid