[MSN] Last Hurrah for Street Art, as Canvas Goes Condo

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New York Times
December 14, 2006

Last Hurrah for Street Art, as Canvas Goes Condo
By RANDY KENNEDY


It was as if someone had told devotees of Picasso's "Demoiselles
d'Avignon" or Matisse's "Dance" that the Museum of Modern Art had changed
hands and would soon be shut down for residential redevelopment, with all
the art inside to vanish as part of the deal.

In this case the art is not hanging inside the building but is splashed
all over the walls outside, in spray paint, wheat paste, rubber, plastic,
metal, cardboard and various other unidentifiable substances, a story-high
gallery of graffiti and street art that seems to have grown almost
organically (and mostly unimpeded by the authorities) over the last two
decades.

Depending on your point of view, the hulking 19th-century brick building
at 11 Spring Street in NoLIta, a former stable and carriage house, was
either a stunning eyesore or one of the most famous canvases and lodestars
in the world for urban artists. When those of the latter view heard
recently that the building had been sold and would soon be gutted and
converted into condominiums, they considered it the end of an era. Bearing
their cameras, they began showing up at the building over the last few
weeks in a kind of mournful procession.

But inside the building over those same weeks, an unlikely tribute to 11
Spring's history - and a brief reprieve for its artwork - was also quietly
taking shape.

After buying the building several months ago, the new owner-developers,
Caroline Cummings and Bill Elias, wanted to find some way to bid an
appropriate farewell to its past. They admired the artwork, they said,
even if there was no way it could remain on a building where buyers would
soon be dropping millions of dollars on new condos.

They contacted Marc and Sara Schiller, longtime documentarians of street
art whose Web site, woostercollective.com, collects thousands of pictures
of such art from around the world. The group decided that the best salute
would be to stage one last, thoroughly legal, art-making hurrah, inviting
some of the best-known graffiti and street artists in the world, many of
whose work already loomed large on the outside of the building, to take
over the inside and completely cover five floors, 30,000 square feet of
brick wall space, with work.

The art would then stay up only for a few days before the contractors
moved in with drywall to cover up the interior works and pressure hoses to
erase those on the outside. There would be no sponsors, no press releases,
no payments to the artist and no artwork for sale. As much as it is still
possible in today's art world, it would be art for art's sake, a fleeting
salute to a fleeting form.

Now, after nearly two months of work by 45 artists, the show is almost
ready. The building's doors will be unlocked tomorrow for an open house
that will continue through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. On Monday
work will begin that will eventually seal most of the interior artwork
behind pipes, wires and drywall.

"In a way the art is all going to disappear, but it's also going to be
sealed up in this incredible time capsule," said Mr. Schiller, walking
through the building Tuesday afternoon as more than a dozen artists
continued to work on their pieces in a haze of aerosol fumes and sawdust.

Several of the artists involved in the project are still little known
outside the street art world, but others have become highly successful
designers, marketers and gallery darlings. Many converged on short notice
from around the world to create artwork, some flown in and housed at the
developers' expense.

Shepard Fairey, a veritable rock star in the street art world, came from
Los Angeles before jetting off again for the Art Basel fair in Miami
Beach. D*Face, a London artist who once proposed to his fiancée by
painting the question on 11 Spring Street, flew in from north of the
Arctic Circle, where he had been commissioned to create an artwork for the
Icehotel in Sweden.

And Jace, who created a piece on the building's fifth floor that includes
a frighteningly large mousetrap, made of wood and metal and baited with a
huge bag of fake money - a clear jab at the development that is about to
transform the building - probably won the prize for longest commute. He
flew in from the island of Réunion, east of Madagascar, where he lives,
spent several days in the building and then returned.

"It's like a family reunion we've got here," said one artist in from Milan
who calls himself Bo and works with a partner, a small woman who calls
herself Microbo. "Except some of the family you've never met before."

The other evening, as music blared from multiple stereos, about a dozen
artists were arrayed among the floors, still at work. One known as Lady
Pink, a veteran New York graffiti artist, was applying the last touches to
a large, pink supine version of the Statue of Liberty that was being
impaled with a cross but seeming somehow to enjoy it.

Mr. Schiller, passing by the work with Ms. Cummings, smiled. "This is
probably the most political work we've got in here," he said.

 Lady Pink smiled back. "Oh, it gets more political than this, believe
me," she said.

Downstairs two members of a younger generation of street artists, a pair
of New York-based twins who call themselves Skewville, went outside to
look again at one of their favorite pieces - one that will soon become
history - a very realistic-looking fake air vent that, if you look
closely, spells "fake." Early one morning a couple of years ago, they
bolted it to a wall above one of the building's doors.

Ms. Cummings went outside to look at it with them and told them that she
thought it was a great work of art. One of the twins looked at it and
agreed. "Basically, she bought our piece for $10 million," he said, "and
the building was thrown in for free."