Here are more photos from the street art exhibition (www.moca.org), courtesy of my husband’s iPhone.

Street Art Exhibition, MOCA, 2011

Street Art Exhibition, MOCA, 2011

Recently my local paper ran a piece on the unexpectedly large increase in graffiti in San Jose, Ca. According to the article, graffiti and tagging are at its highest level since 1999, when the city started keeping track of such things. While the spike in graffiti seems to be a mystery to those quoted in the piece, city politicians have vowed to fight the defacing of public property aggressively, by painting over the transgressions as quickly as possible. I wonder if part of this spike might have something to do with the recent focus on this medium, including the exhibition on street art at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles, along with other attentions such as the recent movie Exit Through the Gift Shop. The MoCA exhibition was intriguing and wildly popular; when I went there was a line around the block. Much of the art was accomplished, and included paintings, colleges, films, as well as theme rooms, where museum-goers walked into dark “alleys” and decrepit “neighborhoods”, covered in color, shapes, messages.

The exhibition had a historical perspective, showing early street art up until the present. There were even allusions to the legacy of street art going back to ancient Egypt. With this level of institutional respect given to street artists and with the potential for fame (imagine the possibility of your work being displayed at MoCA), I’m guessing that just painting over graffiti is not going to come close to stopping this form of self expression. An example of the works on display:

Can you guess what this is?

MOCA Exhibition, 2011

MOCA Exhibition, 2011

My husband and I made our every two years or so trip to New Mexico and visited museums and galleries. I found this quote at The Indian Arts and Culture Museum (www.indianartsandculture.org).It made me think about how we define “art” and how, in this western culture at least, we tend to almost fetishize art by placing it in institutional settings and charging people to look and marvel. What follows is another perspective:

The word “art” is not found in our language. But what do we call a piece of work created by the hands of my family? What will we call that piece which embodies the life of its creator? What will it be if it has a life and a soul, while its maker sings and prays for it?

In my home we call it pottery painted with designs to tell a story. In my mother’s house, we call it a wedding basket, to hold blue corn meal for the groom’s family. In my grandma’s place, we call it a Kachina doll, a carved image of a life force that holds the Hopi world in place.

We make pieces of life to see, touch, and feel. Shall we call it art? I hope not. It may lose its soul. Its life. Its people.
Michael Lacapa, Apache/Hopi/Tewa

I guess summer isn’t technically over, but I’ve started back on my teaching schedule at San Jose State, which is my unofficial “summer’s over” date. One memorable experience for me this summer was the Romare Bearden exhibition put on by the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). I first learned about Bearden in 2004 when the San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOMA) put on an exhibition of his artwork. I was entranced by his collages–the amazing use of color, the cubist-like style of his pieces, and the subjects he chose to portray. I really loved that there were images of people who looked like me; at the time it was a revelation. Bearden includes a very broad range of subjects in his art, but I particularly lke his depictions of African American life and his portrayal of families, urban life, the Great Migration, and jazz music. I’ve included some examples below. These pieces were part of MoAD’s exhibition:From Process to Print: Graphic Works by Romare Bearden.

This image is from Bearden’s Odysseus series (The Fall of Troy):

This print is a great example of his depiction of the family living in the rural South (The Family):

Bearden created a lot of work related to the great migration of African Americans from the South to the North (The Train):

(All images courtesy of the Museum of the African Diaspora, www.moadsf.org)